Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Gorbachev

  • Withdrawing from the INF Treaty: A Massive Mistake

    Withdrawing from the INF Treaty: A Massive Mistake

    This article was originally published by The Hill.

    It would be a mistake of significant proportions for the U.S. to unilaterally withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. It would end an important arms limitation treaty, one that eliminated a whole category of nuclear-armed missiles with a range from 500 km to 5,500 km.

    The treaty eliminated 846 U.S. nuclear missiles and 1,846 Soviet nuclear missiles, for a combined total of 2,692 nuclear missiles. President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the treaty in 1987. It was an agreement that followed their realization, “A nuclear war cannot be won, and must never be fought.”

    Fast forward to President Trump and his national security advisor, John Bolton announcing their intention to jettison the treaty that ended the Cold War; took Europe out of the cross-hairs of nuclear war; and allowed for major reductions in nuclear arms.

    After the signing of the INF Treaty, the two countries moved steadily downward from a high of 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world to less than 15,000 today. While this is still far too many, it was at least movement in the right direction.

    The withdrawal of the U.S. from the INF Treaty will reverse the progress made by the treaty over the past 30 years. It could restart the Cold War between Russia and the U.S.; reinstate a nuclear arms race; further endanger Europe; and make nuclear war more likely.

    Why would Trump do this? He claims that Russia has cheated on the agreement, but that is far from clear, and U.S. withdrawal from the treaty would leave Russia and the U.S. free to develop and deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles without any constraints. Surely, that would be a far worse option for the U.S. and the world. Instead of withdrawal, the U.S. and Russia should resume negotiations to resolve any concerns on either side.

    This is the latest important international agreement that Trump has unwisely sought to disavow. Other agreements that he has pulled out of include the Paris accords on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

    A recent Los Angeles Times editorial concluded: “On too many occasions this administration has acted impulsively on the world stage and scrambled to contain the damage later. Trashing the INF Treaty would be another such blunder. The president should pull back from the precipice.”

    However, since Trump operates in his own egocentric universe, it is doubtful that he even recognizes that his actions are moving the world closer to the nuclear precipice. With his deeply irrational and erratic leadership style, he is demonstrating yet again why nuclear weapons remain an urgent and ultimate danger to us all. He inadvertently continues to make the case for delegitimizing and banning these instruments of mass annihilation.

  • Nuclear Zero: Getting to the Finish Line

    This article was originally published by Truthout.


    David KriegerAlmost five decades ago, I first visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It was 18 years after the atomic bombings flattened the cities, and the cities had returned to a kind of normalcy.  At the memorial museums, though, a very different perspective on nuclear weapons was presented than that taught in American schools.  It was the perspective from below the bombs – that of the victims – not the technological perspective of having created and used the bombs.


    Nuclear weapons are not simply a technological achievement, as the West has tended to portray them.  They kill indiscriminately – children, women and men.  They are not weapons of war; they are tools of mass annihilation.  No matter what we call them, they are not truly weapons, but instruments of unbridled mass destruction.  Their threat or use is illegal under international law.  Surely, their possession, like chemical or biological weapons, should be as well.  They are immoral, as has been concluded by all the world’s great religions.  And they have cost us dearly, in financial and scientific resources and in compromises of the soul.


    Three decades ago, in 1982, we founded the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  Its vision is a just and peaceful world, free of nuclear weapons.  The Foundation’s mission is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders.  So we educate, advocate and empower – that’s what we do.  We speak out.  We are a voice of conscience.  We advocate for sane policies and for leadership to achieve a world without nuclear dangers.  Our goal is to educate and engage millions of people to move the world to nuclear disarmament and peace.


    We challenge bad theory, such as the theory of nuclear deterrence, a theory that justifies reliance on nuclear weapons, but has many faults.  For nuclear deterrence to work successfully, leaders of nuclear-armed states must be rational at all times and under all circumstances, particularly under conditions of stress when they are least likely to be rational.  Also, nuclear deterrence cannot deter those who have no territory to retaliate against or who are suicidal.  Thus, nuclear deterrence has no possibility of success against terrorist organizations.  To see one of many ways that deterrence can fail, I encourage you to watch the 1964 movie, Fail-Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet, based upon the 1962 novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler.


    The Foundation also challenges bad nuclear policies, including those that tolerate a two-tier structure of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots.”  We believe that the ultimate consequence of this two-tier structure will be nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war.  We also advocate for nuclear policies that reduce risks and move us toward a world without nuclear weapons, policies such as security assurances to non-nuclear weapon states of: no first use of nuclear weapons; no launch on warning of nuclear attack; lowering the alert status of nuclear weapons; a comprehensive test ban treaty; and a fissile material cut-off treaty.  These are all elements of the critical goal of nuclear weapons abolition and must be viewed in that context.


    Scientists tell us that even a small nuclear war with an exchange of a hundred Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons, destroying cities and sending smoke into the stratosphere, could result in blocking sunlight and lowering the earth’s temperature, leading to massive crop failures and famine, resulting in some one billion deaths.  This would be the kind of nuclear war that could occur in South Asia between India and Pakistan.  A larger-scale nuclear war, fought with a few hundred thermonuclear weapons, the kind that could occur between the US and Russia, could destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human species and most other forms of complex life on the planet.  We all share a responsibility to assure there are no small- or large-scale nuclear wars, but as long as nuclear weapons exist in any substantial numbers, the possibility of nuclear war also exists.


    In October 1962, the world held its collective breath as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded.  The world was poised on the brink of a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR.  John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev managed to navigate those dangerous currents, but many of their advisors were pushing them toward nuclear war.  Decisions on all sides were made with only partial knowledge, which could have resulted in disaster.  Robert Kennedy’s eye-witness account of the crisis, Thirteen Days, is sobering reading.


    In 1982, the year the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was created, there was considerable concern in the world about nuclear dangers.  There were more than 60,000 nuclear weapons, nearly all in the arsenals of the US and USSR.  More than one million people gathered in Central Park in New York calling for a nuclear freeze.  Of course, they were right to do so.  The nuclear arms race was out of control, and the leaders of the US and USSR were not talking to each other.  An uncontrollable nuclear arms race coupled with a failure to communicate were and are a recipe for disaster.


    By 1986, the nuclear arms race reached its apogee with over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, nearly all in the arsenals of the US and USSR.  But by this time Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power in the USSR and was talking about abolishing nuclear weapons by the year 2000.  Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, who shared Gorbachev’s view about nuclear weapons, came heartbreakingly close to agreeing to abolish their nuclear arsenals at a summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986.  Their attempt to find their way to zero nuclear weapons foundered on the issue of the Strategic Defense Initiative, now commonly referred to as missile defense.  Reagan wanted it; Gorbachev didn’t.


    So, in 1986 there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world.  Since then, we have made progress in substantially reducing nuclear arsenals to the current number of under 20,000 worldwide, having shed some 50,000 nuclear weapons.  Of the 8,500 nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, about 3,500 are awaiting dismantlement and fewer than 2,000 are deployed, about the same number deployed in Russia.  The US and Russia have agreed that they will each reduce their deployed strategic weapons to 1,550 by the year 2017.  Neither country has conducted an atmospheric or underground nuclear weapon test since 1992 (other than underground subcritical nuclear tests in which the nuclear material does not reach the criticality necessary for a nuclear chain reaction). 


    We have made progress.  We are now on relatively positive terms with Russia, since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Through solid US negotiating, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus agreed to give up the nuclear arsenals that the former Soviet Union had left on their territories and to give these weapons over to Russia for dismantlement. 


    A significant event occurred in 1996 when US Secretary of Defense William Perry met with the Russian and Ukrainian Defense Ministers at a former missile base in Ukraine to plant sunflowers.  Secretary Perry said on the occasion, “Sunflowers in the soil instead of missiles will ensure peace for future generations.”  We adopted the sunflower as a symbol of a nuclear weapons-free world.  The sunflower symbolizes everything that a nuclear-armed missile is not, being natural, nutritious, healthy, beautiful, grounded in the earth and powered by the sun.


    We have come a long way, but we haven’t reached the finish line, which is a world without nuclear weapons.  The issue we face now is to educate decision makers and the public that the dangers of nuclear weapons have not gone away.  There are still many flash points of nuclear danger in the world: India-Pakistan, North Korea, the continued possession of nuclear weapons by the UK and France, the possession of nuclear weapons by Israel and the incentive for nuclear proliferation this creates in the Middle East, and the relationship of the nuclear energy fuel cycle to nuclear proliferation.


    The greatest problem related to nuclear weapons is not that Iran might develop such weapons.  It is that the countries with nuclear weapons are not taking seriously enough their obligations to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity and achieve nuclear disarmament.  Nuclear weapons do not make their possessors more secure.  When a country has nuclear weapons or seeks to acquire them, that country will also be a target of nuclear weapons.  This goes for both the US and Iran, and for all other countries with nuclear weapons or seeking to develop them.  Nuclear weapons turn cities and countries into targets for mass annihilation.


    What shall we do to advance to zero?  In the spirit of Gorbachev and Reagan, the US and Russia must lead the way. They still possess over 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world.  It was recently revealed that President Obama has requested a study of reductions of deployed strategic nuclear weapons to three levels: 1000 to 1,100 weapons; 700 to 800 weapons; and 300 to 400 weapons.  This is significant.  It is worth advocating for US leadership to reduce the US nuclear arsenal to the lower level, to 300 nuclear weapons, as a next step.  But, of course, this would not be the desired end result.  First, it is not low enough; it is not zero.  It still would be more than enough to destroy civilization and potentially cause the extinction of complex life on the planet.  Second, it is unilateral; it must be bilateral and moving toward multilateral.


    At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we have never called for unilateral nuclear disarmament.  Going down to 300 deployed strategic nuclear weapons would be a significant reduction, but it should be a joint endeavor with Russia. To get Russia to join us in this next step will require the US to move its missile defense installations away from the Russian border, so that Russia does not feel threatened by these defenses, particularly at lower levels of offensive weapons.  US officials tell Russia not to worry about these missile defense installations, but the Russians are wary.  It is easy to understand this, if one imagines the Russians placing missile defense installations on the Canadian border and telling the US not to worry.  Missile defenses, if they are needed, must be a joint project, just as reductions in the numbers of offensive nuclear weapons must be a joint project.


    The US and Russia must cooperate on continuing to pare down their nuclear arsenals for their own security and for global security.  At the level of 300 deployed strategic nuclear weapons each, they would then be in a position of rough parity with the other nuclear weapon states and in a position to effectively negotiate a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.  The number that matters most in the nuclear disarmament arena is zero. It is the most secure and stable number of nuclear weapons.  It must be achieved carefully and in phases, but it must be achieved for the benefit of our children, grandchildren and all future generations.

  • A Farewell to Nuclear Arms

    Mikhail GorbachevTwenty-five years ago this month, I sat across from Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland to negotiate a deal that would have reduced, and could have ultimately eliminated by 2000, the fearsome arsenals of nuclear weapons held by the United States and the Soviet Union.


    For all our differences, Reagan and I shared the strong conviction that civilized countries should not make such barbaric weapons the linchpin of their security. Even though we failed to achieve our highest aspirations in Reykjavik, the summit was nonetheless, in the words of my former counterpart, “a major turning point in the quest for a safer and secure world.”


    The next few years may well determine if our shared dream of ridding the world of nuclear weapons will ever be realized.


    Critics present nuclear disarmament as unrealistic at best, and a risky utopian dream at worst. They point to the Cold War’s “long peace” as proof that nuclear deterrence is the only means of staving off a major war.


    As someone who has commanded these weapons, I strongly disagree. Nuclear deterrence has always been a hard and brittle guarantor of peace. By failing to propose a compelling plan for nuclear disarmament, the US, Russia, and the remaining nuclear powers are promoting through inaction a future in which nuclear weapons will inevitably be used. That catastrophe must be forestalled.


    As I, along with George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, Sam Nunn, and others, pointed out five years ago, nuclear deterrence becomes less reliable and more risky as the number of nuclear-armed states increases. Barring preemptive war (which has proven counterproductive) or effective sanctions (which have thus far proven insufficient), only sincere steps toward nuclear disarmament can furnish the mutual security needed to forge tough compromises on arms control and nonproliferation matters.


    The trust and understanding built at Reykjavik paved the way for two historic treaties. The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty destroyed the feared quick-strike missiles then threatening Europe’s peace. And, in 1991, the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) cut the bloated US and Soviet nuclear arsenals by 80% over a decade.


    But prospects for progress on arms control and nonproliferation are darkening in the absence of a credible push for nuclear disarmament. I learned during those two long days in Reykjavik that disarmament talks could be as constructive as they are arduous. By linking an array of interrelated matters, Reagan and I built the trust and understanding needed to moderate a nuclear-arms race of which we had lost control.


    In retrospect, the Cold War’s end heralded the coming of a messier arrangement of global power and persuasion. The nuclear powers should adhere to the requirements of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty and resume “good faith” negotiations for disarmament. This would augment the diplomatic and moral capital available to diplomats as they strive to restrain nuclear proliferation in a world where more countries than ever have the wherewithal to construct a nuclear bomb.


    Only a serious program of universal nuclear disarmament can provide the reassurance and the credibility needed to build a global consensus that nuclear deterrence is a dead doctrine. We can no longer afford, politically or financially, the discriminatory nature of the current system of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots.”


    Reykjavik proved that boldness is rewarded. Conditions were far from favorable for a disarmament deal in 1986. Before I became Soviet leader in 1985, relations between the Cold War superpowers had hit rock bottom. Reagan and I were nonetheless able to create a reservoir of constructive spirit through constant outreach and face-to-face interaction.


    What seem to be lacking today are leaders with the boldness and vision to build the trust needed to reintroduce nuclear disarmament as the centerpiece of a peaceful global order. Economic constraints and the Chernobyl disaster helped spur us to action. Why has the Great Recession and the disastrous meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan not elicited a similar response today?


    A first step would be for the US finally to ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). President Barack Obama has endorsed this treaty as a vital instrument to discourage proliferation and avert nuclear war. It’s time for Obama to make good on commitments he made in Prague in 2009, take up Reagan’s mantle as Great Communicator, and persuade the US Senate to formalize America’s adherence to the CTBT.


    This would compel the remaining holdouts – China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan – to reconsider the CTBT as well. That would bring us closer to a global ban on nuclear tests in any environment – the atmosphere, undersea, in outer space, or underground.


    A second necessary step is for the US and Russia to follow up on the New START agreement and begin deeper weapons cuts, especially tactical and reserve weapons, which serve no purpose, waste funds, and threaten security. This step must be related to limits on missile defense, one of the key issues that undermined the Reykjavik summit.


    A fissile material cut-off treaty (FMCT), long stalled in multilateral talks in Geneva, and a successful second Nuclear Security Summit next year in Seoul, will help secure dangerous nuclear materials. This will also require that the 2002 Global Partnership, dedicated to securing and eliminating all weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, chemical, and biological – is renewed and expanded when it convenes next year in the US.


    Our world remains too militarized. In today’s economic climate, nuclear weapons have become loathsome money pits. If, as seems likely, economic troubles continue, the US, Russia, and other nuclear powers should seize the moment to launch multilateral arms reductions through new or existing channels such as the UN Conference on Disarmament. These deliberations would yield greater security for less money.


    But the buildup of conventional military forces – driven in large part by the enormous military might deployed globally by the US – must be addressed as well. As we engage in furthering our Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) agreement, we should seriously consider reducing the burden of military budgets and forces globally.


    US President John F. Kennedy once warned that “every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment.” For more than 50 years, humanity has warily eyed that lethal pendulum while statesmen debated how to mend its fraying cords. The example of Reykjavik should remind us that palliative measures are not enough. Our efforts 25 years ago can be vindicated only when the Bomb ends up beside the slave trader’s manacles and the Great War’s mustard gas in the museum of bygone savagery.

  • Looking Back at Reykjavik

    This article was originally published by The Hill.


    David KriegerTwenty-five years ago, on October 11-12, 1986, Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavík, Iceland and came close to agreeing to eliminate their nuclear arsenals within 10 years.  The main sticking point was the US “Star Wars” missile defense technology.  Reagan wouldn’t give up its development and future deployment, and Gorbachev wouldn’t accept that. 


    The two men had the vision and the passion to achieve a world without nuclear weapons, but a difference of views about the role of missile defenses that kept them from concluding an agreement.  For Reagan, these defenses were seen as protective and helpful.  For Gorbachev, these defenses upset the strategic balance between the two countries by making the possibility of US offensive attacks more likely.  


    The summit at Reykjavik was a stunning moment in Cold War history.  It was a moment when two men, leaders of their respective nuclear-armed countries, almost agreed to rid the world of its gravest danger.  Both were ready to take a major leap from arms control negotiations to a commitment to nuclear disarmament.  Rather than seeking only to manage the nuclear arms race, they were ready to end it.  Their readiness to eliminate these weapons of annihilation caught their aides and the world by surprise.  Unfortunately, their passion for the goal of abolition could not be converted to taking the action that was necessary.


    When the two leaders met in Reykjavik, there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, nearly all in the arsenals of the US and Soviet Union.  Today there is no Soviet Union, but there remain over 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world, with over 95 percent in the arsenals of the US and Russia.   In 1986, there were six nuclear weapon states: the US, Russia, UK, France, China and Israel.  Today, three more countries have been added to this list: India, Pakistan and North Korea. 


    In 1986, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was in force and had been since 1972.  An important element of the Soviet position was that this treaty should remain in force, preventing a defensive arms race that would feed an offensive arms race, and maintaining treaty provisions that would prevent an arms race in outer space.  In 2002, George W. Bush unilaterally abrogated the ABM Treaty, and this has remained a strong element of contention between the US and Russia. 


    At the time of the summit in Reykjavik, there was a strong anti-nuclear movement in the US, the Nuclear Freeze Movement, but its goals were modest: a freeze in the size of nuclear arsenals.  Today, many people have lost interest in nuclear disarmament and it has largely slipped off the public agenda.  Public concern faded rapidly after the end of the Cold War in 1991, although serious nuclear dangers still plagued humanity then and continue to do so.  These include nuclear proliferation, nuclear accidents, nuclear terrorism, and new nuclear arms races (for example, between India and Pakistan).  As long as the weapons exist, the possibility will exist that they will be used by accident, miscalculation or design, all with tragic consequences for the target cities and for humanity.


    There were other differences in the positions of the two sides at Reykjavik that would have needed to be worked out, even had they gotten through the stumbling block of missile defenses.  While both side’s proposals called for a 50 percent reduction in strategic nuclear forces in the first five years, the proposals differed on the next five years.  The Soviet proposal called for the elimination of all remaining strategic offensive arms of the two countries by the end of the next five years.  The US proposal called for the elimination of all offensive ballistic missiles in the next five years, thus not including the elimination of strategic nuclear weapons carried on bomber aircraft.  This was not an insignificant detail.


    What is important to focus on is that these two leaders came close to achieving a goal that has eluded humanity since the violent onset of the Nuclear Age.  They demonstrated that with vision and goodwill great acts of peace are within our collective reach.  These two leaders didn’t reach quite far enough, but they paved the way for others to follow.  In the last 25 years, there has been some progress toward eliminating nuclear weapons, but not nearly enough.


    The people of the world cannot wait another 25 years for leaders like Reagan and Gorbachev to come along again.  They must raise their voices clearly and collectively for a world free of nuclear threat.  It is long past time to stop wasting our resources on these immensely destructive and outdated weapons that could be used again only at terrible cost to our common humanity.


    Five important steps, supported by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, that would move the world closer to the goal are: first, make binding pledges of No First Use of nuclear weapons to reduce concerns about surprise attacks; second, lower the alert levels of all existing nuclear weapons to prevent accidental launches; third, negotiate a Middle East Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone; fourth, bring the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty into force with the required ratifications of the treaty; and fifth, begin negotiations on a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.

  • Ronald Reagan’s Great Dream

    David KriegerOn February 6, 2011, Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old.  It is worthwhile to recall that this conservative president’s great dream was the abolition of nuclear weapons.  According to his wife, Nancy, “Ronnie had many hopes for the future, and none were more important to America and to mankind than the effort to create a world free of nuclear weapons.”


    President Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist.  He believed that the only reason to have nuclear weapons was to prevent the then Soviet Union from using theirs.  Understanding this, he asserted in his 1984 State of the Union Address, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”  He continued, “The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used.  But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?”


    Ronald Reagan regarded nuclear weapons, according to Nancy, as “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.”


    In 1986, President Reagan and Secretary General Gorbachev met for a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland.  In a remarkable quirk of history, the two men shared a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.  Despite the concerns of their aides, they came close to achieving agreement on this most important of issues.  The sticking point was that President Reagan saw his Strategic Defense Initiative (missile defense) as being essential to the plan, and Gorbachev couldn’t accept this (even though Reagan promised to share the US missile defense system with the then Soviet Union).  Gorbachev wanted missile defense development to be restricted to the laboratory for ten years.  Reagan couldn’t accept this.


    The two leaders came heartbreakingly close to ending the era of nuclear weapons, but in the end they couldn’t achieve their mutual goal.  As a result, nuclear weapons have proliferated and remain a danger to all humanity.  Today, we face the threat of terrorists gaining possession of nuclear weapons, and wreaking massive destruction on the cities of powerful nations.  There can be no doubt that had Reagan and Gorbachev succeeded, the US and the world would be far more secure, and these men would be remembered above all else for this achievement.


    In his book, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Paul Lettow quotes Reagan as saying, “I know that there are a great many people who are pointing to the unimaginable horror of nuclear war….  [T]o those who protest against nuclear war, I can only say, ‘I’m with you.’”  Lettow also quotes Reagan as stating, “[M]y dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.”


    In the 18th and 19th centuries, individuals struggled for the abolition of slavery because they understood that every man, woman and child has the right to live in freedom.  Through the efforts and persistence of committed individuals like William Wilberforce in Great Britain and Frederick Douglass in the United States, institutionalized slavery was brought to an end, and humanity is better for it.  In today’s world, we confront an issue of even more transcending importance, because nuclear weapons place civilization and the human species itself in danger of annihilation.


    Ronald Reagan was a leader who recognized this, and worked during his presidency for the abolition of these terrible weapons.  He believed, according to Nancy, that “as long as such weapons were around, sooner or later they would be used,” with catastrophic results.  He understood that nuclear weapons themselves are the enemy.


    Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan died before seeing his goal of abolishing nuclear weapons realized.  It is up to those of us still living to complete this job.  It is not a partisan issue, but rather a human issue, one that affects our common future.

  • Gorbachev and the US People-Uncelebrated Victories in the Struggle for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons

    Originally Published in Science for Democratic Action, Volume 13, Number 1, March 2005

    Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is justly famous for inaugurating demokratizatsiya and glasnost in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. His steadfast support for non-violence gave the people of Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union a chance for open discourse about government, trust, democracy, and freedom. President Gorbachev, in partnership with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, gave hope to people everywhere that the world may get rid of nuclear weapons.

    But this essay is about what Mikhail Gorbachev is less known for. His actions also created conditions for a special demokratizatsiya and glasnost on nuclear weapons related questions in the United States. In turn, this caused a closure of most of the large U.S. nuclear weapons facilities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In addition to raising the hopes of people in his own country, Gorbachev’s work also lifted a fear from the hearts and minds of the people of the United States, and enabled them to look at their own nuclear weapons establishment with fresh eyes.

    Gorbachev’s reach

    It started with the trip that Gorbachev made to Britain in December 1984, before he became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.He was immediately recognized as a prospective leader of the Soviet Union. With his wife, Raisa, Mr. Gorbachev charmed Prime Minister Thatcher, known in British politics as the “Iron Lady.” She said that he was a man with whom she “could do business.”

    After Gorbachev became General Secretary, he talked about reducing nuclear dangers and eliminating the threat of nuclear war. He abandoned the language of confrontation and replaced it with cooperation. If Margaret Thatcher could do business with him, President Reagan could too.

    Gorbachev’s U.K. trip opened the door for the people of the United States to do business with their own government in a manner that no one anticipated. Instead of keeping their eyes fixed on the Soviet Union out of fear, more and more people began to look more closely at the nuclear contamination in their neighborhoods. Some courageous ones had done that before, as indeed, they had in the Soviet Union. But the nuclear weapons establishment had generally been able to silence them, get lawsuits thrown out of court, and cover its own actions in rhetoric of national security and propaganda about the Soviet threat.

    Starting at about the time of Gorbachev’s visit to Britain and for the rest of the 1980s, the numbers of people in the United States with questions about water and air pollution, radioactive waste, and nuclear safety risks due to aging nuclear weapons plants grew rapidly. In times past, public concerns would have quickly died out. But this time, local and national media, law enforcement officials, elected legislators, congressional committees, and even the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) paid more attention to environmental matters relating to nuclear weapons production than they ever had.

    Certainly, it was unthinkable during the Cold War that the FBI might become involved in raiding a nuclear weapons plant to look for evidence of environmental crimes.2 It may have been denounced as a communist plot within the U.S. government. For example, in 1954, when the Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, became heavily contaminated with fallout for the U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini, the then-Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission falsely said that it was a Red spy boat inside the prohibited test area.3

    But this time, because of Gorbachev’s refusal to use violence to suppress the hopes of the people in Eastern Europe, the zerozero Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty for intermediate-range nuclear missiles, and the warm relationship between Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan, the result was dramatically different. By the time the Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov said in 1987, upon the signing of the INF treaty, “I do think the winter of mistrust is over,” much more than the fear of the Soviet Union had lifted. The people were routinely discovering that their own government had—under cover of secrecy, with the aid of bad science, and in the frigid public fright of the Cold War—done them and their children a great deal of harm.

    An Ohio story

    Consider a nuclear weapons factory in southwestern Ohio, about 17 miles west of Cincinnati. It produced half a million tons of uranium metal mainly for use in U.S. plutonium reactors at Hanford and South Carolina. In December 1984 Lisa Crawford, who lives near the plant, heard that some wells in the area were contaminated with uranium. Until then, she and most others like her did not even know they were living near a nuclear weapons plant. It was called the Feed Materials Production Center and had a water tower painted in a red and white checkerboard pattern that resembled the logo of Purina, the famous pet food company. With cows grazing near it, many people thought it was a pet food plant. Others thought it produced paint because it was run by a subsidiary of National Lead Industries, which was a wellknown paint-maker at the time. But few knew it was a nuclear weapons plant. It is commonly known as the Fernald plant.

    In January 1985 there was uproar in this quiet part of Ohio, known for its conservative, anti-communist views. People wanted to know whose wells were contaminated. Tom Luken, the area’s representative in the U.S. Congress at the time, held a meeting there. Hundreds came. Lisa found out that her well was one of polluted ones. She had a young son. She made food with water from the well, and filled her backyard pool with it. She was very upset.

    As usual, the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment said the water was quite safe and there was no need to worry. But, unlike the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, when most people trusted such assurances, Lisa and her neighbors did not. She was afraid her child might get cancer. (Thankfully, he is well). She did three things. First, she and her husband decided they were not going to have more children, a difficult and tragic way to make such a decision. Second, she got bottled water. Third, at the end of January 1985 she filed a tort lawsuit against the corporation that ran the Fernald plant for the government on behalf of her family and 14,000 other people who lived in the area. They claimed that the company, National Lead of Ohio, had been negligent and endangered their health and damaged their property. The U.S. government defended the lawsuit and paid all the expenses.

    There had been previous lawsuits regarding nuclear weapons issues. In fact, General Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project during World War II, was afraid of them as early as April 1945.4 For example, in the 1950s, shepherds had filed a lawsuit against the government claiming that thousands of sheep had died because of fallout. But representatives of the Atomic Energy Commission falsely told the court that it was not fallout. The case was dismissed. The judge found out in 1980 and wrote that the government had been “deceptive” and “deceitful” in its presentation of the evidence in the case.5 He reversed his decision and made one in favor of the shepherd. But the U.S. government appealed and prevailed.

    Lisa’s lawsuit succeeded where others had failed. Between 1985 and 1989 there was an enormous amount of local and national publicity about the Fernald plant. Lisa became a well-known figure in Ohio and other parts of the country. As part of the lawsuit, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research was retained to do an expert assessment of radioactivity releases from the plant. In 1989, Bernd Franke and I published the first independent assessment of radioactivity releases from a nuclear weapons plant. We concluded that the nuclear weapons establishment had done poor science, entered fraudulent data into official records, been negligent in operating the plant, and violated its own rules regarding radiation safety. We also concluded that the official estimates of uranium releases from the plant were much higher than what the government and its contractors had told the public. We estimated that releases of uranium had probably been more than 300,000 kilograms since the 1950s, compared to the government’s estimates in 1987 of 135,000 kilograms, revised in 1989 to 179,000 kilograms.6

    In April 2004 I asked Lisa whether Gorbachev’s becoming General Secretary and then President of the Soviet Union played a role in her thinking. She said it was not a direct influence. But she said it affected how she viewed the U.S. government’s criticism of the Soviet government. She specifically mentioned the Chernobyl accident. She said that she thought then that “the United States is horrified that the Soviets did not tell us for three days but they [the U.S. government] did not tell us [about Fernald] for thirty years.” It no longer worked for the U.S. government to point a finger at problems over there in the Soviet Union. It did not divert Lisa’s attention from the problem she was focused on—finding out about the pollution in her own neighborhood.7

    The government settled the lawsuit in June 1989 for $78 million. The money is mainly being used for providing medical monitoring to people. But there was another happy result. In July 1989, production at the Fernald plant was stopped forever. The combination of the Cold War winding down and the lawsuit and the scandals around radioactive pollution of air and water worked together to accomplish important progress in disarmament. The Fernald plant has been dismantled and the factory buildings have been torn down.

    Tank explosion risks

    June 1989 was an historic month in other ways as well. In that month the Soviet government admitted that a high-level waste tank had exploded in 1957 at Chelyabinsk-65 by filing a report about the accident with the International Atomic Energy Agency. I believe this was in response to a question about the accident that Dr. Bernard Lown had raised in a meeting in April 1989 with then-Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Schevernadze. That, too, had big implications for people working the United States. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had known about the accident since 1959. But, unlike so many other things, it took no propaganda advantage of it. Instead, it kept the matter secret, until its papers were revealed as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request by the nongovernmental organization Public Citizen in 1977. (A dissident Soviet scientist, Zhores Medvedev, had written about the accident in the West in 1976.)8

    I suspect that the Atomic Energy Commission did not want to admit that there was also a risk of tank explosion in the United States due to hydrogen build up because the official U.S. position continued to be that things were safe even after the CIA documents became public. But when the Soviet Union officially admitted in 1989 that there had been an explosion, one result was deeper NGO and Congressional investigations into the problems in the United States. The Department of Energy established its own panel on the high-level waste tanks at the Hanford site and steps were taken to reduce explosions risks. Concern about these risks helped ensure permanent closure of the last operating plutonium separation plant at Hanford in the early 1990s.

    FBI raid on Rocky Flats

    Perhaps the most dramatic event of June 1989 in this regard was the FBI raid on the Rocky Flats plant near Denver, a large scale factory for producing plutonium pits for nuclear weapons. Such a raid would have been unthinkable during the Cold War. But by 1989, there was daily publicity about safety issues in the nuclear weapons complex. There had been a Congressional investigation of human radiation experiments done by the U.S. government.More Congressional hearings were focused on health and safety. Before the mid-1980s, such hearings were mainly routine exercises to give more money for nuclear weapons establishment. The scandals multiplied.

    In this atmosphere, federal officials in the Department of Justice based in Colorado heard that illegal burning of plutonium-containing waste may be taking place at Rocky Flats. FBI headquarters in Washington took notice and ordered the raid. The Department of Justice convened a grand jury to investigate whether the corporation that ran the plant had committed environmental crimes. Production at the Rocky Flats plant was stopped.Deputy Energy Secretary W. Henson Moore went to Denver and admitted that the plant had been operated as if the nuclear establishment was above the law.

    In the late 1950s, the Rocky Flats Plant was producing about 10 plutonium pits every day. When production was stopped in 1989, the U.S. government fully intended to re-open it after fixing the safety and environmental problems. But Rocky Flats never re-opened. It will never again produce nuclear weapons. It has been dismantled, though the plutonium will remain for generations in the form of residual contamination.

    By 1989, the public feeling had grown strong that since the United States was arriving at agreements to reduce nuclear weapons, why should the people’s health be put at risk to operate unsafe nuclear weapons plants? The historic events that were occurring in Eastern Europe that are so well celebrated in history books found an echo in Colorado and elsewhere. The global importance of these local events is becoming clearer today than it was then.

    Uncelebrated victories

    The list of local events and concerns about health and environment that added up to an immense accomplishment for the elimination of nuclear weapons is long. All U.S. plutonium and tritium production reactors were closed in the same period. The large plutonium separation plant at Hanford in Washington State was shut. The plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb was made at Hanford. Many smaller facilities were also closed. When the United States stepped down so many large nuclear weapons plants in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it fully intended to resume production. Sometimes plants were shut from one day to the next, with material still in the production lines.

    The Soviet moratorium on nuclear testing that President Gorbachev initiated reverberated in the United States. The nuclear weapons establishment argued against making the moratorium into a U.S. law, but failed. (They did get the so-called stockpile stewardship program for nuclear weapons and a great deal of money for it as a consolation prize, however.) The moratorium was enacted into law and played a role in the achievement of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

    Of course, there have been severe reverses since the mid-1990s on many fronts including nuclear weapons. The U.S. Senate rejected ratification of the CTBT. The U.S. nuclear weapons establishment has created a new nuclear weapons doctrine that actually names target states, including Russia. It wants to build usable nuclear weapons called “robust nuclear earth penetrators” and mini-nukes.9 Money for design of nuclear weapons as well as maintaining a huge U.S. arsenal is flowing at levels higher than the average of the Cold War.

    But amidst this gloom there are accomplishments from the 1980s and 1990s that endure. Specifically, the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment does not have the capacity to mass manufacture nuclear bombs because Rocky Flats was the only large-scale plutonium pit manufacturing facility in the United States. Its production buildings have been torn down. The Department of Energy has proposed building a new large-scale factory for manufacturing plutonium pits, but it will take a decade or more to build. That gives peace and environmental advocates some time to organize a struggle to prevent it from being built.

    Unlike during the Cold War, it is now much more difficult for the nuclear weapons establishment to get the money for such a factory. Many Congresspersons recognize it is a dangerous proliferation provocation. Local concerns are also crucial. While some want the money and jobs that a new factory would bring, many more are opposed than would have been imaginable during the Cold War, even though we are in a period that resembles it in many ways. But this time the government cannot pretend that such a plant will pose no risks. It is required to publish risk estimates, which indicate that, over the life of the plant with a capacity of 450 plutonium pits per year, nine workers would die from their work.10 The nuclear weapons establishment has asked people not to worry because it is only a statistical estimate. But the public is skeptical. The idea that a little plutonium won’t hurt you finds few takers.

    The gains on nuclear testing are also likely to endure. The nuclear weapons establishment would like to resume testing. But this would be very difficult. During the late 1980s and the 1990s, a huge scandal emerged regarding the poisoning of much of the U.S. milk supply with iodine-131. At first, in the 1980s, it was about iodine- 131 emissions from the plutonium separations plants at Hanford. But the issue grew from there. In 1997, the National Cancer Institute released a study showing that iodine-131 releases from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing at Nevada had been 130 million curies, more than 15 times greater than the releases from the Chernobyl accident. The high fallout areas were spread out all over the country from Idaho and Montana to Kansas and Iowa to New York and Vermont. In the course of pursuing the Cold War, the nuclear weapons establishment poisoned much of the U.S. milk supply and did nothing to protect it. At the same time, declassified documents revealed that the government had provided secret data to Kodak and other photographic film companies so that they could take measures to protect film from becoming fogged as a result of fallout.

    Today, as the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment prepares to test again, the National Academy of Sciences is looking into whether people should be compensated due to the milk contamination and if so how many. A conservative senator, Bob Bennett, Republican from Utah, is playing a role in slowing down the rush for testing.According to his website he has proposed legislation that“will prevent the resumption of nuclear testing without approval by the Congress, extensive environmental and safety analysis, and open public involvement.”11 If this law is passed, it will be difficult or impossible for the United States to resume testing unless some other country does it first.

    Enduring accomplishments

    In October 1989, President Gorbachev told the world,“the Soviet Union has no moral or political right to interfere in the affairs of its East European neighbors. They have the right to decide their own fate.” This opened up the arena for the people of the United States to decide the fate of U.S. nuclear weapons plants. The tradition of vigorous citizen participation in the United States re-awakened with Gorbachev’s determination not to repeat the ghastly violence of the past. The combination has produced a result in reducing the nuclear weapons menace that has not been celebrated, but whose fruits we continue to enjoy.

    The world is undeniably going through a difficult time; war and violence are a constant theme. But the accomplishments of mothers and fathers concerned about their children and water and milk that resulted in a shut down of production at so many nuclear weapons plants and a moratorium on nuclear testing endure. They provide us with breathing room to secure the gains of those times for posterity and to continue to push for the complete elimination of all nuclear arsenals and weapons plants.

    1. Some of the research for this article was done as part of a book grant to Arjun Makhijani made by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The working title is Science of Death, Science of Life: An Enquiry into the Contrasts between Weapons Science and Health and Environmental Science in the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex.
    2. See Wes McKinley and Caron Balkany, Esq., The Ambushed Grand Jury: How the Justice Department Covered Up Government Nuclear Crimes and How We Caught Them Red Handed. New York: Apex Press, 2004.
    3. Leo Strauss, as cited in Barton C. Hacker, Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing 1947–74. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1994. pp. 150 –151.
    4. Barton C. Hacker, The Dragon’s Tail: Radiation Safety in the Manhattan Project 1942–1946. Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1987, p. 85.
    5. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Radioactive Heaven and Earth: The health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons testing in, on, and above the earth. New York: Apex Press, 1991, Chapter 4.
    6. For more information on Fernald releases, see Science for Democratic Action vol. 5 no. 3 (October 1996). For information about flawed nuclear worker dose records, see Science for Democratic Action vol. 6 no. 2 (November 1997).
    7. Arjun Makhijani, Science of Death, Science of Life manuscript, Lisa Crawford interview.
    8. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Plutonium: Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age. Cambridge, MA: IPPNW Press, 1992.
    9. See “The ‘Usable’ Nuke Strikes Back,” in Science for Democratic Action vol. 11, no. 4 (September 2003).
    10. See “Back to the Bad Old Days,” in Science for Democratic Action vol. 11, no. 4 (September 2003).
    11. Press release of U.S. Senator Bob Bennett, “Bennett Bill Halts Nuclear Testing Without Congressional Approval, Public Input,” September 7, 2004, online at http://bennett.senate.gov/press/record. cfm?id=225115.