Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: call to action

  • Santa Barbara Declaration: Reject Nuclear Deterrence: An Urgent Call to Action

    Click here to sign the declaration.


    Vaya aquí para la versión española.


    Nuclear deterrence is a doctrine that is used as a justification by nuclear weapon states and their allies for the continued possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons. 


    Nuclear deterrence is the threat of a nuclear strike in response to a hostile action.  However, the nature of the hostile action is often not clearly defined, making possible the use of nuclear weapons in a wide range of circumstances.


    Nuclear deterrence threatens the murder of many millions of innocent people, along with severe economic, climate, environmental, agricultural and health consequences beyond the area of attack.


    Nuclear deterrence requires massive commitments of resources to the industrial infrastructures and organizations that make up the world’s nuclear weapons establishments, its only beneficiaries.


    Despite its catastrophic potential, nuclear deterrence is widely, though wrongly, perceived to provide protection to nuclear weapon states, their allies and their citizens.


    Nuclear deterrence has numerous major problems:  



    1. Its power to protect is a dangerous fabrication. The threat or use of nuclear weapons provides no protection against an attack.
    2. It assumes rational leaders, but there can be irrational or paranoid leaders on any side of a conflict.
    3. Threatening or committing mass murder with nuclear weapons is illegal and criminal.  It violates fundamental legal precepts of domestic and international law, threatening the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people.
    4. It is deeply immoral for the same reasons it is illegal: it threatens indiscriminate and grossly disproportionate death and destruction.
    5. It diverts human and economic resources desperately needed to meet basic human needs around the world.  Globally, approximately $100 billion is spent annually on nuclear forces.
    6. It has no effect against non-state extremists, who govern no territory or population.
    7. It is vulnerable to cyber attack, sabotage, and human or technical error, which could result in a nuclear strike.
    8. It sets an example for additional countries to pursue nuclear weapons for their own nuclear deterrent force.

    Its benefits are illusory. Any use of nuclear weapons would be catastrophic.


    Nuclear deterrence is discriminatory, anti-democratic and unsustainable. This doctrine must be discredited and replaced with an urgent commitment to achieve global nuclear disarmament. We must change the discourse by speaking truth to power and speaking truth to each other.


    Before another nuclear weapon is used, nuclear deterrence must be replaced by humane, legal and moral security strategies.  We call upon people everywhere to join us in demanding that the nuclear weapon states and their allies reject nuclear deterrence and negotiate without delay a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of all nuclear weapons.
    _____________



    Initial Signers: Participants in The Dangers of Nuclear Deterrence Conference, hosted by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Santa Barbara, February 16-17, 2011.


    Blase Bonpane, Ph.D., Director, Office of the Americas
    Theresa Bonpane, Founding Director, Office of the Americas
    John Burroughs, Ph.D., Executive Director, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy
    Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation
    Kate Dewes, Ph.D., Co-Director, Disarmament and Security Centre, New Zealand
    Bob Dodge, M.D., Coordinator, Beyond War Nuclear Weapons Abolition Team
    Dick Duda, Ph.D., founding member, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation – Silicon Valley
    Denise Duffield, Associate Director, Physicians for Social Responsibility – Los Angeles
    Richard Falk, J.S.D., Chair, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
    Commander Robert Green (Royal Navy, ret.), Co-Director, Disarmament and Security Centre, New Zealand
    David Krieger, Ph.D., President, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
    Robert Laney, J.D., Secretary, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
    Steven Starr, Senior Scientist, Physicians for Social Responsibility
    Rick Wayman, Director of Programs, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
    Bill Wickersham, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor of Peace Studies, University of Missouri

  • On the Brink of War

    On the Brink of War

    We are on the brink of a war that will undoubtedly be disastrous for the people of Iraq, and likely even more so for the people of the United States. Listening to President Bush’s rhetoric, one has the feeling that it is Hate Week in Orwell’s 1984.

    Surely, Saddam Hussein is a dictator who has committed atrocities in the past. Surely, the American people can be aroused to hate Saddam. These are the buttons that are being pushed by Bush and his militant advisors who are eager for war.

    As Bush raises shrill charges against Hussein, US troops take up their positions on his orders surrounding Iraq. According to Bush, “Saddam has the motive and the means and the recklessness and the hatred to threaten the American people.”

    But exactly what motive could he have? Self-destruction? The desire to see himself and his country destroyed? On the contrary, his motivation seems to be to hold off a war by allowing free access in his country to the United Nations weapons inspectors.

    But still Saddam is easy to hate, and the Bush administration is pressing for a war. “The United States,” says Bush, “along with a growing coalition of nations, is resolved to take whatever action is necessary to defend ourselves and disarm the Iraqi regime.”

    But how exactly is Saddam threatening us? What exactly are we defending against? These are among the questions that go unanswered by the administration and the media as Bush pushes for war.

    In fact, the Iraqi regime has been largely disarmed. It will be a fairly easy target for the US military with its crushing might, a far easier target of attack than North Korea.

    Sometimes in the flurry of administration invective, it is difficult to remember that it is the United States that has an arsenal of 10,000 nuclear weapons and Iraq that has none, or that it is the US military that is surrounding Iraq and that Iraq has not actually made any threat against the US.

    Neither the Bush administration nor the American media has paid much attention to the consequences of a US attack to “disarm” Saddam. They do so at their peril and at the peril of the American people because the consequences will be grave.

    The consequences will include the deaths of many innocent Iraqi civilians and young American troops. They will include increased hatred of the US throughout the Arab world, and a corresponding rise in terrorism. They will include the undermining of the international law of war and of the United Nations. The global economy could be sent into a tailspin, and there will potentially be serious adverse effects on the environment.

    This war will cause major rifts in the Western alliance. It will provide a precedent to other leaders who want to solve international conflicts by means of preemptive unilateral wars. It will encourage the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in countries likely to be threatened by the US in the future.

    In the end, it will be the American people who will pay the heaviest price for Bush’s ill-considered war. We will be the victims of future acts of terrorism and our civil liberties will continue to be diminished as power is concentrated in a dictatorial president.

    We should not lose track of the fact that George Bush was not elected. He was selected by a small group of conservative justices on the US Supreme Court. This makes it even more tragic that he is leading our country into a disastrous war.

    Nelson Mandela, one of the great moral leaders of our time, recently expressed his sense of the Bush administration’s policies: “It is a tragedy what is happening, what Bush is doing in Iraq. What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.”

    Only the American people can stop this war, and only if they act now in overwhelming numbers.
    *David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the co-editor with Richard Falk of The Iraq Crisis and International Law.

  • Let Us Use Our Strength in a Decade of Service to Humanity

    We the people of the United States are members of the most fortunate, most successful, most powerful nation that ever existed upon this planet. Recent outbursts of terrorism have frightened us into forgetting how strong we are, how many resources we have, what great things we can achieve if we decide to evoke the creative qualities of every human being on earth.

    This country was founded upon universal principles of freedom and equality. It offered possibilities and opportunities that drew millions of immigrants to its shores. It finally eliminated the scourge of slavery which marred its history. It has risen to tremendous heights of productivity and prosperity. It has friends and enemies everywhere.

    We the people can put this giant nation under a new course – a course which can transform the world. It is true that God blessed America. Let us share our blessings as we did when we helped many nations recover from the ravages of World War II. We helped our former enemies to shake off totalitarian systems and reach heights they had never known before. We helped to create the United Nations and other international organizations which have brought benefits to people on every continent. Now the time has arrived for us to take the lead in launching a Decade of Service to Humanity.

    It is time for all of us to adopt the personal policy described by Albert Einstein many years ago: “A hundred times a day I remind myself that my life depends on other people living and dead, and that I must invest myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving….” The strength we have acquired came to us through other human beings – and we must use that strength by opening our hearts and reaching out to others across all boundaries.

    When the World Trade Towers were destroyed in September of 2001, people from eighty countries dies in the wreckage. There was a huge surge of compassion from people in the United States and many of those countries. People invested themselves in countless ways to help the victims of that attack and their families. People everywhere realized “a hundred times a day” that their lives depended upon other people living and dead. The repercussions from those who died penetrated the consciousness of all the millions who saw the towers exploding. The memories were implanted forever.

    The creation of a Decade of Service to Humanity, sponsored by people in America, will have impacts upon people of all generations. It could bring giant strides to eliminate poverty and disease, to link people together in cooperative efforts in every field – just as people worked together to cope with the effects of the terrible explosions in the Trade Towers.

    The launching of a Decade of Service would not require a declaration by the United Nations. It would not require action by the Congress of the United States. It would not have to be sponsored by any of the governmental or nongovernmental bodies existing in the world today.

    It would simply require a state of awareness by every human person of the connections on which every life is based. It would demand a universal circulation of the statement made by Dr. Einstein: “A hundred times a day I remind myself that my life depends on other people living and dead….” That statement could be placed on the bulletin boards in every school and church, in every business office, in every courtroom, in every place where human beings gather.

    What would be the effects of reminding ourselves “a hundred times a day” that we are supported and sustained in countless ways by those who labored to build our civilization, who enabled us to produce enormous quantities of food and clothing, wide networks of roads and highways, enormous harbors filled with ships, huge airports crowded with planes, enormous broadcasting systems and internet webs of electronic communication? What would be the effects of realizing that people in every part of the world, people from the East and the West, the North and the South, people of every color and every religion, people from Africa and Asia, from Europe and Latin America, from Japan and China and Iran and Iraq, from Brazil and Poland and Germany and Spain, are important in our personal lives?

    If we kept these facts steadily before us, we could take part in a Decade of Service to Humanity. We would insist that our representatives in Congress, the President and his advisors, the ambassadors at the United Nations, would have to recognize and fulfill the needs of human beings for a decent, satisfying life. President Truman said once that every person had a right to such a life.

    The statement of Albert Einstein came from one of the most brilliant scientists who ever lived. His thinking about the structure and potential energies of the atom led to the release of nuclear energy, the most revolutionary event of the twentieth century. He declared that the release of that energy changed everything for humanity, whether human beings realized it or not.

    In this Nuclear Age, when thousands of weapons of mass destruction exist in our country and in other nations, we live with the possibility of annihilation at any time. We seldom realize that human beings have the power to wipe out all life on earth. If we brought a realization of that awesome possibility into our minds every day, we would have an additional motivation for using our strength to serve humanity – and all the forms of life connected with us.

    “We the people” have achieved many worthy goals in the past. Millions of us are engaged today in lives of service in many fields. Many of us know that serving one another brings the deepest rewards, the most enduring happiness that we can enjoy. The idea of being a Public Servant motivated many of our most admired leaders – Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess and Harry Truman, Rosalyn and Jimmy Carter, Jonas Salk, Earl Warren, Lady Bird Johnson, John Kennedy, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, and many others. All nations have produced men and women whose services to humanity have inspired millions of people from all generations.

    A Decade of Service to Humanity might be followed by a noble era of humanity’s development – an era that could stretch for centuries or eons. The earth could become a place of everlasting peace, a place filled with the signs of love shining far into the future.

    We the people of America can lead the way. Let us start now!
    *Frank K. Kelly is the senior vice president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. His fields of service include human rights – he was vice president of the Fund for the Republic and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions – and public affairs. He was a speech writer for President Truman, a noted journalist, a war correspondent, and author of many books on American history. In the 1950s, he was a special assistant to Majority Leaders of the U.S. Senate. He lives in Santa Barbara.

  • Reflection of the New Year

    Reflection of the New Year

    The turning of a year is always a good time to take stock of where we are and to look for lessons of the past that may guide us into the future. Here are a few thoughts as we enter this New Year.

    We share a single, beautiful Earth, the only place we know of in the universe that supports the miracle of life.

    We are one people, one great humanity, capable of cooperating to turn this planet into a paradise for all.

    We may have different histories, but we share a common future. We will rise or fall together.

    By the greed and lack of care and vision that is integral to our current economic system, we are poisoning our Earth, destroying other species at a prodigious rate, and foreclosing possibilities for future generations of humans, including our own children and grandchildren.

    We have penetrated the power of the atom and created technologies capable of destroying most life on Earth, including human life. Our current world order, based upon nuclear “haves” and “have-nots,” is not sustainable.

    Life has existed on Earth for some four billion years, and in just a matter of decades, hardly a tick on the geological clock, we humans have placed the continuation of life in jeopardy.

    Albert Einstein warned: “The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

    And yet, we have chosen leaders myopic in vision and committed to military solutions that have placed humanity on a collision course with catastrophe.

    With this leadership, we are abrogating our responsibility to humanity as a whole and to future generations.

    The challenge to humanity is to come together to end the great disparities and ill will that divide us and find a way that all individuals can live with dignity.

    We can start by recognizing that we are all citizens of Earth with corresponding rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and with corresponding responsibilities. Among these responsibilities are:

    • To end the continuing threat to humanity of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.
    • To redirect scientific and economic resources from the destructive pursuit of weapons technologies to the beneficial tasks of ending hunger, disease, poverty and ignorance.
    • To break down barriers that divide people and nations and, by acts of friendship, reduce tensions and suspicions.
    • To live gently on the Earth, reclaiming and preserving the natural beauty and profound elegance of our land, mountains, oceans and sky.
    • And to teach others, by our words and deeds, to accept all members of the human family and to love the Earth and live with peace and justice upon it.

    Our starting point is to put aside our apathy, complacency and cynicism and to choose hope, hope that leads to engagement. It is only by our hope and in our actions that the world will change.
    *David Krieger is the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the co-author of Choose Hope, Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age (Middleway Press, 2002).