Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: humanitarian law

  • The Moral Challenge of a Nuclear-Free World

    This article was originally published by the Wall Street Journal.

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

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

    Our second conclusion is that the agreement is extremely fragile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Pentagon Brass Suppresses Truth About Toxic Weapons

    Poisonous Uranium Munitions Threaten World

    The use of weapons containing uranium violates existing laws and customs of war and “constitutes a war crime or crime against humanity,” according to a leading U.S. expert on humanitarian law.

    Karen Parker, a San Francisco-based expert in armed conflict law, told American Free Press that the use of radioactive uranium weapons violates the Hague and Geneva Conventions as well as the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980.

    Although no treaty specifically bans DU weapons, they are illegal “de facto and de jure,” Parker said. However, a class action lawsuit by victims of DU weapons will probably be required for a court to ban their use, she said.

    ‘ILLEGAL FOR ALL COUNTRIES’

    “A weapon made illegal only because there is a specific treaty banning it is only illegal for countries that ratify such a treaty,” Parker wrote in a paper, “The Illegality of DU Weaponry,” presented at the International Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany last October. However, “a weapon that is illegal by operation of existing law is illegal for all countries.”

    Parker, a delegate to the UN Commission on Human Rights since 1982, provides legal advice to the UN on DU weapons and other matters of humanitarian law.

    “DU weaponry cannot possibly be legal in light of existing law,” Parker said.

    “In evaluating whether a particular weapon is legal or illegal when there is not a specific treaty, the whole of humanitarian law must be consulted,” Parker wrote.

    According to humanitarian law, the illegality of DU weapons is based on four criteria:

    The first is the “territorial” test. Weapons may only be used in the legal field of battle. Weapons may not have an adverse effect off the legal field of battle.

    The second is the “temporal” test, meaning that weapons may only be used for the duration of an armed conflict. A weapon that continues to act after the war violates this criterion.

    The territorial and temporal criteria are meant to prevent weapons from being “indiscriminate” in their effect.

    The third rule is that a weapon cannot be unduly inhumane. The Hague Convention of 1907 prohibits “poison or poisoned weapons.” Because DU weapons are radioactive and chemically toxic, as the military knows, they fit the definition of poisonous weapons banned under the Hague Convention.

    WHAT THE MILITARY KNOWS

    The Defense Department is well aware of the toxic effects of DU. In an official presentation by U.S. Army Reserve Col. J. Edgar Wakayama at Fort Belvoir, Va. on Aug. 20, 2002, the dangers of exposure to DU were clearly spelled out:

    “Inhalation exposure has a major effect on the lungs and thoracic lymph nodes,” Wakayama read from a slide. “The alpha particle taken inside the body in large doses is hazardous, producing cell damage and cancer. Lung cancer is well documented,” he noted.

    “Urine samples containing uranium are mutagenic [capable of producing mutation]” and “the cultured human stem bone cell line with DU also transformed the cells to become carcinogenic,” Wakayama read.

    DU deposited in the bone causes DNA damage because of the effects of the alpha particles, Wakayama stressed. One gram of DU emits 12,000 high-energy alpha particles per second.

    The fourth rule for weapons, the “environmental” test, says that weapons cannot have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment.

    Wakayama advised, “Heavily contaminated soil should be removed if the area is to be populated with civilians.”

    Wakayama described the dangers to children playing in contaminated soil and the leaching of DU into local water and food supplies.

    DU FAILS ALL LEGAL CRITERIA

    DU weaponry fails all four tests, Parker says. Because it cannot be contained to the battlefield, it fails the territorial test. Airborne DU particles are carried far from the battlefield affecting distant civilian populations and neighboring countries.

    Because the uranium dispersed on the ground and in the air cannot be “turned off” when the war is over, DU fails the temporal test.

    “The airborne particles have a half-life of billions of years and have the potential to keep killing . . . long after the war is over,” Parker wrote.

    “The status of DU as nuclear, radiological, poison or conventional does not change its illegality. When the weapons test is applied to DU weaponry, it fails,” she concluded.

    DU weapons fail the humaneness test because of how they kill, Parker says, “by cancer, kidney disease etc, long after the hostilities are over.

    “DU is inhumane because it can cause birth defects such as cranial facial anomalies, missing limbs, grossly deformed and non-viable infants and the like, thus affecting children . . . born after the war is over,” Parker said.

    “The teratogenic [interfering with normal embryonic development] nature of DU weapons and the possible burdening of the gene pool of future generations raise the possibility that the use of DU weaponry is genocide,” she wrote. “Willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health” of civilians constitutes a grave breach of the fourth Geneva Convention, and this is “exactly what DU weapons do.”

    Finally, because DU weapons cannot be used without unduly damaging the natural environment, they fail the fourth rule for weapons, the environmental test.

    “No available technology can significantly change the chemical and radiological toxicity of DU,” the Army Environmental Policy Institute reported to Congress in 1994. “These are intrinsic properties of uranium.”

    “Regarding environmental damages, users of these weapons are obligated to carry out an effective cleanup,” Parker wrote. “The cost of legal claims and environmental cleanup for the gulf wars alone could be staggering.”

    “Use of DU weaponry necessarily violates the ‘grave breach’ provision of the Geneva Conventions, and hence its use constitutes a war crime or crime against humanity,” Parker concluded.

    Questions regarding the legality of DU weapons were sent in writing to the Pentagon’s appointed spokesman on DU matters, James Turner.

    Turner told AFP that he was “not qualified” to answer such questions.

    By press time the Pentagon had not responded to repeated requests for information.

  • Nuclear Weapons Exact a Terrible Price

    In today’s world, nuclear weapons no longer create security, they threaten it. In 1996, the World Court declared the use of nuclear weapons illegal under international humanitarian law, because these weapons of mass destruction cannot distinguish between combatants and innocent civilians and create unnecessary suffering. Maintaining the current U.S. nuclear arsenal of more than 10,000 warheads is extremely expensive. This year alone, it will cost the U.S. taxpayer $6.5 billion, or $18 million per day.

    If we know that nuclear weapons pose an acute danger to our security; that their use is illegal because of their inhumane and indiscriminate power; and that maintaining them is consuming enormous resources, which could otherwise be used to improve our ailing public schools and universities or strengthen our exhausted conventional military forces, how can we tacitly accept our government’s and the National Weapons Labs’ push for the development of new generations of nuclear weapons and increased nuclear weapons spending of up to $30 billion over the next four years?

    Under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of 1970, the United States remains committed to the gradual reduction and eventual elimination of its nuclear arsenal. Article VI of the treaty stipulates that “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” Accordingly, the United States is obliged to disengage from activities that risk fueling a new nuclear arms race, and to continuously reduce its nuclear arsenal. This has been confirmed at the last Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2000, when the United States signed on to “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 [to the NPT] are committed under Article VI.”

    The nuclear weapons activities at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories are in direct violation of these international commitments.

    The ongoing research into new generations of nuclear weapons — so-called bunker busters and mini-nukes — and the related expansion of laboratory capabilities represent vertical proliferation prohibited under the treaty. In addition to providing the other eight nuclear-weapon states, including North Korea, with a powerful incentive to put the reduction of their arsenals on hold and develop similar new nuclear weapons, these activities give the 180 non-nuclear-weapon states an equally powerful incentive to break their non-proliferation commitment under the treaty and start working toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Recently discovered nuclear weapons programs in Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and possibly Iran underscore this logic.

    One cannot go around with a cigarette in one’s mouth, asking the rest of the world not to smoke. Yet this is precisely what the United States is doing. Only the total elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide in compliance with legal commitments under the treaty and under the strict control of the International Atomic Energy Agency can stop nuclear proliferation. New nuclear weapons research and design programs, combined with the expansion of nuclear weapons labs, undermine the international non-proliferation regime, stimulate the spread of nuclear weapons, and enhance the risk of these horrific weapons actually being used.

    The impending expiration of its lab oversight contracts with the Department of Energy offers UC [University of California] a unique opportunity to disengage from aiding and abetting in the violation of international law and the potential commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws of war. Conversely, successful bids for the continued management of Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Labs could mean that UC and its weapons scientists may one day be sued under emerging international criminal law.

    *Urs Cipolat is a lecturer on Law, Ethics and Science at UC Berkeley. He serves as program director at the Global Security Institute in San Francisco.