Tag: deterrence
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Scenarios for Nuclear Catastrophe
In a recent article that I wrote, “British Petroleum, Imagination and Nuclear Catastrophe,” I argued we should use the occasion of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to imagine scenarios in which a nuclear catastrophe could take place. The reason for imagining such scenarios should be obvious: to keep them from occurring.
Here is a proposition: Continued offshore oil drilling runs the risk of future offshore oil leak catastrophes that will destroy large aquatic and shoreline habitats. Applied to nuclear weapons, the proposition could be restated in this way: Continued reliance on nuclear weapons runs the risk of future nuclear catastrophes that will destroy cities, countries and civilization.
In my article, I proposed four of many possible scenarios that could be envisioned. These scenarios involved a terrorist bomb on a major city somewhere in the world; an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war; an accidental nuclear launch by Russia, leading to a nuclear exchange with the US; and a nuclear attack by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il on Japan and South Korea.
These scenarios elicited responses that I would like to share. The first response, from South Korea, expressed the opinion that Kim Jong-Il would not make a preemptive nuclear attack. The writer said, “I agree with your imagined scenarios except for the following: …Kim Jong-Il is not so irrational that he would attack Japan and South Korea for not receiving development assistance. He and North Korean officials usually say that they would attack only in the case of being attacked….” This may be true, but it remains difficult to predict which leaders will act rationally and which will not. It seems certain, though, that all leaders will not act rationally at all times with regard to nuclear weapons, and that deterrence theory, at a minimum, requires rational decision makers.
The second and third responses imagine other scenarios. The second response focuses on Israel: “You forget one other horrible scenario: Israel decides to preemptively bomb Tehran and Isfahan, because they ‘fear for their own safety.’ Armed with nukes, and in the name of ‘Civil Defense,’ rogue Israel thumbs its nose at the world again and takes out parts of Iran….” Would Israel initiate a nuclear attack under certain circumstances, such as a major threat from Arab countries? The truth is that we do not know under what conditions Israel, or any other nuclear weapon state, would initiate such an attack.
The third response, from South Africa, focuses on the possibility of a US initiated nuclear attack: “In your scenarios you do not imagine the US pressing the nuclear button. The United States is beyond question the most aggressive nation in the world and remains among the most recalcitrant in signing peace and environmental protocols. As a person who lives outside the United States, I feel most threatened by the US. The US does not negotiate, at the heart of which is compromise for the greater good. Narrow interests are pursued relentlessly – even to the detriment of US citizens.”
The response continued, “I was appalled to receive by email photos of a US warship recently launched. It was built from the scrap metal of the Twin Towers and named ‘Never Forget’ or some such title. I don’t believe that honors the lives lost. What would have honored them would be a ship custom built to deliver aid, medical services, etc. to disaster areas and developing countries. I do believe citizens in the US, so many of whom are brought up on the myth that the US is always in the right, should recognize their own potential to be the ultimate aggressors in the use of nuclear weapons. They use every other weapon of destruction – Agent Orange, cluster bombs, etc. Why should they hold back on nuclear weapons?”
Would the US initiate a nuclear attack? The answer is the same for the US or any other nuclear weapon state: We don’t know. What we do know is that the leaders of countries that possess nuclear weapons are essentially holding the world, including their own citizens, hostage to the potential catastrophic consequences of using these weapons.
Deterrence can fail in many ways, some of which we cannot foresee, and it may be the unforeseeable scenarios that are most dangerous. We don’t know what the trigger may be, only that we are playing with nuclear fire. The Gulf of Mexico recovery from the British Petroleum oil spill may take decades. For civilization to recover from nuclear war could take centuries and might not be possible. The oil spill in the Gulf has provided us an opportunity to awaken to the nuclear dangers that confront us and to act. The question remains: Will we seize this opportunity?
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The Abolition of Nuclear Weapons and US Vulnerability
At a recent meeting a question came up concerning how to respond to someone who asks, “Won’t the abolition of nuclear weapons leave the United States vulnerable?” Here is my response.
First, it is important to make clear that we are not asking for the US alone to disarm its nuclear arsenal. Rather than seeking unilateral disarmament, we are calling for the US to lead a multilateral process for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons. We are convinced that all countries, and especially the US, would be safer and more secure in a world without nuclear weapons.
Second, we are not calling for going to zero nuclear weapons overnight. Rather, it would be done cautiously over time and in phases. The term “phased” in the disarmament process is very important. By proceeding in phases, it means there would be a plan in place that allows for confidence building in discrete steps. Each phase would need to be completed before moving on to the next phase. US military and security professionals would be involved in designing the phases. If problems arise in a phase, attention can be given to working them out before proceeding to the next phase.
Third, there would need to be means built into the disarmament process by which there is confidence that cheating is not occurring. This would require verification of the disarmament process. President Reagan reached the conclusion that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” He supported the abolition of nuclear weapons, but understood the necessity of verification procedures. He said, “Trust, but verify.” This makes sense and would be a key element of the disarmament plan.
Verification procedures would need to include not only technical means, such as remote sensing and satellite imagery, but also the ability to hold on-site inspections, including unscheduled challenge inspections. All sides would have to feel sufficiently comfortable with the verification procedures to move forward into new phases of the disarmament process.
Fourth, the process would be designed to be irreversible. It would include provisions that weapons that are dismantled could not later be converted back to weaponry. Verification procedures would ensure the irreversibility of the process.
Fifth, transparency would be another key element of the disarmament process. Countries would reveal what weapons and delivery systems they possess in their nuclear arsenals, and the process would be subject to confirmation by means of inspections and verification. The US has recently taken an important step toward transparency by revealing that its nuclear arsenal contains 5,113 weapons deployed and in reserve (plus several thousand more awaiting dismantlement).
Sixth, the question itself implies that currently the US nuclear arsenal prevents the country from being vulnerable to nuclear attack. This is clearly not the case. Nuclear weapons do not provide physical protection to their possessors. Their power to defend against nuclear attack is based upon their ability to deter by threat of nuclear retaliation. But deterrence is only a theory and one that cannot be proven. Deterrence cannot protect against accidents or miscalculations. Nor can it protect against nuclear armed terrorists. Additionally, nuclear deterrence may simply fail if the threat of retaliation is not believed. Nuclear deterrence theory requires leaders to behave rationally, and not all leaders do at all times.
Seventh, the nuclear status quo of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots” supports double standards that encourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries. Such proliferation makes accidents and proliferation to terrorist groups more likely, diminishing security for all. The United States and the world would be safer and more secure in a world without nuclear weapons.
Finally, in a world without nuclear weapons, the US, with its strong conventional military forces, would be far more secure than in a world with many nuclear weapons states and the threat of nuclear terrorism. Achieving a world without nuclear weapons would leave the US more secure and less vulnerable than it is at the present when the country remains subject to being destroyed by a nuclear attack.
The choice before the US now is to continue to live with the vulnerability of the threats posed by weapons capable of destroying cities, countries, civilization and the human species along with other complex forms of life, or to proceed cautiously on the path to nuclear weapons abolition. The nuclear status quo is filled with extreme risks. The path to zero nuclear weapons may also contain risks, but of the options available, it is the safer and more secure path not only for the US but for the world. To follow this path, which has legal, moral and practical imperatives, will require US leadership and the commitment of US citizens.
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The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence
The human race stands on the verge of nuclear self-extinction as a species, and with it will die most, if not all, forms of intelligent life on the planet earth. Any attempt to dispel the ideology of nuclearism and its attendant myth propounding the legality of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence must directly come to grips with the fact that the nuclear age was conceived in the original sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined by the Nuremberg Charter of August 8, 1945, and violated several basic provisions of the Regulations annexed to Hague Convention No. 4Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907), the rules of customary international law set forth in the Draft Hague Rules of Air Warfare (1923), and the United States War Department Field Manual 27-10, Rules of Land Warfare (1940). According to this Field Manual and the Nuremberg Principles, all civilian government officials and military officers who ordered or knowingly participated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been lawfully punished as war criminals. The start of any progress toward resolving humankind’s nuclear predicament must come from the realization that nuclear weapons have never been legitimate instruments of state policy, but rather have always constituted illegitimate instrumentalities of internationally lawless and criminal behavior.
THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
The use of nuclear weapons in combat was, and still is, absolutely prohibited under all circumstances by both conventional and customary international law: e.g., the Nuremberg Principles, the Hague Regulations of 1907, the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocol I of 1977, etc. In addition, the use of nuclear weapons would also specifically violate several fundamental resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly that have repeatedly condemned the use of nuclear weapons as an international crime.
Consequently, according to the Nuremberg Judgment, soldiers would be obliged to disobey egregiously illegal orders with respect to launching and waging a nuclear war. Second, all government officials and military officers who might nevertheless launch or wage a nuclear war would be personally responsible for the commission of Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and Protocol 1, and genocide, among other international crimes. Third, such individuals would not be entitled to the defenses of superior orders, act of state, tu quoque, self-defense, presidential authority, etc. Fourth, such individuals could thus be quite legitimately and most severely punished as war criminals, up to and including the imposition of the death penalty, without limitation of time.
THE THREAT TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter of 1945 prohibits both the threat and the use of force except in cases of legitimate self-defense as recognized by article 51 thereof. But although the requirement of legitimate self-defense is a necessary precondition for the legality of any threat or use of force, it is certainly not sufficient. For the legality of any threat or use of force must also take into account the customary and conventional international laws of humanitarian armed conflict.
Thereunder, the threat to use nuclear weapons (i.e., nuclear deterrence/terrorism) constitutes ongoing international criminal activity: namely, planning, preparation, solicitation and conspiracy to commit Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, as well as grave breaches of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, Additional Protocol I of 1977, the Hague Regulations of 1907, and the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, inter alia. These are the so-called inchoate crimes that under the Nuremberg Principles constitute international crimes in their own right.
The conclusion is inexorable that the design, research, testing, production, manufacture, fabrication, transportation, deployment, installation, maintenance, storing, stockpiling, sale, and purchase as well as the threat to use nuclear weapons together with all their essential accouterments are criminal under well-recognized principles of international law. Thus, those government decision-makers in all the nuclear weapons states with command responsibility for their nuclear weapons establishments are today subject to personal criminal responsibility under the Nuremberg Principles for this criminal practice of nuclear deterrence/terrorism that they have daily inflicted upon all states and peoples of the international community. Here I wish to single out four components of the threat to use nuclear weapons that are especially reprehensible from an international law perspective: counter-ethnic targeting; counter-city targeting; first-strike weapons and contingency plans; and the first-use of nuclear weapons even to repel a conventional attack.
THE CRIMINALITY OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE
As can be determined in part from the preceding analysis, today’s nuclear weapons establishments as well as the entire system of nuclear deterrence/terrorism currently practiced by all the nuclear weapon states are criminal — not simply illegal, not simply immoral, but criminal under well established principles of international law. This simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons can be utilized to pierce through the ideology of nuclearism to which many citizens in the nuclear weapons states have succumbed. It is with this simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons that concerned citizens can proceed to comprehend the inherent illegitimacy and fundamental lawlessness of the policies that their governments pursue in their names with respect to the maintenance and further development of nuclear weapons systems.
THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE/TERRORISM
Humankind must abolish nuclear weapons before nuclear weapons abolish humankind. Nonetheless, a small number of governments in the world community continue to maintain nuclear weapons systems despite the rules of international criminal law to the contrary. This has led some international lawyers to argue quite tautologically and disingenuously that since there exist a few nuclear weapons states in the world community, therefore nuclear weapons must somehow not be criminal because otherwise these few states would not possess nuclear weapons systems. In other words, to use lawyers’ parlance, this minority state practice of nuclear deterrence/terrorism practiced by the great powers somehow negates the existence of a world opinio juris (i.e., sense of legal obligation) as to the criminality of nuclear weapons.
There is a very simple response to that specious argument: Since when has a small gang of criminals — in this case, the nuclear weapons states — been able to determine what is legal or illegal for the rest of the community by means of their own criminal behavior? What right do these nuclear weapons states have to argue that by means of their own criminal behavior they have ipso facto made criminal acts legitimate? No civilized nation state would permit a small gang of criminal conspirators to pervert its domestic legal order in this manner. Moreover, both the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Tribunal made it quite clear that a conspiratorial band of criminal states likewise has no right to opt out of the international legal order by means of invoking their own criminal behavior as the least common denominator of international deportment. Ex iniuria ius non oritur is a peremptory norm of customary international law. Right cannot grow out of injustice!
To the contrary, the entire human race has been victimized by an international conspiracy of ongoing criminal activity carried out by the nuclear weapons states under the doctrine known as “nuclear deterrence,” which is really a euphemism for “nuclear terrorism.” This international criminal conspiracy of nuclear deterrence/terrorism currently practiced by the nuclear weapons states is no different from any other conspiracy by a criminal gang or band. They are the outlaws. So it is up to the rest of the international community to repress and dissolve this international criminal conspiracy as soon as possible.
THE HUMAN RIGHT TO ANTI-NUCLEAR CIVIL RESISTANCE
In light of the fact that nuclear weapons systems are prohibited, illegal, and criminal under all circumstances and for any reason, every person around the world possesses a basic human right to be free from this criminal practice of nuclear deterrence/terrorism and its concomitant specter of nuclear extinction. Thus, all human beings possess the basic right under international law to engage in non-violent civil resistance activities for the purpose of preventing, impeding, or terminating the ongoing commission of these international crimes. Every citizen of the world community has both the right and the duty to oppose the existence of nuclear weapons systems by whatever non-violent means are at his or her disposal. Otherwise, the human race will suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs, and the planet earth will become a radioactive wasteland. The time for preventive action is now!
Francis A. Boyle is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. -
Maybe We Should Take the North Koreans at Their Word
Shortly after North Korea exploded its second nuclear device in three years on Monday morning, it released a statement explaining why. “The republic has conducted another underground nuclear testing successfully in order to strengthen our defensive nuclear deterrence.”(1) If the Obama Administration hopes to dissuade Pyongyang from the nuclear course it seems so hell bent on pursuing, Washington must understand just how adroitly nuclear arms do appear to serve North Korea’s national security. In other words, perhaps we should recognize that they mean what they say.
From the dawn of history until the dawn of the nuclear age, it seemed rather self-evident that for virtually any state in virtually any strategic situation, the more military power one could wield relative to one’s adversaries, the more security one gained. That all changed, however, with Alamogordo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the Cold War’s long atomic arms race, it slowly dawned on “nuclear use theorists” – whom one can hardly resist acronyming as NUTS – that in the nuclear age, security did not necessarily require superiority. Security required simply an ability to retaliate after an adversary had struck, to inflict upon that opponent “unacceptable damage” in reply. If an adversary knew, no matter how much devastation it might inflict in a first strike, that the chances were good that it would receive massive damage as a consequence (even far less damage than it had inflicted as long as that damage was “unacceptable”), then, according to the logic of nuclear deterrence, that adversary would be dissuaded from striking first. What possible political benefit could outweigh the cost of the possible obliteration of, oh, a state’s capital city, and the leaders of that state themselves, and perhaps more than a million lives therein?
Admittedly, the unassailable logic of this “unacceptable damage” model of nuclear deterrence – which we might as well call UD – failed to put the brakes on a spiraling Soviet/American nuclear arms competition that began almost immediately after the USSR acquired nuclear weapons of its own in 1949. Instead, a different model of nuclear deterrence emerged, deterrence exercised by the capability completely to wipe out the opponent’s society, “mutually assured destruction,” which soon came to be known to all as MAD. There were other scenarios of aggression – nuclear attacks on an adversary’s nuclear weapons, nuclear or conventional attacks on an adversary’s closest allies (in Western and Eastern Europe) – that nuclear weapons were supposed to deter as well. However, the Big Job of nuclear weapons was to dissuade the other side from using their nuclear weapons against one’s own cities and society, by threatening to deliver massive nuclear devastation on the opponent’s cities and society in reply. “The Department of Defense,” said an Ohio congressman in the early 1960s, with some exasperation, “has become the Department of Retaliation.”(2)
Nevertheless, those who engaged in an effort to slow the arms race often employed the logic of UD in their attempts to do so. “Our twenty thousandth bomb,” said Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project that built the world’s first atomic weapons, as early as 1953, “will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two thousandth.” (3) “Deterrence does not depend on superiority,” said the great strategist Bernard Brodie in 1965.(4) “There is no foreign policy objective today that is so threatened,” said retired admiral and former CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1998, “that we would É accept the risk of receiving just one nuclear detonation in retaliation.”(5)
Consider how directly the logic of UD applies to the contemporary international environment, to the twin nuclear challenges that have dominated the headlines during most of the past decade, and to the most immediate nuclear proliferation issues now confronting the Obama Administration. Because the most persuasive explanation for the nuclear quests on which both Iran and North Korea have embarked is, indeed, the notion that “deterrence does not depend on superiority.” Deterrence depends only an ability to strike back. Iran and North Korea appear to be seeking small nuclear arsenals in order to deter potential adversaries from launching an attack upon them – by threatening them with unacceptable damage in retaliation.
Neither North Korea nor Iran could hope to defeat its most powerful potential adversary – the United States – in any kind of direct military confrontation. They cannot repel an actual attack upon them. They cannot shoot American planes and missiles out of the sky. Indeed, no state can.
However, what these countries can aspire to do is to dissuade the American leviathan from launching such an attack. How? By developing the capability to instantly vaporize an American military base or three in Iraq or Qatar or South Korea or Japan, or an entire U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf or the Sea of Japan, or even an American city on one coast or the other. And by making it implicitly clear that they would respond to any kind of assault by employing that capability immediately, before it’s too late, following the venerable maxim: “Use them or lose them.” The obliteration of an entire American military base, or an entire American naval formation, or an entire American city, would clearly seem to qualify as “unacceptable damage” for the United States.
Moreover, to deter an American attack, Iran and North Korea do not need thousands of nuclear warheads. They just need a couple of dozen, well hidden and well protected. American military planners might be almost certain that they could take out all the nuclear weapons in these countries in some kind of a dramatic lightning “surgical strike.” However, with nuclear weapons, “almost” is not good enough. Even the barest possibility that such a strike would fail, and that just one or two nuclear weapons would make it into the air, detonate over targets, and result in massive “unacceptable damage” for the United States, would in virtually any conceivable circumstance serve to dissuade Washington from undertaking such a strike.
In addition, it is crucial to recognize that Iran and North Korea would not intend for their nascent nuclear arsenals to deter only nuclear attacks upon them. If the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States disappeared tomorrow morning, but America’s conventional military superiority remained, it still would be the case that the only possible military asset that these states could acquire, to effectively deter an American military assault, would be the nuclear asset.
The “Korean Committee for Solidarity with World Peoples,” a mouthpiece for the North Korean government, captured Pyongyang’s logic quite plainly just weeks after the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. “The Iraqi war taught the lesson that ‘the security of the nation can be protected only when a country has a physical deterrent force’”(6) Similarly, a few weeks earlier, just before the Iraq invasion began, a North Korean general was asked to defend his country’s nuclear weapons program, and with refreshing candor replied, “We see what you are getting ready to do with Iraq. And you are not going to do it to us.”(7)
It really is quite a remarkable development. North Korea today is one of the most desperate countries in the world. Most of its citizens are either languishing in gulags or chronically starving. And yet – in contrast to all the debate that has taken place in recent years about whether the United States and/or Israel ought to launch a preemptive strike on Iran – no one seems to be proposing any kind of military strike on North Korea. Why not? Because of the mere possibility that North Korea could impose unacceptable damage upon us in reply.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about UD is that it seems every bit as effective as MAD. North Korea today possesses no more than a handful of nuclear warheads, and maintains nothing like a “mutual” nuclear balance with the United States. In addition, the retaliation that North Korea can threaten cannot promise anything like a complete “assured destruction.” To vaporize an American carrier group in the Sea of Japan, or a vast American military base in South Korea or Japan, or even an American city, would not be at all the same thing as the “destruction” of the entire American nation – as the USSR was able to threaten under MAD.
And yet, MAD and UD, it seems, exercise deterrence in precisely the same way. Astonishingly, it seems that Washington finds itself every bit as thoroughly deterred by a North Korea with probably fewer than 10 nuclear weapons as it did by a Soviet Union with 10,000. Although UD hardly contains the rich acronymphomaniacal irony wrought by MAD, it appears that both North Korea and Iran intend now to base their national security strategies solidly upon it.
There is very little reason to suppose that other states will not soon follow their lead.
President Obama, of course, to his great credit, has not only made a nuclear weapon-free Iran and North Korea one of his central foreign policy priorities, he has begun to chart a course toward a nuclear weapon-free world. In a groundbreaking speech before a huge outdoor rally in Prague on April 5th, he said, “Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” (Unfortunately, he followed that with the statement that nuclear weapons abolition would not “be achieved quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime,” suggesting that neither he nor the nuclear policy officials in his administration fully appreciate the magnitude and immediacy of the nuclear peril. Do they really think the human race can retain nuclear weapons for another half century or so, yet manage to dodge the bullet of nuclear accident, or nuclear terror, or a nuclear crisis spinning out of control every single time?)
The one thing we can probably say for sure about the prospects for universal nuclear disarmament is that no state will agree either to abjure or to dismantle nuclear weapons unless it believes that such a course is the best course for its own national security. To persuade states like North Korea and Iran to climb aboard the train to abolition would probably require simultaneous initiatives on three parallel tracks. One track would deliver foreign and defense policies that assure weaker states that we do not intend to attack them, that just as we expect them to abide by the world rule of law they can expect the same from us, that the weak need not cower in fear before the strong. Another track would deliver diplomatic overtures that convince weaker states that on balance, overall, their national security will better be served in a world where no one possesses nuclear weapons, rather than in a world where they do-but so too do many others. And another track still would deliver nuclear weapons policies that directly address the long-simmering resentments around the world about the long-standing nuclear double standard, that directly acknowledge our legacy of nuclear hypocrisy, and that directly connect nuclear non-proliferation to nuclear disarmament.
The power decisively to adjust all those variables, of course, does not reside in Pyongyang or Tehran. It resides instead in Washington.
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(1) The Washington Post, May 25, 2009.
(2) Quoted in Daniel Lang, An Inquiry Into Enoughness: Of Bombs and Men and Staying Alive (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 167.
(3) Quoted in Ibid., p. 38.
(4) Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971 – first published in 1965), p. 274, quoted in Sarah J. Diehl and James Clay Moltz, Nuclear Weapons and Nonproliferation: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2002), p. 34.
(5) Quoted in The Nation, Special Issue Containing Jonathan Schell’s interviews with several nuclear policy professionals and intellectuals, February 2/9, 1998, p. 40.
(6) Quoted in Securing Our Survival: The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, Tilman Ruff and John Loretz, eds. (Boston: IPPNW, 2007), p. 37.
(7) Don Oberdorfer, PBS, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, October 9, 2006, quoted in Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), p. 141.
Tad Daley is the Writing Fellow with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Nobel Peace Laureate disarmament advocacy organization. His first book, Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in January 2010. -
UK Does Not Need a Nuclear Deterrent
Sir, Recent speeches made by the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and the previous Defence Secretary, and the letter from Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind, David Owen and George Robertson in The Times on June 30, 2008, have placed the issue of a world free of nuclear weapons firmly on the public agenda. But it is difficult to see how the United Kingdom can exert any leadership and influence on this issue if we insist on a costly successor to Trident that would not only preserve our own nuclear-power status well into the second half of this century but might actively encourage others to believe that nuclear weapons were still, somehow, vital to the secure defence of self-respecting nations.
This is a fallacy which can best be illustrated by analysis of the British so-called independent deterrent. This force cannot be seen as independent of the United States in any meaningful sense. It relies on the United States for the provision and regular servicing of the D5 missiles. While this country has, in theory, freedom of action over giving the order to fire, it is unthinkable that, because of the catastrophic consequences for guilty and innocent alike, these weapons would ever be launched, or seriously threatened, without the backing and support of the United States.
Should this country ever become subject to some sort of nuclear blackmail — from a terrorist group for example — it must be asked in what way, and against whom, our nuclear weapons could be used, or even threatened, to deter or punish. Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently, or are likely to, face — particularly international terrorism; and the more you analyse them the more unusable they appear.
The much cited “seat at the top table” no longer has the resonance it once did. Political clout derives much more from economic strength. Even major-player status in the international military scene is more likely to find expression through effective, strategically mobile conventional forces, capable of taking out pinpoint targets, than through the possession of unusable nuclear weapons. Our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant except in the context of domestic politics. Rather than perpetuating Trident, the case is much stronger for funding our Armed Forces with what they need to meet the commitments actually laid upon them. In the present economic climate it may well prove impossible to afford both.
This article was originally published in The Times of London
The authors are former high-ranking members of the British military.
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Firings and Hirings: the US Nuclear Arsenal Versus the People
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has announced the firing of two top Air Force officials for failure to adequately secure the nation’s nuclear weapons, citing a report that found a “problem…not effectively addressed for over a decade.” The individuals fired were the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But why stop there?
The firing of these two men suggests that the problem is the adequate safeguarding of nuclear weapons and materials in the US arsenal. That is a serious problem, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Even if we could assure the security of all US nuclear weapons, we would not have dealt with the larger problem of assuring the security of US citizens from nuclear weapons. It is not only our own nuclear weapons we must worry about, but those of all other nuclear weapon states as well.
What most Americans don’t realize is that nuclear weapons do not and cannot protect us. They are not a defensive shield. All we can do with nuclear weapons is threaten their use against a country that would attack us and then hope that our threat is adequately communicated and believed, and that the leadership on the other side behaves rationally. In other words, deterrence (threat of retaliation) is a theory about how people may behave, and not a means of defense. We are staking the future of our country and the world on deterrence working under all circumstances. Whoever came up with this concept should be fired immediately.
In fact, some of the strongest proponents of deterrence during the Cold War are now calling for US leadership for a nuclear weapons-free world, precisely because they have concerns about the capacity of deterrence to provide for US security. Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have joined with former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn in pressing for a new approach to US nuclear policy. They wrote in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal article, “We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.”
Working to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons will require far more than firing two air force officials. In the current administration, it would require firing the president. He has failed to pursue US obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; threatened preemptive use of nuclear weapons; kept US nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert status; sought to develop new nuclear weapons; failed to support US ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue missile defenses (or, more accurately, missile offenses); and has blocked proposals by Russia and China to ban the weaponization of space. The one nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia that the president achieved, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), does not go as low in the number of weapons as the Russians proposed, has no provisions for verification, requires no dismantling of weapons taken off deployed status, and ends on December 31, 2012.
Both major party presidential candidates have said in general terms that they support the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. McCain stated that he shares Ronald Reagan’s dream “to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.” However, he characterizes that dream as “a distant and difficult goal.”
Barack Obama has stated, “A world without nuclear weapons is profoundly in America’s interest and the world’s interest. It is our responsibility to make the commitment, and to do the hard work to make this vision a reality. That’s what I’ve done as a Senator and a candidate, and that’s what I’ll do as President.”
Both candidates are short on details of how they intend to move forward. It is the responsibility of the American people to assure that the next president they elect have a solid plan for getting from where we are now to a world free of nuclear weapons and that he be ready to begin the process on his first day in office. It is certain that without determined US leadership a nuclear weapons-free world will remain a distant goal and the security of the American people will continue to be endangered by the threat of nuclear war, by design or accident, and by nuclear terrorism; and further, that our current arsenal of some 10,000 nuclear weapons will provide us with no protection.
David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The Foundation’s Appeal to the Next President can be signed at www.wagingpeace.org/appeal.
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Empire and Nuclear Weapons
Over the past six decades, the United States has used its nuclear arsenal in five often inter-related ways. The first was, obviously, battlefield use, with the “battlefield” writ large to include the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The long -held consensus among scholars has been that these first atomic bombings were not necessary to end the war against Japan, and that they were designed to serve a second function of the U.S. nuclear arsenal: dictating the parameters of the global (dis)order by implicitly terrorizing U.S. enemies and allies (”vassal states” in the words of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.) The third function, first practiced by Harry Truman during the 1946 crisis over Azerbaijan in northern Iran and relied on repeatedly in U.S. wars in Asia and the Middle East, as well as during crises over Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis, has been to threaten opponents with first strike nuclear attacks in order to terrorize them into negotiating on terms acceptable to the United States or, as in the Bush wars against Iraq, to ensure that desperate governments do not defend themselves with chemical or biological weapons. Once the Soviet Union joined the nuclear club, the U.S. arsenal began to play a fourth role, making U.S. conventional forces, in the words of former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, “meaningful instruments of military and political power.” As Noam Chomsky explains, Brown was saying that implicit and explicit U.S. nuclear threats were repeatedly used to intimidate those who might consider intervening militarily to assist those we are determined to attack.
The final role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is deterrence, which came into play only when the Soviet Union began to achieve parity with the United States in the last years of the Vietnam War. This is popularly understood to mean preventing a surprise first strike attack against the United States by guaranteeing “mutual assured destruction.” In other words, any nation foolish enough to attack the United States with nuclear weapons will be annihilated. However, Pentagon leaders have testified that deterrence has never been U.S. policy, and they have defined deterrence as preventing other nations from taking “courses of action” that are inimical to U.S. interests. This could include decisions related to allocation of scarce resources like oil and water, defending access to markets, or preventing non-nuclear attacks against U.S. allies and clients, i.e. role #2, using genocidal nuclear weapons to define and enforce the parameters and rules of the U.S. dominated global (dis)order.
My argument is not that U.S. use and threatened use of nuclear weapons have always succeeded. Instead, successive U.S. presidents, their most senior advisers, and many in the Pentagon have believed that U.S. use of nuclear weapons has achieved U.S. goals in the past. Furthermore, these presidents have repeatedly replicated this ostensibly successful model. In fact, even the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki achieved only one of their two purposes. These first bombs of the Cold War did communicate a terrorizing message to Stalin and the Soviet elite about the capabilities of these new weapons and about the U.S. will to use them. But, within weeks of the A-bombings, Washington was sharing influence in Korea with Moscow. Four years later northern China and Manchuria, which U.S. leaders thought they had won with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, fell into what was seen as the Soviet sphere. In 1954 France declined the offer of two U.S. A-bombs to break the Vietnamese siege at Dienbienphu, and in 1969 North Vietnam refused to be intimidated by Nixon’s “November ultimatum.”
The U.S. commitment to nuclear dominance and its practice of threatening nuclear attacks have, in fact, been counterproductive, increasing the dangers of nuclear war in yet another way: spurring nuclear weapons proliferation. No nation will long tolerate what it experiences as an unjust imbalance of power. It was primarily for this reason that the Soviet Union (now Russia) and China, North Korea, and quite probably Iran opted for nuclear weapons.
The Romance of Ruthlessness The Bush administration has again put nuclear weapons – and their various uses – at the center of U.S. military and foreign policy. The message of the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) in December 2001 was unmistakable. As The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists editorialized, “Not since the resurgence of the Cold War in Ronald Reagan’s first term has U.S. defense strategy placed such an emphasis on nuclear weapons.” The NPR reiterated the U.S. commitment to first-strike nuclear war fighting. For the first time, seven nations were specifically named as primary nuclear targets: Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea. Consistent with calls by senior administration figures who spoke of their “bias in favor of things that might be usable,” the NPR urged funding for development of new and more usable nuclear weapons. This included a new “bunker buster.” Seventy times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb, the bunker buster was designed to destroy enemy command bunkers and WMD (weapons of mass destruction) installations buried hundreds of feet beneath the surface.
To ensure that the “bunker buster” and other new nuclear weapons could inflict their holocausts, the NPR called for accelerating preparations for the resumption of nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site. It also pressed for the nuclear weapons laboratories to continue modernizing the nuclear arsenal and to train a new generation of nuclear weapons scientists. Among their first projects would be the design of a “Reliable Replacement Warhead” to serve as the military’s primary strategic weapon for the first half of the 21st century. With a massive infusion of new funds to consolidate and revitalize nuclear research, development and production facilities, National Nuclear Security Administration Deputy Administrator Tom D’Agostino testified it would “restore us to a level of capability comparable to what we had during the Cold War.”
Later, the Rumsfeld Pentagon published and then ostensibly “rescinded” a non-classified version of its Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations. The Doctrine was revealing and profoundly disturbing. In the tradition of the Clinton administration’s Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, the Doctrine communicated that the United States could all too easily “become irrational and vindictive.”
Most striking was the Doctrine’s extended discussion of deterrence. Rather than define deterrence as the prevention of nuclear attacks by other nuclear powers, the Doctrine stated that “The focus of US deterrence efforts is… to influence potential adversaries to withhold actions intended to harm US’ national interests…based on the adversary’s perception of the…likelihood and magnitude of the costs or consequences corresponding to these courses of actions.” Diplomatically, the Doctrine continued, “the central focus of deterrence is for one nation to exert such influence over a potential adversary’s decision process that the potential adversary makes a deliberate choice to refrain from a COA [course of action.]” In addition to putting Chinese diplomatic efforts to marginalize U.S. power in Asia on notice or deterring unlikely Russian or French nuclear attacks, the central role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal was global dominance. China, Russia, France and Germany were reminded of their proper places, and Iran and Venezuela received ample warning not to adopt oil and energy policies that might constitute- courses of action that would “harm U.S. national interests.”
Placing the world on further notice, the Doctrine threatened that “The US does not make positive statements defining the circumstances under which it would use nuclear weapons.” Maintaining ambiguity about when the United States would use nuclear weapons helped to “create doubt in the minds of potential adversaries.” The Doctrine also refused to rule out nuclear attacks against non-nuclear weapons states.
The Doctrine also baldly instructed the U.S. military that “no customary or conventional international law prohibits nations from employing nuclear weapons in armed conflict,” thus subordinating international law to U.S. military strategy. It also argued that nuclear wars could be won. The Doctrine gave increased authority to field commanders to propose targets for nuclear attacks and described the circumstances when field commanders could request approval to launch first-strike nuclear attacks. “Training,” it further stated, “can help prepare friendly forces to survive the effects of nuclear weapons and improve the effectiveness of surviving forces.” The Doctrine went on to reconfirm the bankruptcy of the nuclear reduction negotiations between the United States and Russia. The Doctrine was clear that U.S. nuclear forces would not actually be reduced because “US strategic nuclear weapons remain in storage and serve as an augmentation capability should US strategic nuclear force requirements rise above the levels of the Moscow Treaty.”
Toward Abolition Since the end of the Cold War, the media and national political discourse in the United States have focused on the dangers of “horizontal proliferation.” These dangers include “rogue” states with nuclear weapons, the possibility of nations with nuclear power plants becoming nuclear weapons states, and leakage from nuclear stockpiles finding its way to “rogue” states or to non-state terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. One nightmare scenario has envisioned the overthrow of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of radical Islamists.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand the importance of under-funded initiatives like the congressional Nunn-Lugar Nuclear Threat Initiative, which was designed to secure the world’s nuclear weapons, fissile materials, and nuclear wastes. However, these efforts can be no more than stop-gap measures as long as the United States threatens other nations with nuclear attacks and insists on maintaining the terrorizing imbalance of power.
Since the 1995 Nuclear Nonproliferation Review Conference, popular, elite, and governmental demands have been growing for the United States and other nuclear powers to fulfill their Article VI treaty commitment to negotiate the complete elimination of their nuclear arsenals. In 1996, in the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on the use and threatened use of nuclear weapons ruled that both are violations of international law, and the Court directed the nuclear powers to implement their Article VI commitments. While NGOs and popular movements from across the world came together to form Abolition 2000, at the elite level former head of the U.S. Strategic Command Gen. Lee Butler – supported by many of the world’s generals and admirals – called for abolition. And, in January 2007, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz joined former secretary of defense William Perry and former senator Sam Nunn in saying that U.S. double standards were driving nuclear weapons proliferation, and that the time had come for the United States to meet its NPT obligations.
Since then, pressed by voters and community based activists, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson have each stated that if elected, they will be the president who negotiates the complete elimination of the world’s nuclear weapons. They need to be held to these commitments, and other presidential and congressional candidates need to be pressed to join their commitment. (Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel have made similar commitments.)
The political and technical steps needed to eliminate nuclear weapons have long been known. First, the United States must renounce its “first strike” nuclear wear fighting doctrines. Next it must refuse to fund the development and deployment of new nuclear weapons. The other essential steps include verified and irreversible dismantling of nuclear weapons and their installations; halting production of weapons-grade fissile material and securely containing existing stockpiles; verification, including societal verification, and intrusive inspection systems; and investing power in a supranational authority, probably the UN Security Council, to isolate, contain, or remove threats to the nuclear-free order.
Like cannibalism and slavery, nuclear weapons can be abolished. The question is whether we humans have the will and courage to choose life.
Like cannibalism and slavery, nuclear weapons can be abolished. The question is whether we humans have the will and courage to choose life.
Table 1: Partial Listing of Incidents of Nuclear Blackmail
(From Empire and the Bomb: How the United States Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World by Joseph Gerson)
1946 Truman threatens Soviets regarding Northern Iran. 1946 Truman sends SAC bombers to intimidate Yugoslavia following the downing of U.S. aircraft over Yugoslavia. 1948 Truman threatens Soviets in response to Berlin blockade. 1950 Truman threatens Chinese when U.S. Marines were surrounded at Chosin Reservoir in Korea. 1951 Truman approves military request to attack Manchuria with nuclear weapons if significant numbers of new Chinese forces join the war. 1953 Eisenhower threatens China to force an end to Korean War on terms acceptable to the United States. 1954 Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Dulles offers French three tactical nuclear weapons to break the siege at Dienbienphu, Vietnam. Supported by Nixon’s public trial balloons. 1954 Eisenhower used nuclear armed SAC bombers to reinforce CIA-backed coup in Guatemala. 1956 Bulganin threatens London and Paris with nuclear attacks, demanding withdrawal following their invasion of Egypt. 1956 Eisenhower counters by threatening the U.S.S.R. while also demanding British and French retreat from Egypt. 1958 Eisenhower orders Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare to use nuclear weapons against Iraq, if necessary to prevent extension of revolution into Kuwait. 1958 Eisenhower orders Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare to use nuclear weapons against China if they invade the island of Quemoy. 1961 Kennedy threatens Soviets during Berlin Crisis. 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. 1967 Johnson threatens Soviets during Middle East War. 1967 Johnson’s public threats against Vietnam are linked to possible use of nuclear weapons to break siege at Khe Shan. 1969 Brezhnev threatens China during border war. 1969 Nixon’s “November Ultimatum” against Vietnam. 1970 Nixon signals U.S. preparations to fight nuclear war during Black September War in Jordan. 1973 Israeli Government threatens use of nuclear weapons during the “October War.” 1973 Kissinger threatens Soviet Union during the last hours of the “October War” in the Middle East. 1973 Nixon pledges to South Vietnamese President Thieu that he will respond with nuclear attacks or the bombing of North Vietnam’s dikes if it violated the provisions of the Paris Peace Accords. 1975 Sec. of Defense Schlesinger threatens North Korea with nuclear retaliation should it attack South Korea in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. 1980 Carter Doctrine announced. 1981 Reagan reaffirms the Carter Doctrine. 1982 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher threatens to eliminate Buenos Aires during the Falklands War. 1990 Pakistan threatens India during confrontation over Kashmir. 1990-91 Bush threatens Iraq during the “Gulf War.” 1993 Clinton threatens North Korea. 1994 Clinton’s confrontation with North Korea. 1996 China threatens “Los Angeles” during confrontation over Taiwan. Clinton responds by sending two nuclear-capable aircraft carrier fleets through the Taiwan Straight. 1996 Clinton threatens Libya with nuclear attack to prevent completion of underground chemical weapons production complex. 1998 Clinton threatens Iraq with nuclear attack. 1999 India and Pakistan threaten and prepare nuclear threats during the Kargil War. 2001 U.S. forces placed on a DEFCON alert in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. 2001 Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refuses to rule out using tactical nuclear weapons against Afghan caves possibly sheltering Osama Bin Laden. 2002 Bush communicates an implied threat to counter any Iraqi use of chemical weapons to defend Iraqi troops with chemical or biological weapons with a U.S. nuclear attack. 2006 French Prime Minister Chirac threatens first strike nuclear attacks against nations that practice terrorism against France. 2006 & 07 “All options are on the table”: U.S. threats to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure made by President Bush and presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton. This article is adapted from Joseph Gerson, Empire and the Bomb (University of Michigan Press, 2007).
Joseph Gerson is the director of programs of the American Friends Service Committee in New England and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. His previous books include The Sun Never Sets and With Hiroshima Eyes.
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Nuclear Dangers and Challenges to a New Nuclear Policy
It is worthwhile asking the question: What are nuclear weapons? In some respects the answer to this question may seem obvious, but this is not necessarily the case. To some, nuclear weapons are a scientific achievement that bestows prestige. This is the view that has been taken by each of the nuclear weapons states, with the exception of Israel. Most recently, this perspective was on display when India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998.
To others, nuclear weapons are a deterrent that protects a weaker state from a more powerful one. This is likely the view of North Korea and perhaps Iran, after having been designated by the US president as part of the “Axis of Evil” and observing the United States attack Iraq, the third designated country in this axis. To still others, such as Israel, nuclear weapons represent a final response to an existential threat. To North Korea, nuclear weapons may represent a response to an existential threat and also a “bargaining chip” for security guarantees and development aid.
To others, nuclear weapons demonstrate a state’s power in the international system. This likely reflects the view of the five original nuclear weapons states, the ones that also hold permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council – the US, UK, Russia, China and France – and quite possibly the rest of the nuclear weapons states as well.
Thus far, I have only given the probable views of states that possess nuclear weapons or may wish to do so. Let me now offer another view of nuclear weapons. They are weapons that kill massively and indiscriminately. As such, they are long-distance instruments of annihilation. Weapons that kill indiscriminately are illegal under international law. In this respect, any threat or use of nuclear weapons that failed to discriminate between civilians and combatants would be illegal. It is hard to imagine any threat or use of these weapons that would or even could discriminate.
The International Court of Justice has found that any threat or use of nuclear weapons would be generally illegal, allowing for the possible but uncertain exception under current international law of a circumstance in which the very existence of a state is at stake. But even then, for such use to be legal it would have to meet the standards of international humanitarian law. In other words, it would have to discriminate between soldiers and civilians, be proportionate, and not cause unnecessary suffering.
Nuclear weapons are also cowardly and anti-democratic. More accurately, the weapons themselves may not be cowardly, but those who would threaten or use these long-distance killing machines are cowardly. Nearly all of the leading military figures of World War II recognized this and commented upon it. Admiral William Leahy, referring to the use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said, “[I]n being the first to use it, we…adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
Nuclear weapons are anti-democratic because they concentrate power in the hands of single individuals or a small cabal. They take away the most basic right of people everywhere – the right to survive. There will never be a democratic vote to use nuclear weapons. These weapons place in the hands of leaders the capacity to destroy cities, countries and civilization, with the high likelihood that any use of nuclear weapons would lead to the destruction of the country that initiated a nuclear attack.
No Defense against Nuclear Attack
It is not possible to defend against a nuclear attack. Deterrence, which has been the main line of prevention, cannot provide physical defense against a nuclear attack. It is simply the threat of retaliation. This threat must be effectively communicated and believed by a potential attacker. It is, of course, not a meaningful threat against a non-state extremist organization, which cannot be located. Deterrence theory is rooted in rationality. It posits leaders acting rationally to assure their survival, even in times of severe crisis. Basing protection against nuclear attack on rationality, unfortunately, is irrational.
This is what the former commander-in-chief of the United States Strategic Command, General George Lee Butler, had to say about deterrence: “Deterrence serves the ends of evil as well as those of noble intent. It holds guilty the innocent as well as the culpable. It is a gamble no mortal should pretend to make. It invokes death on a scale rivaling the power of the Creator.”
Early in 2007, four former high-level US officials – George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn – published an article, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” in the Wall Street Journal. They addressed the issue of deterrence, arguing: “The end of the Cold War made the doctrine of mutual Soviet-American deterrence obsolete. Deterrence continues to be a relevant consideration for many states with regard to threats from other states. But reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.”
If deterrence is becoming more dangerous and less effective, what remains? US leaders have put significant emphasis on missile defenses, but few knowledgeable scientists, other than those working on government contracts, believe that missile defenses would actually work under real-world conditions. There is a widespread understanding that missile defenses, in addition to being unreliable, can be easily overcome by offensive forces and the use of decoys. The US push to deploy missile defenses has frayed relations between the US and Russia and China, and led these countries to improve their offensive nuclear capabilities.
If neither deterrence nor missile defenses provide security against nuclear attack, what is left? Nothing is viable but diplomacy to eliminate nuclear arsenals. There is no reliable defense against nuclear attack. Major countries might consider returning to the “duck and cover” drills of the 1950s, although they might update the drills so that they took place in legislatures rather than in schools. These drills, of course, offer no protection to those who do them, but they might help awaken them to the dilemma and the need to take action to eliminate the threat by eliminating the weapons.
Nuclear Dangers
Since nuclear weapons continue to exist, nuclear dangers have not gone away, despite the ending of the Cold War and the break up of the Soviet Union. What has largely ended is public concern for the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. The end of the Cold War has created a false sense of security, largely attributable to inertia and poor leadership. It is worthwhile reviewing current nuclear dangers.
- The proliferation of nuclear weapons to other state actors. The more states in possession of nuclear weapons, the more likely they are to proliferate further and to be used. The spread of nuclear weapons dramatically increases problems of control, as was demonstrated by the case of Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan.
- The proliferation of nuclear weapons to extremist organizations. This is a danger that cannot be ruled out. Nuclear weapons in the hands of an extremist organization, such as al Qaeda, pose substantial danger to all countries, including the major nuclear weapons states.
- The use of a nuclear weapon by an extremist organization against a state. The actual use of a nuclear weapon by an extremist organization against a state could result in destruction comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with added widespread security and economic implications. Questions would arise about the viability of the world economy, human rights and democratic processes in the face of such attack.
- The use of a nuclear weapon by a nuclear weapons state against another state. Such use would be devastating and could trigger a nuclear war. It would end the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons that has existed since 1945.
- An all-out nuclear war, initiated either intentionally or accidentally. The danger of an all-out nuclear war is always with us. It would be insane, but it could happen. Just as states stumbled into World War I, they could stumble again, by accident or miscalculation, into an all-out nuclear war.
These dangers are obviously not trivial, nor are they dangers with which anyone should feel comfortable. They are dangers that place civilization and even the human species at risk of annihilation.
Current nuclear dangers are fueled by the continued reliance of the nuclear weapons states on their nuclear arsenals for their security. Whereas these states once lived in a world of Mutually Assured Destruction, they now live in a world of Mutually Assured Delusions. Their greatest delusion is that they can continue to rely upon nuclear weapons for their own security and that of their friends, while preventing these weapons from spreading to others or being used again.
There have been repeated warnings over a long period of time that nuclear double standards cannot hold. In 1955, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto warned: “We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?”
In 1996, the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons warned, “The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or by decision – defines credibility. The only complete defense is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.”
This warning was repeated in 2006 by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, chaired by Hans Blix. Their report, entitled Weapons of Terror, Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms, stated: “So long as any state has such weapons – especially nuclear arms – others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain in any state’s arsenal, there is a high risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. Any such use would be catastrophic.”
A New Nuclear Policy
There have been many proposals for a new nuclear policy. The essence of such a policy is rooted in the following:
- The obligation for good faith negotiations to achieve nuclear disarmament in Article VI of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty;
- The 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, which stated, “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”
- The pledge in the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to unanimously at the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference: “An unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon States to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament to which all States parties are committed under Article VI.
US leadership will be necessary in order to move forward in implementing such a policy. Without US leadership there will be little incentive for the other nuclear weapons states to act, and we are likely to remain frozen in the nuclear double standards of the status quo.
While US leadership for a new nuclear policy has not been forthcoming, some hope exists in that the group of former US officials – Shultz, Perry, Kissinger and Nunn – called for it in their January 2007 Wall Street Journal article. They endorsed “the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal….” The four former officials argued, “Reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and practical measures toward achieving that goal would be, and would be perceived as, a bold initiative consistent with America’s moral heritage. The effort could have a profoundly positive impact on the security of future generations.”
Once the political will for the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons exists, it will be possible to take the necessary actions to move from where we are to the goal. There have been many proposals for how to achieve the goal. A group of leading civil society organizations has drafted a plan for a Nuclear Weapons Convention that would lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons in a series of stages. This draft Convention has been introduced to the United Nations by the Republic of Costa Rica. The 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to at the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference sets forth another series of steps. The four former Cold Warriors set forth their own series of steps. What is most important in achieving the elimination of nuclear weapons, once there is sufficient political will, is that the disarmament be phased, transparent, verifiable, irreversible, and subject to strict and effective international control.
Challenges to a New Nuclear Policy
There are many challenges to a new nuclear policy, but the greatest challenges lie in the orientation of the current leadership of the US. In July 2007, the US Secretaries of State, Defense and Energy issued a joint statement, “National Security and Nuclear Weapons: Maintaining Deterrence in the 21st Century.” This statement, contrary to the position taken by the four former US officials, began by extolling “the essential role that nuclear weapons play in maintaining deterrence.” It ended up by calling for replacing every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal with a new type of thermonuclear weapon, the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). They argued that “RRW is key to sustaining our security commitment to allies, and is fully consistent with U.S. obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty – including Article VI.” They also threatened that delays on RRW “raise the prospect of having to return to underground nuclear testing to certify existing weapons.”
The Bush administration is clearly not seeking to achieve a new nuclear policy, but a retrenchment of the status quo, one in which the United States remains the dominant nuclear weapons state. They seem unaware of the risks they are running, particularly the dangers that their nuclear policies create for the US itself.
Further challenges to a new nuclear policy come from those states that want to defy the nuclear status quo of privileged nuclear “haves” maintaining their superiority over nuclear “have-nots.” Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea were not content living in that two-tiered nuclear world, and pursued nuclear programs that led to the development of nuclear arsenals. South Africa had followed this path in earlier years, developed a small nuclear arsenal, and then reconsidered and dismantled its weapons. Without more concerted action to achieve nuclear disarmament, we can anticipate that more states will move toward a nuclear option in the future. Even today, some countries, like Japan, hold open the nuclear option as virtual nuclear weapons states, having both the technology and nuclear materials to develop nuclear arsenals in a very short time.
A general challenge to a new nuclear policy is the belief that a firewall can be drawn between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. No such firewall is possible, and nuclear reactors, for power or research, have fueled the nuclear programs of Israel, India and Pakistan. The designation of peaceful nuclear power as an “inalienable right” in the Non-Proliferation Treaty is a contradiction that must be addressed if nuclear proliferation is to be controlled.
A Way Forward
In the end, the most important consideration may be that suggested by the hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in their statement, “Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist.” This is patently true. The two are now placed in an uneasy juxtaposition. One represents the technology of annihilation. The other represents the sum total of human achievement – past, present and potential future. It should not be a difficult choice, but many of us on the planet seem to be voting against ourselves by our ignorance, apathy and denial. An awakened populace may prove to be a potent force to achieve a nuclear weapons free world.
Our challenge, as leaders in civil society, is to educate and advocate for a new nuclear policy that will move the world away from the nuclear precipice. In doing so, we may find many important partners, including the mayors of cities throughout the world who have joined Mayors for Peace led by Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba of Hiroshima; the network of parliamentarians in the Parliamentary Network for Nuclear Disarmament; and the governments of non-nuclear weapons states, such as those in the New Agenda Coalition, which have worked closely with the Middle Powers Initiative.
What has been accomplished thus far is not nearly enough. The world remains in peril. In Einstein’s words, “we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Our challenge is to reverse that drift, to move back from the nuclear precipice, to prevent the catastrophe Einstein foresaw. To achieve a new and human-centric nuclear policy will require major national efforts within nuclear weapons states, and a major global campaign to bring pressure to bear upon these states from without. Already the southern hemisphere of the planet has organized itself into a series of Nuclear Weapon Free Zones.
Europe could play an important role in the effort to achieve a nuclear weapons free world by demanding that US nuclear weapons be removed from Europe, by refusing to participate in missile defense programs, by stepping out from under the US nuclear umbrella, and by convening a forum for the good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament called for in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Now is the time to begin planning for a saner, more reasonable and law abiding US administration that will replace the current one in early 2009.
Nuclear weapons currently divide humanity, but the recognition of their danger could be a force for uniting humanity for their elimination. This would be a great achievement not only for its expression of common human purpose, but also for the resources it would free for meeting basic human needs for food, health care, housing, education, the alleviation of poverty and the protection of the environment. A new nuclear policy aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons should be the top priority on the global agenda.
David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).
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Reliance on Nuclear Weapons in Naively Unrealistic
For many years the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has advocated the global elimination of nuclear weapons. This advocacy is consistent with the moral position adopted by nearly all major religions as well as with the dictates of international law. It is also consistent with the security interests of all states, including the current nuclear weapons states. Nonetheless, many Americans cling tenaciously to the idea that the US is more secure with nuclear weapons than it would be without them.
In response to an article that I wrote recently on “Global Hiroshima,” a letter to the editor took the position, “The proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons is idealistic, but it is naively unrealistic, unless a creditable concept for protecting the US from other nations’ nuclear weapons is available.” The writer concluded his letter by stating, “Our nuclear weapons are not to use, but to prevent other nations from using theirs.”
This is, unfortunately, a falsely reassuring and illusory viewpoint. Nuclear deterrence – the threat of nuclear retaliation – could fail for many reasons, including accidental launches, miscalculations, poor decisions in time of crisis, or the inability to credibly threaten extremist organizations that cannot be located and therefore retaliated against. A threat to retaliate against an opponent that you cannot locate, such as al Qaeda, is futile.
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has never called for the US to unilaterally disarm its nuclear arsenal. What we do advocate is for the US to take a leadership role in negotiating nuclear disarmament among all nations. This is a role that only the US can assume, due to its enormous military and economic power.
By taking on this role, the US would be acting in accord with a unanimous 1996 ruling of the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, which concluded: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”
Our position at the Foundation is that the US should take this obligation under international law seriously, both because the US has a responsibility to follow the dictates of international law and because doing so will enhance our national security. This is not a prescription for immediate or unilateral nuclear disarmament. It is a prescription for demonstrating the political will to move judiciously but urgently toward a world free of nuclear weapons.
The first step in following this path would be for the US to convene the other nuclear weapons states and set forth a negotiating agenda. An important confidence building measure would be a legal commitment by all nuclear weapons states to No First Use of nuclear weapons. This would demonstrate that nuclear weapons had no other purpose than deterring another country from using theirs. Other confidence building steps would include the de-alerting of existing nuclear weapons and ratification by all nuclear capable states of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
The goal of the negotiations would be the phased elimination of nuclear arsenals under strict and effective international controls. Countries would phase out their nuclear arsenals gradually and in a verifiable manner. Processes would be established to assure that nuclear weapons and materials were not being diverted into secret stores outside the purview of international inspectors.
The plan is simple. It begins with good faith negotiations convened by the US. It ends with a world free of nuclear weapons. In between, there is much to be worked out to assure the security of all states. One thing is certain, however: This is not a “naively unrealistic” plan. It is the only approach that will assure that cities, countries and civilization remain safe from nuclear devastation and that humankind is secure from future Hiroshimas and Nagasakis.
David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is aleader in the global effort for a world free of nuclear weapons.