Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Alice Slater

Alice Slater: China Is the Only Country that Promised Not To Use Nuclear Weapons First

This article was originally published by RIA Novosti.

Alice Slater, New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, told Rossiya Segodnya about the current situation with the nuclear weapons in China. 50 years ago China detonated its first nuclear test, nearly 20 years after the US dropped their bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are nine countries that have nuclear weapons today: the US, Russia, UK, France, and China, who signed the Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT) in 1970.

China’s first nuclear test took place 50 years ago. How would you assess the current situation with the nuclear weapons in the country? Does it represent any potential danger?

Alice Slater: Every country’s nuclear bombs represent a danger to the world. It is estimated that there are 16,300 nuclear bombs on the planet with all but a thousand of them in the US and Russia. China is estimated to have about 250 of them. China is the only country among the NPT signers who has promised not to be the first to use them. But essentially, just the possession of a nuclear arsenal is a form of use. When a bank robber walks into a bank and points a gun at people, even if the gun is never shot, it is still being used by the robber to bully and intimidate. That is what the possession of nuclear weapons means, by any country possessing, them, even China with its modest arsenal.

Is it true, in your view, that possessing nuclear weapons increases the country’s diplomatic credibility on the international arena? Do nuclear weapons provide important security benefits to China and generally to the countries possessing nuclear weapons?

Alice Slater: It is an illusion to think that there are any security benefits to possessing nuclear weapons. We are learning now of the many near-accidents with airplane crashes carrying nuclear weapons, misplaced missiles flown unknown to distant bases carrying unaccounted nuclear weapons, missing and lost nuclear weapons in the US. Undoubtedly similar situations exist in Russia. Perhaps not in China since they never built the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that the US and Russia competed with to show who was stronger, when it actually made us weaker and more vulnerable to accidents, hazardous waste issues, not to mention possible miscalculations. We were very lucky not to have experienced an accidental nuclear war. While laboring under the illusion that nuclear weapons provide security, it isn’t so for the major nuclear powers. Of course the fact that Saddam Hussein wound up in a hole in the ground and Muammar Gaddaffi in a sewer pipe after they gave up or were forced to turn over their nuclear technology, may give cause to isolated nations like North Korea to cling to their nuclear “deterrent”.

Do you think it is important to continue the development of nuclear weapons or should the countries work on its elimination?

Alice Slater: With the planet facing catastrophic climate change, droughts, hurricanes, tsunamis, forest fires, from the excessive carbon emissions from the industrial age, we can little afford to spend our national treasures of money and intellectual power on nuclear technology – both for weapons and power. The nuclear waste lasts 250,000 years and we don’t know how to safely isolate it from the environment for that inordinate length of time. It is now reported that the US is contemplating expenditures of one trillion dollars over 30 years on its nuclear arsenal, laboratories, and delivery systems, with $300 billion budget for the next ten years. Russia and China, as well as India and Pakistan, have also been announcing new expenditures on this destructive and useless technology. Perhaps Asia can lead the way towards nuclear disarmament. The West is now caught up in a new cold war, having failed to contain NATO as promised to Gorbachev when the wall came down in Berlin and having expanded the missile program into eastern Europe after the US walked out of its Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia.

Given the current political situation in the world, is there a risk that any of Nuclear-Weapon States will use the weapons against another country? What are your estimates in this regard? What country could it be?

Alice Slater: I don’t think any country would deliberately use nuclear weapons first, but we can’t be lucky forever on accidental launch or misjudgments. The world remembers Russia’s Colonel Petrov, in the Soviet bunker who disobeyed orders when a radar blip indicated a nuclear attack from the US and it was only a Norwegian weather satellite that had gone off course. We could have had a nuclear holocaust had he not done the right thing. We also came very close to miscalculating the presence of nuclear weapons during the Cuban missile crisis. We shouldn’t continue to push our luck! Some wise country, or group of countries should take the lead and start the talks for elimination under monitoring, verification and a tight timeline.

Do you think any nuclear threat from Iran exists and what is your personal view on Iran’s nuclear program? Is it peaceful?

Alice Slater: Iran is no more of a threat than other countries. Once you have the enrichment technology, you have the capacity to make the bomb, just as North Korea did. Every nuclear power plant is a bomb factory and the sooner we phase out nuclear power and rely on the abundant, clean, free energy of the sun, wind, water, geothermal we will all be safer, less poor, and may actually have some peace on earth. Over 400,000 people marched in NYC this month to make the links between poverty, war, and climate catastrophe. If Russia could put a man on the moon, surely it can work to end destructive technology and lead the way to a 21st century free of nuclear and fossil fuel.

China, France, Russia, United Kingdom and the United States are officially recognized as possessing nuclear weapons by the Non – Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Three states – India, Israel, and Pakistan – never joined the NPT and are known to possess nuclear weapons. What other countries could potentially possess nuclear weapons or facilities to create such weapons?

Alice Slater: Any country with a nuclear reactor has the capacity to develop a bomb. Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, were on the way to making bombs and changed course. Japan has the capacity and every now and then its generals say it should use its tons to enriched plutonium to make bombs. Brazil is enriching plutonium. We are planning to sell nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia but they won’t give us assurances that they won’t enrich uranium.

How can you describe relations between China and the United States in the nuclear weapons development sphere?

Alice Slater: I don’t know if the US and China even discuss nuclear weapons. The two main players are the US and Russia. Right now there is a push from the military industrial complex and the unregulated corporations to make an enemy of Russia over Ukraine. We should be clearing up the events that occurred in the Ukraine as the corporate dominated media in the US doesn’t report events accurately and Russia is being blamed by our government and press without evidence. We still don’t know what happened. Some members of Civil Society called for an investigation, but nothing has happened. I think Russia should bring this up in the Security Council and in the First Committee of the UN that is meeting this week and next week. Let’s get all the facts out on the table.

Finally, Russia and China should come to the meeting in Vienna on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons this December. India and Pakistan came to the last two in Mexico and Oslo which the p-5 boycotted. This is the time for China and Russia to join the Asian nuclear weapons states and call for a treaty to ban the bomb, just as we’ve banned chemical and biological weapons. It would give the Western states pause, and empower civil society to press more effectively for nuclear disarmament in the US, UK, and France, as well as in the five European states that are part of NATO’s nuclear sharing – Italy, Belgium, Turkey, Netherlands and Spain.

October 17, 2014
Tone Deaf US Foreign Policy Announcements Create New Provocations in Asia

This article originally appeared in the January 2012 newsletter of the Global Network Against Nuclear Weapons and Power in Space.

On UN Day, at a panel on Nuclear Disarmament, Secretary General Ban-ki Moon spoke about his 2008 five point proposal for nuclear disarmament, including the requirement for negotiations to ban the bomb. It was dismaying when the next speaker, a retired US Air Force General, Michal Mosley, breezily assured the audience and his fellow panelists that it certainly was now possible to rid the world of nuclear weapons, since atomic bomb technology is thoroughly out of date. He boasted that today “we” have long range attack weapons of such “unbelievable precision and lethality” that we no longer need nuclear weapons in the US arsenal. Our conventional weapons are ever so superior to those of any other nation.  He said this as his fellow co-panelists, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors, took in the full import of his braggadocio, to my extreme embarrassment as a US citizen.  Did the General consider for a moment the effect his words were having on the Ambassadors and the other non-US participants in the meeting? His astonishing disregard for the effect of such provocative war talk on our fellow earth mates seems to be a major failure of our “tin ear” foreign policy.

Hillary Clinton proclaimed a similarly tone-deaf policy in an article in November’s Foreign Affairs, “America’s Pacific Century”,    remarking that now that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were winding down, we were at a “pivot point”   and that “one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will be to lock in a substantially increased investment—diplomatic economic, strategic and otherwise—in the Asia-Pacific region.” Calling for “forward-deployed” diplomacy, she defined it to include “forging a broad-based military presence” in Asia…that would be “as durable and as consistent with American interests and values as the web we have built across the Atlantic…capable of deterring provocation from the full spectrum of state and non-state actors” She added that just as our NATO alliance “has paid off many times over…the time has come to make similar investments as a Pacific power”.

Citing our Treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand as the “fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asian-Pacific”, she also spoke of the need to expand our relationships to include India, Indonesia Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, Mongolia Vietnam, and the Pacific Island countries. While acknowledging “fears and misperceptions that “linger on both sides of the Pacific”, stating that “some in our country see China’s progress as a threat to the United States; some in China worry that America seeks to constrain China’s growth” she blithely asserted, “we reject both those views …a thriving America is good for China and a thriving China is good for America”. This said as the United States aggressively lines up a host of new nations in an expanded Pacific military alliance, providing them with missile defenses, ships, and warplanes, encircling China.   What is she thinking?

Shortly after Clinton’s article appeared, Obama went to Australia to open up a new military base there with a token 250 US soldiers, and a promise of 2500 to come with plans for joint military training, promising that “we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.” He also adopted the “Manila Declaration”, pledging closer military ties with the Philippines and announced the sale of 24 F-16 fighter jets to Indonesia. Clinton just paid a visit to Myanmar, long allied with China, to re-establish relations there.

In her article’s conclusion Clinton bragged, “Our military is by far the strongest and our economy is by far the largest in the world.   Our workers are the most productive.   Our universities are renowned the world over.   So there should be no doubt that America has the capacity to secure and sustain our global leadership in this century as we did in the last.” Didn’t anyone tell her that the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest in the 52 years the census bureau has been publishing those figures?  Or that the United States deteriorating transportation infrastructure will cost the economy more than 870,000 jobs and would suppress US economic growth by $3.1 trillion by 2020, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers?

The tone-deaf quality of US foreign policy pronouncements is like an infant who pulls the covers over his head to play peek-a-boo, thinking he can’t be seen so long as he can’t see out.  China has responded as would be expected. A Pentagon report warned Congress that China was increasing its naval power and investing in high-tech weaponry to extend its reach in the Pacific and beyond. It ramped up efforts to produce anti-ship missiles to knock out aircraft carriers, improved targeting radar, expanding its fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and warships and making advances in satellite technology and cyber warfare.   What did we expect? And now, having provoked China to beef up its military assets, the warmongers in the US can frighten the public into supporting the next wild burgeoning arms race in the Pacific and what appears to be endless war.

This month, Mikhail Gorbachev, in The Nation, observed the US elite’s “winner’s complex” after the end of the Cold War, and the references to the US as a “hyperpower”, capable of creating “a new kind of empire”. He said, “[t]hinking in such terms in our time is a delusion. No wonder that the imperial project failed and that it soon became clear that it was a mission impossible even for the United States.” The opportunity to build a “truly new world order was lost.” The US decision to expand NATO eastward “usurped the functions of the United Nations and thus weakened it. We are engulfed in global turmoil, “drifting in uncharted waters. The global economic crisis of 2008 made that abundantly clear.”

Sadly, the powers in control of US public policy and their far-flung global allies appear to have learned nothing from the extraordinary opportunity we lost for a more peaceful world at the Cold War’s end. We are now repeating those expansionary designs in Asia, and “thus we continue to drift towards unparalleled catastrophe” as Albert Einstein observed when we split the atom which “changed everything save man’s mode of thinking”.

January 10, 2012
Review of From Omnicide to Abolition: Shifting the Mindset

This article was originally published in Reaching Critical Will’s News In Review.

Organized by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF) and moderated by Rick Wayman, the panel consisted of five speakers who discussed the goal of shifting paradigms on nuclear weaponry and energy.

David Krieger, NAPF President, defined “omnicide,” as the ability to destroy humanity and other complex life forms, calling it the most compelling reason to abolish nuclear weapons. He argued that because of the possibility for total destruction, nuclear weapons are not useful for war, only for political uses such as dominance and prestige.

Mr. Krieger and fellow panelist Steven Starr both challenged nuclear deterrence in their statements. Mr. Starr pointed out that deterrence involves the assumption that leaders are rational, and Mr. Krieger added that omnicide was an incredibly high risk to take when tested against that assumption. Mr. Krieger also pointed out that there have been numerous near misses at nuclear war. Mr. Starr noted that deterrence has to work perfectly to justify nuclear weapons, and that it has to fail only once to cause a worldwide catastrophe.

Mr. Starr and Alice Slater also discussed the environmental effects of nuclear technology. Mr. Starr concentrated upon the effects of usage of nuclear weapons, noting that a scientific modeling of a possible nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan using only low-yield weapons found that atmospheric pollution would block sunlight, lowering temperatures in North America by 2.5-4 degrees Celsius; this would limit crop viability in Canada and the United States. Mr. Starr argued that even the low-yield weapons used would cause the starvation of nearly one billion people.

In addition to the 32 states with plutonium and highly-enriched uranium, states with nuclear power programs are also able to develop weapons in months without significant technological adaptation.

Ms. Slater quoted former CIA Director George Tenet, who noted that the difference between a power program and a weapons program is “time and intent, not technology.” Ms. Slater, who argued against nuclear energy altogether, noted that renewable energy sources were sufficient to power the planet without usage of nuclear, coal or oil-based power. She noted that while there was an “inalienable right” to nuclear power in Article IV of the NPT, it could be overruled in future agreements as renewable power arrangements such as the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) replaced nuclear power.

Panelist Rob Green, who served as a commander in the British Navy before authoring Security Without Nuclear Deterrence, focused on the ‘indoctrination’ of military personnel and diplomats into the fallacy of nuclear deterrence. Green turned away from military leaders as a pilot in the 1960s, when he carried nuclear weapons until he realized that he would “destroy myself if I dropped it […] I was ordered to become a suicide bomber.”

Multiple panelists noted the risk to democracy that nuclear weapons pose. Mr. Green warned that deference to leaders was a major obstacle to challenging the status quo and achieving total nuclear disarmament. Ms. Slater noted that the military and conservative allies in parliaments have provided universal “push-back” to disarmament, which limits debate and democratic decision-making.

The final panelist, Kate Dewes, focused on current initiatives. Ms. Dewes, the Co-Director of the Disarmament and Security Centre, highlighted the Secretary-General’s 5-Point Plan on elimination of nuclear weapons and called upon civil society to continue pressuring the UN to proceed on the plan, which includes negotiations for a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) and creation of Nuclear Weapon-Free Zones. Joining Ms. Dewes in calling for negotiations to create a NWC, Mr. Starr also recommended that nuclear weapon states conduct health and environmental assessments. Mr. Green called for openness in discussion of nuclear weapons as a way of continuing this discussion. All five of the panelists highlighted the present NPT Review Conference as one of many places to continue the discussion, including delegates of governments, civil society and peace activists in the process.

May 4, 2010
Shifting the Paradigm: Time to Replace Article IV of the Non-Proliferation Treaty

Shifting the Paradigm: Time to Replace Article IV of the Non-Proliferation Treaty with Universal Membership in the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)

These are the remarks prepared by Alice Slater for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s panel discussion at the United Nations on May 3, 2010.

While the world applauds the growing recognition that the abolition of nuclear weapons seems to be an idea whose time has finally come—from the calls by rusty cold warriors and former statesmen and generals to eliminate nuclear weapons—to the recent modest START negotiated by President Obama and Medvedev to cut nuclear arsenals under new verifications procedures, there are appalling countervailing forces, born from the old 20th century paradigm of war and terror, that undercut the growing positive pressures to end the nuclear scourge.   In addition to the pushback from the military and the Republican party in the US Congress to hold the START agreement hostage to billions of new dollars for the weapons labs to build new plutonium cores for the atom bombs, continue sub-critical explosions of plutonium and chemicals at the Nevada test site, and erect new buildings in the weapons complex, as well as continued expansion of destabilizing missile “defenses” and space warfare programs, there is a growing global proliferation of so-called “peaceful” nuclear reactors, metastasizing around the planet and spreading their lethal technology as incipient bomb factories.

Ironically as new calls come from the nuclear sophisticated “haves” to control the nuclear fuel cycle, there has been an explosion of interest from nations that never sought “peaceful” nuclear power before to achieve the technical know-how that will allow them to play in the nuclear club with the big boys.   Thus we see countries like El Salvador, Ghana, Burma and Indonesia declaring their intention to build nuclear power plants as well as hearing expressions of interest from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman Qatar, Saudi Arabia Sudan Syria Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen!

Fueled by commercial interests, the western patriarchal network of industrialized nations is now vigorously promoting a “nuclear renaissance” of civilian power. There has been an explosion of interests in licensing new uranium mines around the world, in Africa, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, India, the United States—even at the very the rim of the sacred land surrounding the awesome Grand Canyon, despite the known tragic consequences of mining on the health of indigenous peoples who bear the brunt of the toxic activity with higher birth defects, cancer, leukemia and mutations in every community where uranium is mined.

The nuclear crisis we face today is a direct result of the export of peaceful nuclear technology to countries such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Indeed, every nuclear reactor enables a country to develop its own nuclear weapons, as we have seen in the case of India, Pakistan, and Israel, who never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and now North Korea, which exploited the fruits of “peaceful” technology and then quit to develop its own deterrent against US bullying. Under the guise of “peace”, other countries, such as South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Libya were also well on their way to developing nuclear bombs, which they later abandoned. Former IAEA Director, Mohammed ElBaradei stated “We just cannot continue business as usual that every country can build its own factories for separating plutonium or enriching uranium. Then we are really talking about 30, 40 countries sitting on the fence with a nuclear weapons capability that could be converted into a nuclear weapon in a matter of months.”

The signers of the CTB were well aware that by having a nuclear reactor, a nation had been given the keys to a bomb factory and would need to be included in any effort to ban nuclear tests, regardless of whether they proclaimed any intention to develop weapons. And former US CIA Director, George Tenet, said, “The difference between producing low-enriched uranium and weapons-capable high-enriched uranium is only a matter of time and intent, not technology.”

There are nearly 200 million kilograms of reactor wastes in the world—with only 5 kilograms needed to make one nuclear bomb. The US is planning to build 50 more reactors by 2020; China plans 30; with 31 more now under construction–to churn out more toxic poisons; on tap for bomb-making, with no known solution to safely containing the tons of nuclear waste that will be generated over the unimaginable 250,000 years it will continue to threaten life on earth. Countless studies report higher incidences of birth defects, cancer, and genetic mutations in every situation where nuclear technology is employed—whether for war or for “peace.” A National Research Council 2005 study reported that exposure to X-rays and gamma rays, even at low-dose levels, can cause cancer. The committee defined “low-dose” as a range from near zero up to about… 10 times that from a CT scan. “There appears to be no threshold below which exposure can be viewed as harmless,” said one NRC panelist. Tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste accumulate at civilian reactors with no solution for its storage, releasing toxic doses of radioactive waste into our air, water and soil and contaminating our planet and its inhabitants for hundreds of thousands of years.

A recent study released by the New York Academy of Sciences, authored by noted Russian scientists concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died of cancer caused between 1986 by the Chernobyl accident through 2004. The industry-dominated IAEA, has been instrumental in covering up the disastrous health effects of the Chernobyl tragedy, understating the number of deaths by attributing only 50 deaths directly to the accident. This cover-up was no doubt due to the collusive agreement between the IAEA and the World Health Organization, which under its terms provides that if either of the organizations initiates any program or activity in which the other has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult with the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement. Thus our scientists and researchers at the WHO are required to have their work vetted by the industry’s champion for “peaceful” nuclear technology, the IAEA.

The industrialized nations have the hubris to think they can manage a whole new regime of nuclear apartheid, despite their recent and most welcome acknowledgement by their leadership of the breakdown of the nuclear weapons arms control regime. They’re planning a top-down, hierarchical, central control of the nuclear fuel cycle, in a mad plan to reprocess the irradiated fuel rods in the “nuclear have” countries, such as the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Japan and India, who are to be members of a new Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. The Partnership will ship toxic bomb-ready materials to the four corners of the world and back, in a nightmare scenario of plutonium in constant transit, subject to terrorist theft and negligent accidents on land and on sea, while creating a whole new class of nuclear “have nots” who can’t be trusted not to turn their “peaceful” nuclear reactors into bomb factories. It’s just so 20th century! Time for a paradigm shift to safe, sustainable energy.

Every 30 minutes, enough of the sun’s energy reaches the earth’s surface to meet global energy demand for an entire year. Wind can satisfy the world’s electricity needs 40 times over, and meet all global energy demands five times over. The geothermal energy stored in the top six miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times the energy of the world’s known oil and gas resources. Tidal, wave and small hydropower, can also provide vast stores of energy everywhere on earth, abundant and free for every person on our planet, rich and poor alike.    We can store hydrogen fuel in cells, made from safe, clean energy sources, to be used when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. When hydrogen fuel is burned, it produces water vapor, pure enough to drink, with no contamination added to the planet. Iceland plans to be completely sustainable by 2050, using hydrogen in its vehicles, trains, busses and ships, made from geothermal and marine energy.

Last year the governments of Germany, Spain and Denmark launched the International Renewal Energy Agency, IRENA, which would empower developing countries with the ability to access the free energy of the sun, wind, marine, and geothermal sources, would train, educate, and disseminate information about implementing sustainable energy programs, organize and enable the transfer of science and know-how of renewable energy technologies, and generally be responsible for helping the world make the critical transition to a sustainable energy future. IRENE is the Greek word for peace, so this new initiative is especially well named.

While the NPT purports to guarantee to States who agree to abide by its terms an inalienable right to so-called peaceful nuclear technology, it is highly questionable whether such a right can ever be appropriately conferred on a State. Inalienable rights are generally distinguished from legal rights established by a State because they are moral or natural rights, inherent in the very essence of an individual. The notion of inalienable rights appeared in Islamic law and jurisprudence which denied a ruler “the right to take away from his subjects certain rights which inhere in his or her person as a human being” and “become Rights by reason of the fact that they are given to a subject by a law and from a source which no ruler can question or alter”.   John Locke, the great Enlightenment thinker was thought to be influenced in his concept of inalienable rights by his attendance at lectures on Arabic studies.

During the Age of Enlightenment natural law theory challenged the divine right of kings. The US Declaration of Independence spoke of “self-evident truth” that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights …life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Where does “peaceful nuclear technology” fit in this picture? Just as the Comprehensive Test Ban cancelled the right to peaceful nuclear explosions in Article V of the NPT, a protocol to the NPT mandating participation in IRENA would supercede the Article IV right to “peaceful” nuclear technology. There are now 143 nations participating in IRENA. www.irena.org We urge you to insure that your nation joins as well.

May 3, 2010
A New Start with START

This article was originally published by YES! Magazine

The United States and Russia reached agreement on a new START treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) to lower their count of deployed atomic warheads from 2,200 each to between 1,500 and 1,675. They would also cut their stocks of strategic bombers and land- and sea-based missiles from a current level of 1,600 each to 800. The treaty replaces the 1991 START agreement, which expired last December. Since each country still has about 10,000 weapons, mostly undeployed and in storage, the new START is a modest step forward. It is, however, a down payment on improved U.S.-Russia relations and a possible prelude to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Presidents Obama and Medvedev will sign the new treaty in Prague, the site of President Obama’s groundbreaking speech one year ago in which he set out a vision for a nuclear free world.

There are 23,000 nuclear bombs on the planet, all but 1,000 of them in the U.S. and Russia. To convince the other nuclear weapons states (the U.K., China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea) to join negotiations for their total elimination, it is imperative that the U.S. and Russia cut their enormous arsenals first.

Obama and Medvedev pledged to negotiate these weapons cuts as a step towards “a nuclear free world.” The talks almost ran aground when the U.S. announced it was putting new missile defenses in Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, after it had canceled plans to site them in the Czech Republic. Russia views the expansion of U.S. missile defenses as a threat to the integrity of its nuclear arsenal. The parties agreed to finesse their differences by settling for language in the treaty’s preamble—which the U.S. argues is not binding—acknowledging that the size of offensive arsenals must be tied to the number of anti-missile defenses.

Powerful forces are arrayed against Obama’s vision. Forty-one Republican senators wrote to him warning that they would not ratify the START treaty if the president made any moves to cut back on the U.S. missile defense program. They have also exacted a stiff price by requiring an increase in the nuclear weapons budget, including plans for a new facility to manufacture plutonium cores for new bombs. And the nuclear weapons labs are raising questions about the soundness of the nuclear arsenal without further money spent on testing and weapons development.

Nevertheless, international expectations for progress in eliminating nuclear weapons are on the rise. In addition to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s proposal to begin negotiations on a nuclear weapons convention to ban the bomb, the German Bundestag has just passed a motion urging major steps towards nuclear abolition—including removing U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Germany and beginning international talks on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons.

In May, the UN will host a conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which contains a promise from the nuclear powers to give up their nuclear weapons in return for a pledge from all the other states not to acquire them. Tens of thousands of citizen activists will march from Times Square to the UN headquarters in New York, calling for nuclear abolition. Strategy sessions to develop next steps are planned by the Abolition 2000 Network and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. On June 5th, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is organizing in communities all over the world to urge negotiations to ban the bomb. While President Obama qualified his call for a nuclear free world by saying it might not be achieved “in my lifetime,” his very articulation of the vision has unleashed the aspirations of people all over the world, making the abolition of nuclear weapons an idea whose time has come.

April 2, 2010
A Global Push for Clean Energy: The International Renewable Energy Agency
This article was originally published by YES! Magazine.

Since 1995, when more than 170 nations voted to extend the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, civil society has been calling for the establishment of an international agency to promote renewable energy sources to take the place of fossil fuels without resorting to nuclear power.

Recognizing the “inextricable link” between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, Abolition 2000, a global network for the elimination of nuclear weapons, drafted a model statute for the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and lobbied nations around the world to institute it. [1] Joining with other grassroots networks working to avoid catastrophic climate change through a transition to sustainable energy, activists spoke up at numerous international meetings and conferences and conferred with national environmental departments, seeking support for an energy agency focused solely on clean, safe, renewable energy.

In January 2009, one year ago, Germany, Denmark, and Spain launched the founding meeting for IRENA in Bonn, Germany. [2] A year later, 142 of the 192 member states of the United Nations, as well as the European Union, have signed the IRENA statute. The agency has opened headquarters in Abu Dhabi and branch offices in Bonn and Vienna, and its interim-director general, Helene Pelosse, a former French environmental minister who held positions in trade and finance as well, is determined to hire a staff comprised of at least 50 percent women.

IRENA is committed to becoming a principal driving force in promoting a rapid transition toward the sustainable use of a renewable energy on a global scale. It has a mandate to promote all forms of renewable energy produced in a sustainable manner, including solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower, ocean, and appropriate bio energy. It will provide practical advice and support for both industrialized and developing countries, helping them to build capacity and improve their regulatory frameworks.

This year, “IRENA will focus on building a network of international renewable energy experts, starting to map the global potential of renewables, and build up a comprehensive database of policies to promote renewable energy,” said Pelosse. It “will become a one-stop-shop for up-to-date and relevant information on renewable energy.” [3] As a pilot project, IRENA will help develop renewable energy for a number of islands within the Kingdom of Tonga that lack basic electricity. [4]

Every 30 minutes, enough of the sun’s energy reaches the Earth’s surface to meet global energy demand for an entire year. Wind can satisfy the world’s electricity needs 40 times over, and meet all global energy demands five times over. The geothermal energy stored in the top six miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times the energy of the world’s known oil and gas resources. Tidal, wave, and small hydropower can also provide vast stores of energy everywhere on earth, abundant and free for every person on our planet, rich and poor alike. [5]

While the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been committed to promoting nuclear power and the International Energy Agency (IEA) was established in the 1970s to handle the crisis in fossil fuel distribution, only IRENA will be solely dedicated to promoting clean, safe, renewable energy from the abundant energy resources of our planet.

As a derivative of the Greek word eirene, meaning “peace,” IRENA is particularly well-named. The rapid development of renewable energy will enable us to forego our reliance on fossil and nuclear fuels, the continued misuse of which will lead inevitably to climate catastrophe, nuclear proliferation, and perpetual resource wars. Universal reliance on sustainable energy will instead create a promising path toward creating peace on earth.

Sources
January 25, 2010