Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: international law

  • The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence Today: International Law as Anchoring Ground

    Ladies and gentlemen:

    I am very happy to be speaking with you this evening. I want to express my gratitude to Zeit-Fragen for publishing the German language edition of my book The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence (Clarity Press: 2002) which comes out now on the anniversary of the end of the Second World War.  At this time 65 years ago, Japan surrendered to the United States after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the incineration of 250,000 completely innocent human beings.

    My father was a Marine who invaded Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa, and was preparing to invade Mainland Japan. I was brought up to believe that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had saved my father’s life and thus made mine possible, although my father never raised me to be anti-Japanese or anti-German.  But when I came to study international relations, I realized: This simply was not true.  Indeed it was total propaganda by the United States government to justify nuclear terrorism and the mass-extermination of a quarter of a million human beings. Even Justice Pal in his dissent to the Tokyo Judgment said that the Japanese war criminals had nothing to their discredit as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which you can only compare to Nazi Acts.

    Today the world is at a precipice of another world war. The United States government has committed acts of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and has authorized, armed, equipped, and supplied Israel to commit acts of aggression, crimes against humanity, and outright genocide against Lebanon and Palestine. Today the United States government is threatening to attack Iran under the completely bogus pretext that they might have a nuclear weapon, which the International Atomic Energy has said is simply not true. If they attack Iran with the Israelis, a British think-tank has predicted they could exterminate 2.8 million Iranians! They are fully prepared — the Americans and the Israelis — to use tactical nuclear weapons.

    Indeed today tactical nuclear weapons have been fully integrated into U.S. armed forces and tactical training and programs. I have read the manual myself.  Nukes are now treated — starting with the Bush Junior administration — as if they were just another weapon.

    We must remember when President Putin was in Iran and he said he did not believe the Iranians had a nuclear weapon, President Bush Jr. publicly got up and threatened World War III. Remember that threat! He threatened World War III! I cannot recall in my lifetime a threat of this nature. You would have to go back to Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo to find high level government officials threatening a world war.

    What did this threat mean? It was saying to Russia: “You had better stand back if we attack Iran.” It wasn`t a threat to Iran; that would not produce a world war attacking Iran, but just a slaughter.  But saying to Russia: “You had better stand back, we are prepared to risk World War III if you don’t let us get our way with Iran.” An attack on Iran would set this entire region of the world on fire, from Egypt over to India, from Uzbekistan down to Diego Garcia. And as my friend and my colleague, Hans von Sponeck pointed out yesterday with his map: We see the counter-alliance to NATO: Russia, China and the so-called Central Asia Collective Security Organization. If you read about the origins World War I or World War II an attack on Iran could clearly set off World War III – remember Bush threatened it. And it could easily become nuclear. I kid you not on the dangers we are facing us all as human beings today.

    We stand on a nuclear precipice, and any attempt to dispel this ideology of nuclearism and its myth propounding the legality and morality of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence must come to grips with the fact that the nuclear age was conceived in the original sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These weapons have always been criminal!  Remember they were developed to deal with the Nazis, out of fear that the Nazis would get them first. And yet for some reason they used them on the Japanese to make a point, to terrorize the rest of the world.

    The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg Charter of August 8th 1945 — right after the United States bombed Hiroshima, and the day before they bombed Nagasaki — that condemned the wanton destruction of cities, towns, and villages; and applied it to the Nazi leaders, but of course never applied it to themselves. In my book The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence there is an entire chapter on the criminality of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I list all the legal violations there, up to and including the United States Department of War Field Manual 27-10 (1940).  So these bombings, and also the firebombing of Tokyo, exterminating 100,000 civilians, were war crimes. Even as recognized officially by the United States government itself.

    The start of any progress towards resolving our nuclear predicament as human beings must come from the realization that nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence have never been legitimate instruments of state policy, but have always constituted instrumentalities of internationally lawless and criminal behaviour. And those states that wield nuclear weapons, their government officials are criminals in accordance with the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles, and the Tokyo Charter and Judgment that the Allies applied to the Nazi war criminals and the Japanese war criminals after World War II.  So I’m not talking here about applying any principle of law that the United States government and the other victors of World War II applied to their enemies to hold them accountable.

    The use of nuclear weapons in combat is contemplated now by the United States and Israel against Iran. How many times have we heard U.S. government officials involved in the Bush Junior administration and now the Obama administration say: “All options are on the table.”  They mean it: not just the use the force but the use of nuclear weapons as well. These are prohibited by conventional and customary international law, including the Genocide Convention of 1948, designed to prevent a repetition of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, the Poles, the Russians, the Ukrainians. The use of nuclear weapons would also violate Resolutions of the U.N. General Assembly that repeatedly condemned their use as an international crime.  We must understand that when dealing with nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence: They are not simply immoral, they are not simply illegal, but they are criminal across the board!

    The Swiss Foreign Ministry a commissioned a study of nuclear deterrence by three American authors, I read it, and I agree with what they said. They pointed out that the critical factor is the delegitimisation of nuclear weapons in the minds of the people. Having litigated nuclear weapons protest cases in the United States, Canada, Britain, and elsewhere since 1982, for me the critical factor in winning these cases is to explain to the common, ordinary people on juries that nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence are criminal. Not simply illegal, not simply immoral, but criminal!

    Yet the government officials in all the nuclear weapon states, not just the United States — they are the worst of them — but also Russia, France, Britain, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea: They are the criminals! For threatening to exterminate all humanity! For threatening Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. That’s what nuclear deterrence really is: threatening mass extermination.  And in the Advisory Opinion by the International Court of Justice on nuclear weapons, the World Court ruled that the threat stands or falls on the same legal grounds as the actual use.  If mass extermination of human beings is a crime, the threat to commit mass extermination is also a crime.

    It is as if the leaders of the nuclear weapon states have all taken out a gun, cocked the trigger, and held it at the heads of all humanity! In any system of criminal justice today that activity is criminal! In the United States it would be attempted murder, and you would be prosecuted for it.  Yet today U.S. government officials threaten murder to millions of people around the world. And now especially in Iran.

    According to the Nuremberg Judgment soldiers would be obliged to disobey criminal orders to launch and wage a nuclear war. And yet, how many soldiers have been educated to understand these principles? A few have educated themselves, acted on it, and have been prosecuted by the United States government.  I have helped to defend them, with a good deal of success, but not complete success. You can read about this in my latest book Protesting Power: War Resistance and Law (Rowman & Littlefield: 2008). How we defended military resisters in our all-volunteer Armed Forces who refused to fight in illegal, criminal wars waged by the United States government, going back to Gulf War I by Bush Senior, Haiti by Clinton, Gulf War II by Bush Junior.

    All government officials and military officers who might launch or wage a nuclear war would be personally responsible for the commission of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. And such individuals whether statesmen or high level military personnel would not be entitled to any defenses of superior orders, act of state, tu quoque, self-defense, presidential authority, etc. All those defenses were made by lawyers for the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg and they were rejected. And yet today in the United States of America starting with the Bush Junior administration and now continuing with Obama you will hear international lawyers working for the government, and many in the private sector, making Nazi arguments to justify what the United States government is doing around the world. That’s how desperate the situation is!

    The whole Bush Doctrine of preventive warfare, which is yet to be officially repealed by Obama now after 18 months, was made by the Nazi lawyers for the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, and it was rejected. And the argument by Nuremberg was: There is no such thing as preventive self-defense or things of this nature. What is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law. And the test is clearly: the necessity of self-defense must be instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, no moment for deliberation. Certainly not Afghanistan or Iraq or Lebanon or Palestine or Iran or Somalia or Yemen or Pakistan. And yet all victims of this Nazi doctrine of preventive self-defense that is now justified by all these prostituted international lawyers on the payroll of the United States government, leaving government service, now they infiltrate into American academia where they likewise try to justify these doctrines and policies that were condemned as criminal at Nuremberg.

    Article 2, paragraph 4 of the United Nations Charter prohibits both the threat and the use of force except in cases of legitimate self-defense. And there is a standard for self-defense. Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, and as supplemented by Nuremberg, that clearly rejects the wars against Afghanistan as aggression – explained in my book in greater detail — against Iraq, against Pakistan, which by the way has nuclear arms.  The Obama administration has now escalated to a war against Pakistan, trying to set off civil war and destabilize Pakistan, just as they did in Yugoslavia, just as they did in Iraq, just as they did in Afghanistan. As we lawyers say: “The modus operandi is the same.”

    The Empire does not change from one administration to the next! In America the government is run by elites who are either liberal imperialists, conservative imperialists, or reactionary imperialists, like the Neocons. But they are all imperialists! And they believe in the god-given right to the American Empire. That’s the way America started. Remember, how did the United States of America start? White European settlers coming over to North America, exterminating millions of indigenous people, and robbing their land, and building an Empire. The process just continues today as we speak.

    The threat to use nuclear weapons, what we call “nuclear deterrence” — I would call “nuclear terrorism” — constitutes ongoing international criminal activity: planning, preparation, solicitation, and conspiracy to commit Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.  These are what we lawyers call inchoate crimes, not the substantive offences themselves, but crimes leading up to the commission of the substantive offences. They were made criminal at Nuremberg in order to establish a bright line and that we would punish even walking up to that bright line as criminal.

    In the case of nuclear weapons once a nuclear war starts I doubt very seriously we are going to be having another war crimes tribunal for anyone.  So what that means then is that it is up to us citizens of the world to stop and prevent a nuclear war, and to stop and prevent the threat, conspiracy, solicitation of the use of nuclear weapons. “Everything is on the table” — clearly a threat to use nuclear weapons, clearly a criminal threat under the World Court Advisory Opinion, against Iran.

    As I explain in more detail in my book, the design, research, testing, production, manufacture, fabrication, transportation, deployment, installation, storing, stockpile, sale, and purchase and the threat to use nuclear weapons are criminal under well-recognized principles of international law.  And I know the German government has finally asked the United States, NATO, to take its nukes out of Germany. And Mrs. Clinton has said: “We don’t support it.” Well is the German government going to cave in? Or will it use law and international law and the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles to get American criminal nukes out of Germany? I guess we will find out this Fall.

    Those government decision-makers in all nuclear weapon states with command responsibility for nuclear weapons are responsible today for personal criminal activity under the Nuremberg Principles for this practice of nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism, that they inflict on all states and peoples in the world today.  And in particular counter-ethnic targeting for the United States, destroying Russians just because they are Russian.

    Also counter city-targeting!  When I worked on the case of the U.K. nuclear weapons in Scotland we established that the entire purpose of the U.K. nuclear weapons force, under the control and allocated to NATO, was to destroy the city of Moscow, seven million human beings! It had no other purpose. Needless to say, once we did that we got all of our defendants off for four counts each of malicious destruction of property when they destroyed a tender servicing the U.K. Trident II nuclear weapons submarines with these weapons of mass extermination. They might have destroyed the tender, but they did not act maliciously.  They acted for the perfectly lawful reason to stop the nuclear extermination of seven million human beings.

    So, I argue in my book, the simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons and deterrence can be used to pierce through the ideology of nuclearism, to which so many citizens in the nuclear weapon states and around the world have succumbed — by means of propaganda techniques, propagated by the governments, going back to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the U.S. government tried to present this as positive to the American people and in particular that it was necessary to end a war to avoid an invasion of Japan, which of course was not going to happen, because the Japanese were already defeated and were trying desperately to negotiate a surrender.

    It is with this simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons that people can easily comprehend the illegitimacy and fundamental lawlessness of these policies that their governments pursue in their names — or allied governments as well. And to those living in the NATO states today: Their leaders are all accomplices, they go along with nuclear policies as well. They send their generals over to NATO headquarters to be integrated into NATO’s strategy.

    I remember after the Berlin Wall fell, the German Branch of International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms had a big conference in Berlin and I gave the keynote address along these lines. And they asked the German General of the Bundeswehr in charge of liaison with NATO on nuclear weapons to respond to me. And he got up and he said: “Well, we all know that Nuremberg is soft law.”

    I had two reactions to that. One: “Mister General, we hanged your predecessors at Nuremberg, under the Nuremberg laws. How can you say it is soft law?”  Not that I support the death penalty even for major war criminals like Bush Junior and Tony Blair.

    But the second reaction I had to this notion of soft law like Joe Nye’s “soft power”: “Soft law’”, I said, “you know, he got that from us.” So we Americans have convinced German generals that Nuremberg is soft law in order to pursue our nuclear policies with the cooperation of the next generation of German generals whose predecessors we hanged at Nuremberg.

    After the public speech I discussed this matter with him, and he agreed with me but he said: “Look, we have no alternative but to do what the Americans tell us to do.” And I quoted to him a passage from the Bible saying: “Yes, and the blind shall lead the blind.”  And the German General said:  “We have to trust that the Americans are doing the right thing.”  Right over the nuclear precipice! The German people have to stand up here and say: “Enough! We want your nukes out of Germany for sure and we are no longer going to cooperate with you on nuclear weapons policies.”

    Humankind must abolish nuclear weapons before nuclear weapons abolish humankind!  Nevertheless there are a small number of governments in the world that continue to maintain their nuclear weapons systems despite the rules of international criminal law to the contrary. I would respond in a very simple way: Since when has a small gang of criminals — the leaders of the nuclear weapons states — been able to determine what is illegal or legal for the rest of the world by means of their own criminal behaviour? What right do nuclear weapons states have to argue that by means of their own criminal behaviour — nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism — they have made criminal acts legitimate? No civilized state would permit a small gang of criminal conspirators to pervert its domestic legal order in this way. Indeed both the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Tribunal made it clear that a conspiratorial band of criminal states has no right to opt-out of the international legal order by means of invoking their own criminal behaviour as the least common denominator of international deportment. It’s a basic rule of international law: Right cannot arise out of injustice! Ex iniuria ius non oritur!

    The entire human race has been victimized by an international conspiracy of ongoing criminal activity carried out by the nuclear weapons states and their leaders under this doctrine of nuclear deterrence which is really a euphemism for nuclear terrorism. And the expansion of NATO has now drawn in almost all of Europe. They have broken down – the United States and NATO – even the traditionally neutral states. Sweden today acts as if it were a de facto but not yet de jure member of NATO. Finland has basically abandoned its neutrality. Austria, with a constitutional obligation to be neutral, has basically abandoned its neutrality. Even Ireland, little bitty Ireland – I have dual nationality with Ireland.  The Americans have forced and compelled Ireland to join up to the Partnership for Peace (PFP) which is one step away from NATO membership, and have forced Ireland then under PFP to put some troops in Afghanistan to help them wage an illegal and criminal war of aggression against Afghanistan.

    The only state in Europe still holding out is Switzerland. Yes, it signed up for Partnership for Peace which it should never have done. But at least Switzerland is holding out, it has no troops in Afghanistan or Iraq. And Switzerland must continue to hold out. And that is exactly why it is been subjected to so much pressure! Including an attack on its banking and financial system to bring Switzerland into line with NATO and the United States, exactly as every other country in Europe has done and succumbed.  That is really what’s at stake here. Are you, the Swiss, going to join up – either de facto or de jure – with NATO and the Americans, so that if and when they attack Iran and perhaps set off a new world war, you and your children will get sucked into it? Switzerland avoided the last two world wars. I certainly hope Switzerland will avoid the next one by having nothing to do with the United States and NATO. And somehow working your way out of Partnership for Peace.

    This international criminal conspiracy of nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism, is no different from any other conspiracy by a criminal gang or band. They are the outlaws. We are the sheriffs — the citizens of the world. So it is up to us to repress and dissolve this international criminal conspiracy by whatever non-violent means are at our disposal and as soon as possible.  As I said: If we all don’t act now, Obama and his people could very well set off a Third World War over Iran, that has already been threatened publicly by Bush Junior.

    Every person around the world has a basic human right to be free from the criminal practice of nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism, and its specter of nuclear extinction. All human beings in our capacities as creatures of God possess the basic right under international law to engage in civil resistance for the purpose of preventing, impeding or terminating the ongoing commission of these international crimes.

    And this is not civil disobedience.  It’s civil resistance! We have disobeyed nothing! We are obeying the dictates of international law! It is the government officials in the nuclear weapons states and their allied states that are disobeying international law. They are the criminals! We are the sheriffs! And it is up to us to stop them!

    Every citizen of the world community has 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 waste-land. And it very well could happen in our life-time.

    The time for preventive action is now! And civil resistance by all of us human beings is the way to go.

    Thank you.

  • Disarmament Work and Justice in a Divided World

    This article was originally published on disarmamentactivist.org

    We are now several years in to a deep global economic and political crisis that shows no sign of abating. Those in command of the world’s political systems seem capable of doing little beyond protecting the immediate interests of privileged elements in their societies. At the same time, the familiar forms of oppositional activity seem spent, unable to pose a coherent and convincing alternative to the current order of things. Movements for peace and for a society that is more fair economically and sustainable ecologically can be found everywhere, but often are fragmented by specialization or particularized grievances and mired in habitual forms of thought and action. It is essential that all of us in these movements try to develop a broader understanding of this time and its challenges, starting from our particular work and location in the world and sketching the connections, however tentatively, to the larger whole. This will be one such sketch, with its starting point in disarmament work in the heartland of the U.S. aerospace-military-industrial complex in California.

    Disarmament “progress” in the United States: rhetoric vs. reality

    Last month in New York, the states that are parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty met to review the status of the treaty and the performance of its parties, a review that occurs every five years. After opening the conference with general endorsements of the concept of nuclear disarmament, the United States (together with other nuclear weapons states) spent the remainder of the month doing its best to weaken or eliminate language in drafts of the Review Conference final document that would impose any substantive disarmament obligations on the nuclear weapons states, such as time limits or definite commitments to negotiate a convention for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile in Washington D.C., the Obama administration proposals for increases in nuclear weapons spending were moving through Congress, the only significant opposition coming from those who claim that the budget increases are too small.We now have a flurry of elite rhetorical enthusiasm for disarmament, and much celebration of a U.S.-Russia treaty that will have little effect on the thousands of nuclear weapons they currently deploy, and even those requirements aren’t mandatory until 2017. But a few hundred nuclear weapons can destroy any country on earth, and a thousand are more could have effects that destroy much of the world’s civilization, killing a significant portion of its inhabitants.

    And in this year’s budget request, the Obama administration, if anything, seems determined to outflank its Congressional critics from the right, proposing a 10% increase in nuclear warhead research and production funding and further increases for future years. And that’s just the Department of Energy budget. The Defense Department budget also has sizable increases for nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In evaluating the level of commitment to disarmament of this administration, it might be wise to remember the observation repeated by several economists of the last century, that “the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.”

    In early June I spoke at a protest at the gates of Vandenberg Air Force Base, a vast installation sprawling for miles along the southern California coast. Unlike the rest of the U.S. economy, Vandenberg is thriving, playing key roles in both the present and the future of this country’s war cycle, fighting endless wars in the present while striving endlessly for dominance in all imaginable wars to come. Vandenberg represents a kind of microcosm both of the gigantic U.S. military machine and of the upper echelons of U.S. society, tending ever more towards a perpetual exercise in maintaining power over others through violence while hiding behind layers of gates, guards, and guns.

    The United States is continuing a broad effort aimed at developing new generations of strategic weapons and refining the techniques for using them, spending far more on high-tech weapons than any other country. This effort today includes upgrading existing intercontinental ballistic missiles and planning for work on next generation long-range missiles. For decades, Vandenberg Air Force Base has tested new generations of long range missiles, and continues to flight test those now operational.

    Vandenberg is both a test range and one of the first two deployment sites for mid-course ballistic missile defense interceptors. And just a few weeks ago, the Air Force launched a Hypersonic Technology Vehicle from Vandenberg aimed at a target area at Kwajelein Atoll in the Pacific. That test was part of a program to develop a new generation of maneuverable gliding delivery vehicles that will be able to hit targets anywhere on earth within an hour or two. If deployed, these systems are intended to carry highly accurate non-nuclear payloads, permitting destruction by missile at global ranges with non-nuclear weapons for the first time. And one of the sites being considered for deployment is Vandenberg Air Force Base, supposedly to avoid confusion with the launch of nuclear-armed missiles from their bases in the Midwest.

    Vandenberg is where the present and future of U.S. war making comes together. Many of the military satellites used for surveillance, to target weapons and to provide communications for current U.S. wars are launched here. The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg does day to day planning of missions for the positioning and use of military satellites in those ongoing wars.

    According to a Vandenberg Air Force Base fact sheet:

        “The Joint Space Operations Center… is a synergistic command and control weapon system focused on planning and executing USSTRATCOM’s Joint Functional Component Command for Space… mission. The purpose of the JSpOC is to provide a focal point for the operational employment of worldwide joint space forces, and enables the Commander, [Joint Functional Component Command for Space] to integrate space power into global military operations.”

    It is this globe-girdling network of command centers and satellites that allows young Americans sitting at an air force base in Nevada, looking at a screen and manipulating buttons and joy sticks, to use pilotless drone aircraft to kill people on the other side of the world with no more risk, and little more existential engagement, than if they were playing a video game.

    The Obama military budget also includes a ramp up of funding over the next five years for the “prompt global strike” weapons recently tested at Vandenberg. It should be noted that there are nothing but paper policy restrictions preventing the United States from using these new delivery systems technologies for nuclear weapons. Even in its conventional version, global strike underscores the aggressive global stance of the US military and its determination to maintain global military dominance, further complicating arms control efforts. It is also noteworthy that the launch vehicle used for the test was made from parts of MX missiles, nuclear-armed ICBMs decommissioned as a result of a prior round of arms agreements, another illustration of the ambiguities of current approaches to arms control.

    Beyond single issue politics: understanding the connections

    After decades in disarmament work, I have come to believe that disarmament initiatives unaccompanied by strong social movements for democracy, global economic equity, and a more ecologically sustainable way of life are highly unlikely to create the political conditions in which significant progress towards disarmament can occur. For those of us who work on disarmament, our goal must be to better understand what part disarmament work can play in these broader movements for fundamental social change.

    We need a way of looking at the world as it now is. Our approach must acknowledge the obstacles as well as the opportunities involved in transforming the global economy and our societies if they are to become ecologically sustainable, democratic, and peaceful.

    A significant part of this approach is a better understanding of the political nature of technology choices. We live in a world dominated by immense organizations that deploy particular combinations of advanced technology, bureaucratic technique, and ideology. These organizations are instrumentally rationalized both within and without. They are largely authoritarian in internal structure, and deal with the world around them instrumentally–as an environment to be controlled to the maximum extent possible in order to achieve their goals.

    The main goal of these organizations is to extract a privileged wealth stream for their upper echelon inhabitants from the rest of an increasingly globalized economy. They also form alliances, many of them long–running, to do so. The “military industrial complex” was only the first of these to be recognized.

    The legal character of these organizations varies from place to place, with the public/private boundary and the powers of large private organizations defined differently in different countries. But similar kinds of organizations–by which I mean organizations deploying similar sets of technology, bureaucratic technique, and ideology–in significant ways behave alike whether defined as “public” or “private.”

    Technologies are not chosen solely because they “work” better in some abstract sense, or even because they are somehow “cheaper” in some fundamental sense related to the organization of the physical world, for example in terms of their thermodynamic efficiency. They are chosen because they work well in combination with other aspects of modern large organization techniques to gain and sustain wealth and power for those in the upper echelons of the immense organizations that dominate every aspect of global economic and political life today.

    The upper level inhabitants of these organizations constitute roughly a fifth of the world’s population, and the divide between them and the rest is growing, as that top fifth and its predatory organizations insatiably seize, consume, and degrade the land, resources, and ecosystems that all depend on.

    This split, I believe, is the defining political fact of our time. It limits society’s potential for adaptation to resource and ecological limits and drives the growing chaos and conflict that the dominant constellations of large organizations meet only with more militarized high–tech “security.” And providing this security at every level from executive protection to high performance strike aircraft to ever more accurate long range missiles has become one of the most dependable strategies for organizational growth and profit everywhere.

    It is all of this we must understand and confront. Nuclear weapons are only a leading instance, their vivid irrationality both exemplar and metaphor for the whole.

    Beyond balance sheet economics and politics: neither we nor the world are for sale

    In August of 1967 Martin Luther King said,

        “A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will thingify them–make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.”[1]

    King understood that slavery was an expression of the social system that was and is the Western-style modernity. And he was telling us that one of its fundamental characteristics–the treating of human beings as objects, as things to be bought, sold, and profited from–was deeply rooted, and is with us still. Equally important is the same system’s reduction of the natural world to an array of things to be manipulated and controlled, seen as nothing more than a source of resource inputs and profit.

    Ultimately, it is these two fundamental characteristics of the economic and political system that has come to dominate the planet that we must overcome.

    These goals may seem huge and abstract, and also utterly impractical where the immense institutions of power and profit-seeking instrumentalism dominate every aspect of the political, economic, and cultural landscape. Yet we must do what we can to seek real change, even when what we can do seems awfully small.But at the same time, we are told over and over by political and NGO professionals that we must seek only incremental change, only what is “practical” and “achievable.”

    So what are our guideposts? How can we tell if the incremental steps offered us by our professional and political classes even are moving in the right direction?

    In that same address, King also said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

    I believe that this was, and is, less a description than a prescription. Only we can be the vehicle of that justice, only we can bend that arc.

    The measure of the incremental steps we are offered by our political classes today must be how much they move us in the direction of a more just world.

    Unfortunately we’re not seeing much movement towards fairness and justice, on disarmament or climate change or anything else. Instead we see the further entrenchment of a political and economic order that treats both people and nature like things, as profit centers to be exploited. We are seeing what should be opportunities for reform used to mask the further consolidation of power by the most powerful institutions.

    Here in the United States, an opportunity for health care reform turned into a mandate that will force Americans to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to a health insurance industry whose financial interests are served by providing as little health care as possible. The clear need for an energy system transformed to prevent catastrophic climate change and to replace diminishing fossil fuels has instead been turned into a veritable Christmas tree for existing energy interests, from coal to oil to nuclear power, with a small fig leaf of subsidies for renewable energy alternatives thrown in.

    As oil spews into the Gulf of Mexico from a well drilled by an industry that has successfully socialized much of its risks through liability limits for the damage it causes, the administration pushes forward with an energy plan that will encourage more offshore drilling, and that will subsidize a nuclear energy industry that also enjoys limits on its liability that are a tiny fraction of the damage that a serious accident would cause. But of course we are told that serious nuclear accidents, like massive deep sea oil blowouts, are far too unlikely to worry about.

    And the much touted new START treaty, advertised as the first step on the path towards disarmament, will have a still–unknown cost, equal to whatever the powerful advocates of the nuclear weapons complex can extort. The Obama administration already has made a down payment that will postpone meaningful movement towards disarmament for a decade or more, promising to spend at least $180 billion over the next ten years to sustain and modernize US nuclear forces and the vast array of laboratories and factories that build and maintain them.

    In early March, I joined thousands of people in California and around the United States, protesting rising tuitions at public universities and colleges and cuts in services at all levels of public education. Professors and students, school teachers, parents, and bus drivers organized  rallies and marches large and small all across the state.The day was full of a sense that people are ready for greater change, and to take more action to get it.

    Speaker after speaker called for ending California’s undemocratic supermajority requirements for budget and tax legislation, and for progressive taxation of corporations and the wealthy to reverse the steady flow of wealth upward that has been a defining feature of US economic and political life for the last three decades. There were signs everywhere with messages like “Fund Schools, Not War!”

    Whether or not it will develop into one, the wave of actions rippling out from the public university protests have some of the makings of a social movement. There was a sense of urgency, grounded in an understanding of how the issues affected each of us–and all of us–directly. People from different segments of society–not only students but relatively privileged university professors and the people who maintain the classrooms and laboratories they depend on, public school teachers and parents who both are burdened by a regressive tax system and need public institutions to educate their children–were starting to have a conversation directly with each other, and coming to realize that the growing crisis in institutions they all depend on in different ways has deeper causes, and may require significant social change if there are to be solutions that work for all.

    Nuclear disarmament work today stands in sharp contrast to energetic new movements brimming with potential–and also stands largely apart from them. Most people don’t think about nuclear weapons from one end of the year to another, and don’t perceive nuclear weapons as constituting a concrete threat to themselves or the people and places they love. Most of the grassroots disarmament organizations are gone. For most arms control and disarmament professionals, the notion of building a social movement, and beyond that a movement that addresses not only the causes of war and entrenched militarism, but that builds a common understanding of the causes of the injustices that afflict most of humanity, has largely receded into the past. Yet if nuclear disarmament work is to avoid irrelevance, much less make genuine progress in these turbulent times, the first priority must be helping to build movements looking for new ways towards justice, and by doing so saving our world.

    Beyond expert rationales for the current order of things: restoring our divided consciousness

    In 1930, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Robert Millikan wrote that “One may sleep in peace with the consciousness that the Creator has put some foolproof elements into his handiwork, and that man is powerless to do it any titanic damage.”

    This statement, by one who was a leading “expert” in his time, has been proven false not only by nuclear weapons, but by the devastating ecological effects of endless accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and today by the growing ability of human beings to manipulate the most basic building blocks of the natural world itself.These threats to our future are manifestations of a global society in which most resources and most of the earth itself is controlled by a tiny minority, with the choices which affect us all dressed up as inevitable and necessary by experts who work in their service.

    A common theme in all of these issues is that decisions are made at a great remove, both socially and geographically, from the places where the human and ecological impacts are felt. One of the great paradoxes of our time is that in a society that depends on the systematic analysis of cause and effect in order to control both nature and human beings, one of the main strategies for maintaining wealth and power is avoiding responsibility, whether moral or financial, for the effects of one’s actions. From the limits on liability for the BP blowout to the socialization of wealthy bankers and investors’ risk by the bank bailout to the endless PR spin employed to absolve every act of malfeasance by the powerful to the soldier fighting a push–button war, killing people he will never truly see, we have created a world that has systematically separated cause and effect. By doing so we have largely destroyed our collective moral consciousness.

    It is this same eliding of consequences that allows us, through our most powerful institutions, to prepare every day for our own annihilation, an end that becomes more likely the longer we allow it to go on.

    This separation of cause and effect also intensifies a phenomenon which is central to the modern order of things: the way people who work in large organizations split their consciousness, focusing only on the task at hand and on the use of their technical or professional skills, leaving at the door all other pieces of their humanity, the fact that they are mothers or fathers or sons or daughters or creatures with living bodies in a living world.

    This state of affairs constitutes both a challenge and an opportunity for nonviolent thought and political action. We need to find creative ways to bring this splitting to light, and make it difficult to sustain. By doing so, we may transform not only our opponents in a particular conflict, but ourselves as well. We too have been raised in this system, and fall back easily into our own ingrained training and habits, even if we are doing what we think of as work for social change.

    Our task is to build a politics that can give voice and decision making power to all those who affected by the decisions of the huge organizations that now dominate our lives, and by doing so democratize the economy, and with it decisions about technology choice. We need to build a social movement that brings these themes together, starting with people where they live, from the bottom up.

    References

    1. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, August 16, 1967

    2. Robert Millikan (Nobel 1923), “Alleged Sins of Science,” in Scribner’s Magazine, 87(2), 1930, pp. 119-30, quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 534.

  • US Opposes ICC Bid to Make ‘Aggression’ a Crime Under International Law

    This article was originally published by the Christian Science Monitor.

    The United States under the Obama administration has developed an increasingly close working relationship with the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But that growing engagement with a controversial institution of international law was unable to prevent the ICC from expanding the scope of its work to include the murky crime of “aggression,” a move the US had vehemently opposed.

    At the 111-nation ICC’s first review conference that wrapped up last week in Kampala, Uganda, delegates decided to expand the international court’s purview to include the crime of aggression – a crime that only the US has successfully tried, in the post-World War II tribunals in Nuremburg and Tokyo.

    State Department officials say the US, which is not a signatory to the ICC, was able to mitigate the drawbacks of such an expansion of the court’s reach, primarily by putting off any prosecution of the newest international crime until at least 2017.

    But some critics say the US failure to stop the enshrining of “aggression” as an international crime demonstrates the limits of President Obama’s multilateralist vision – and sets the US on a collision course with the ICC when the issue comes up again later in the decade.

    “The fact remains that the Obama administration’s vaunted ‘engagement’ strategy was only able to check the ICC’s move towards defining ‘aggression,’ not stop it entirely,” says Brett Schaefer, an expert in international institutions at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “And it sets the US up for another battle in 2017 when the ICC’s advocates will make another push to activate the ICC’s jurisdiction over ‘aggression.’”

    The US confirmed its new footing with the world’s first permanent court for trying war crimes and crimes against humanity, US officials say, although they acknowledge that the US did not get everything it wanted in Kampala. The Rome Statute establishing the ICC was finalized in 1998, but the court did not begin to function until 2002, when the minimum 60 countries ratified it.

    US participation in the Kampala conference “reset US relations with the court from hostility to positive engagement,” says State Department legal adviser Harold Koh. He says the US focus at the review conference was on efforts to “strengthen justice on the ground” in countries so that eventually their judicial systems will be strong enough to take on the kinds of human-rights work the ICC addresses.

    Mr. Koh says that focus was particularly well-received in Africa, “where there is a strong desire to have these cases tried at the national level.”

    Some ICC critics have also noted that the court has only taken up two cases so far, both involving African countries – one involving the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, and the other regarding Sudan – and they dismiss the largely European-Union funded court as a colonial institution pressing Western interests.

    But the US increasingly sees the value of the ICC, especially as it has tried cases that begged for international intervention.

    “If it weren’t for the ICC [in cases like Sudan or Uganda] you would have had to set up a special tribunal,” says Stephen Rapp, the State Department’s coordinator for war crimes issues.

    One of the main US concerns in seeing “aggression” added to the ICC’s jurisdiction was the impact it could potentially have on US military operations abroad. But Koh says the US successfully negotiated the “aggression” statute’s wording so that US forces won’t be susceptible to it.

    “No US national can be prosecuted for ‘aggression’ while the US is not a signatory” to the ICC, he says.

  • World Peace Through Law: Rethinking an Old Theory

    2010_06_10_ranney_peace_law.pdf

  • Gaza Aid Convoy Killings: “Those Responsible Must be Held Criminally Accountable”

    GENEVA – The UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Richard Falk, urged Monday the international community to bring to justice those responsible for the killing of some 16 unarmed peace activist, when Israeli armed commandos stormed a convoy of ships carrying aid to Gaza.

    “Israel is guilty of shocking behavior by using deadly weapons against unarmed civilians on ships that were situated in the high seas where freedom of navigation exists, according to the law of the seas,” Mr. Falk said. “It is essential that those Israelis responsible for this lawless and murderous behavior, including political leaders who issued the orders, be held criminally accountable for their wrongful acts.”

    There are confirmed reports of lethal interference by Israeli military units on the high seas with the Freedom Flotilla of six ships carrying some 10,000 tons of medicine, food, and building materials to the civilian population of Gaza. Preliminary reports suggest as many as 16 unarmed activists were killed, and dozens more wounded.

    “This peaceful humanitarian initiative by citizens from 50 countries is an urgent response to the continuation of an unlawful blockade that has been maintained for almost three years causing great physical and mental harm to the whole of the 1.5 million people entrapped within Gaza,” the UN independent expert said. “Such a massive form of collective punishment is a crime against humanity, as well as a gross violation of the prohibition on collective punishment in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

    “As Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, familiar with the suffering of the people of Gaza, I find this latest instance of Israeli military lawlessness to create a situation of regional and global emergency. Unless prompt and decisive action is taken to challenge the Israeli approach to Gaza all of us will be complicit in criminal policies that are challenging the survival of an entire beleaguered community.”

    Mr. Falk urged the world community “to take urgent action in response to this flagrant flouting of international law. It is time to insist on the end of the blockade of Gaza. The worldwide campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel is now a moral and political imperative, and needs to be supported and strengthened everywhere.”

    ENDS

    Learn more about the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967:  http://www2.ohchr.org/english/countries/ps/mandate/index.htm.

  • Denying Access to a United Nation Official: An Issue of Human Rights

    Denying Access to a United Nation Official: An Issue of Human Rights

    Richard Falk is a soft-spoken and reflective man. He is a scholar, the author or editor of more than 50 books, including important books on human rights. For 40 years he was a professor of international law and practice at Princeton University. After becoming emeritus at Princeton, Falk moved to California, and became a distinguished visiting scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He continues to maintain a busy schedule of teaching at various universities, writing books and articles, and lecturing throughout the world.

    I have known him as a friend and colleague for more than three decades. Despite his mild and scholarly manner, he can be tough on issues of human rights. He has dedicated his life to upholding and strengthening international law and has held human rights as central to international law. With regard to international law in general, and to human rights in particular, he has been a proponent of universal responsibility for upholding human rights and of individual accountability for egregious failures to do so.

    Earlier this year, Falk was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council as the Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories. In this capacity, he is the key person in the United Nations system to report on potential human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories. Falk was chosen by the UN Human Rights Council for this position out of 184 potential candidates.

    This past Sunday, Falk attempted to enter Israel on his way to the Palestinian territories. He was denied entry, detained at the Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv by Israeli officials for 20 hours, and expelled from the country the next day.

    Israeli officials defended their position in denying Falk entry on the grounds that he was hostile to Israel, having said in 2007 that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was a “Holocaust in the making” and for having said this year that Israel’s imposition of collective punishment against the entire population of Gaza is a “crime against humanity.”

    Israeli officials are angry that Falk’s UN mandate as Special Rapporteur focuses solely on Israeli abuses in the Palestinian territories and does not call for reporting on Palestinian abuses of the human rights of Israelis. They also accused Falk of coming into the country on a tourist visa in June 2008 for an academic conference and of having used the occasion to gather information for work in his UN capacity.

    It is clear that Israeli officials do not like the positions that Falk has taken with regard to Israeli actions affecting the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are not, however, taking action against Falk as an individual. They are refusing him entry to their country in his capacity as a United Nations official. In doing so, they are denying him access to the Palestinian territories and making it impossible for him to effectively do the job that has been assigned to him by the United Nations. This is unacceptable.

    Upon his return to the United States, Falk commented on his experience, “My detention and denial of entry into Israel is part of a broader pattern designed to obscure the realities of the occupation by keeping qualified observers from getting out and, in my case, from getting in. Israel has been shifting attention as much as possible to the observer and away from what is observed. In doing so, they have distorted my views. The main point is not balance, but truth, and it is the rendering of what is true in Gaza, the harsh collective punishment, that gives the impression of imbalance. This isn’t about me. It’s about the Palestinian people.”

    If we are to have an international community governed by international law, no state should be allowed to act against the interests of the whole, as Israel is doing in denying Falk the ability to do his work as Special Rapporteur. Sovereignty cannot trump the interests of the international community at large, and the interests of the community lie in the ability of Special Rapporteurs, such as Falk, being able to visit the territories of their responsibility and report on what they find.

    Israel can, of course, take exception to Falk and continue their allegations of his bias, but they should not be allowed to deny him access to the territories where his responsibility lies. Israeli officials can counter the UN Special Rapporteur’s reports with their own facts and positions, but they should not be able to prevent the work of an agent of the United Nations.

    Israel’s position on this matter is an affront not so much to Falk personally as to the United Nations system and to the Palestinian people. This is a situation on which the Secretary General of the United Nations should be speaking out in protest and his protests should be backed by both the General Assembly and the Security Council. This is not an issue of politics. It is an issue of human rights that demands the attention of the world.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and a councilor on the World Future Council.

  • Ten Years of the International Criminal Court

    “For nearly a half a century — almost as long as the United Nations has been in existence — the General Assembly has recognized the need to establish such a court to prosecute and punish persons responsible for crimes such as genocide. Many thought that the horrors of the Second World War — the camps, the cruelty, the exterminations, the Holocaust — could never happen again. And yet they have. In Cambodia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Rwanda. Our time — this decade even— has shown us that man’s capacity for evil knows no limits. Genocide is now a word of our time too, a heinous reality that calls for a historic response.” — Koffi Annan, then UN Secretary-General

    July 17 marks the 10th anniversary of the Diplomatic Conference in Rome that established the International Criminal Court — a major step in the creation of world law. Citizens of the world have usually made a distinction between international law as commonly understood and world law. International law has come to mean laws that regulate relations between States, with the International Court of Justice — the World Court in The Hague — as the supreme body of the international law system. The Internatiional Court of Justice is the successor to the Permanent Court of International Justice that was established at the time of the League of Nations following the First World War. When the United Nations was formed in 1945, the World Court was re-established as the principal judicial organ of the UN. It is composed of 15 judges who are elected by the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.

    Only States may be parties in cases before the World Court. An individual cannot bring a case before the Court, nor can a company although many transnational companies are active at the world level. International agencies that are part of the UN system may request advisory opinions from the Court on legal questions arising from their activities but advisory opinions are advisory rather than binding.

    Citizens of the world have tended to use the term “world law” in the sense that Wilfred Jenks, for many years the legal spirit of the International Labour Organization, used the term the common law of mankind: “By the common law of mankind is meant the law of an organized world community, contributed on the basis of States but discharging its community functions increasingly through a complex of international and regional institutions, guaranteeing rights to, and placing obligations upon, the individual citizen, and confronted with a wide range of economic, social and technological problems calling for uniform regulation on an international basis which represents a growing proportion of the subject-matter of the law.” It is especially the ‘rights and obligations’ of the individual person which is the common theme of world citizens.

    The growth of world law has been closely related to the development of humanitarian law and to the violations of humanitarian law. It was Gustave Moynier, one of the founders of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and a longtime president of the ICRC who presented in 1872 the first draft convention for the establishment of an international criminal court to punish violations of the first Red Cross standards on the humane treatment of the sick and injured in periods of war, the 1864 Geneva Convention. The Red Cross conventions are basically self-enforcing. “If you treat my prisoners of war well, I will treat yours the same way.” Governments were not willing to act on Moynier’s proposition, but Red Cross standards were often written into national laws.

    The Red Cross Geneva conventions deal with the way individuals should be treated in time of war. They have been expanded to cover civil wars and prisoners of civil unrest. The second tradition of humanitarian law arises from the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and deals with the weapons of war and the way war is carried on. Most of the Hague rules, such as the prohibition against bombarding undefended towns or villages, have fallen by the side, but the Hague spirit of banning certain weapons continues in the ban on chemical weapons, land mines and soon, cluster weapons. However, although The Hague meetings made a codification of war crimes, no monitoring mechanisms or court for violations was set up.

    After the First World War, Great Britain, France and Belgium accused the Central Powers, in particular Germany and Turkey of war atrocities such as the deportation of Belgian civilians to Germany for forced labor, executing civilians, the sinking of the Lusitaniaand the killing of Armenians by the Ottoman forces. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919 provided in articles 227-229 the legal right for the Allies to establish an international criminal court. The jurisdiction of the court would extend from common soldiers to military and government leaders. Article 227 deals specifically with Kaiser Wilhelm II, underlining the principle that all individuals to the highest level can be held accountable for their wartime actions. However, the USA opposed the creation of an international criminal court both on the basis of State sovereignty and on the basis that the German government had changed and that one must look to the future rather than the past.

    The same issues arose after the Second World War with the creation of two military courts — the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Some have said that these tribunals were imposing ‘victors’ justice on their defeated enemies, Germany and Japan. There was no international trial for Italians as Italy had changed sides at an opportune time, and there were no prosecutions of Allied soldiers or commanders.

    In the first years of the United Nations, there was a discussion of the creation of an international court. A Special Committee was set up to look into the issue. The Special Committee mad a report in 1950 just as the Korean War had broken out, marking a Cold War that would continue until 1990, basically preventing any modifications in the structure of the UN.

    Thus, during the Cold War, while there were any number of candidates for a war crime tribunal, none was created. For the most part national courts rarely acted even after changes in government. From Stalin to Uganda’s Idi Amin to Cambodia’s Pol Pot, war criminals have lived out their lives in relative calm..

    It was only at the end of the Cold War that advances were made. Ad hoc international criminal courts have been set up to try war crimes from former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. Just as the Cold War was coming to an end, certain countries became concerned with international drug trafficking. Thus in 1989, Trinidad and Tobago proposed the establishment of an international court to deal with the drug trade. The proposal was passed on by the UN General Assembly to the International Law Commission, the UN’s expert body on international law. By 1993, the International Law Commission made a comprehensive report calling for a court able to deal with a wider range of issues than just drugs — basically what was called the three ‘core crimes’ of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

    By the mid-1990s, a good number of governments started to worry about world trends and the breakdown of the international legal order. The break up of the federations of the USSR and Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda, the breakdown of all government functions in Somalia, the continuing north-south civil war in Sudan — all pointed to the need for legal restraints on individuals. This was particularly true with the rise of non-State insurgencies. International law as law for relations among States was no longer adequate to deal with the large number on non-State actors.

    By the mid-1990s, the door was open to the new concept of world law dealing with individuals, and the drafting of the statues of the International Criminal Court went quickly. There is still much to be done to develop the intellectual basis of world law and to create the institutions to structure it, but the International Criminal Court is an important milestone.

    René Wadlow is the Representative to the United Nations, Geneva, Association of World Citizens and the editor of the online journal of world politics and culture www.transnational-perspectives.org
  • Nuclear Weapons and Future Justice

    Nuclear Weapons and Future Justice

    Future justice requires that the inhabitants of the future be treated justly and equitably. This implies that our current social, economic and political relations, both nationally and internationally, become more just and equitable. It also adds an explicit focus on the longer term consequences of these relations. The decisions taken in the present must be made with a view to their effect upon future generations.

    Many indigenous peoples lived with an ethic of considering present impacts on the “seventh generation.” Modern societies have been far less respectful of those who will follow us on the planet, as the expanding population of the planet combined with our greed for natural resources and the power of our technologies has exponentially increased the human impact upon the Earth and upon future generations.

    We need an ethic that expands our concept of justice to generations yet unborn. We need to recognize and appreciate the extent to which our decisions and acts in the present have serious, potentially irreversible, consequences for the future. In the 1990s, The Cousteau Society, led by respected ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, developed and promoted a Bill of Rights for Future Generations. Its five articles are:

    Article 1. Future generations have a right to an uncontaminated and undamaged Earth and to its enjoyment as the ground of human history, of culture, and of the social bonds that make each generation and individual a member of one human family.
    Article 2. Each generation, sharing in the estate and heritage of the Earth, has a duty as trustee for future generations to prevent irreversible and irreparable harm to life on Earth and to human freedom and dignity.
    Article 3. It is, therefore, the paramount responsibility of each generation to maintain a constantly vigilant and prudential assessment of technological disturbances and modifications adversely affecting life on Earth, the balance of nature, and the evolution of mankind in order to protect the rights of future generations.
    Article 4. All appropriate measures, including education, research, and legislation, shall be taken to guarantee these rights and to ensure that they not be sacrificed for present expediencies and conveniences.
    Article 5. Governments, non-governmental organizations, and individuals are urged, therefore, imaginatively to implement these principles, as if in the very presence of those future generations whose rights we seek to establish and perpetuate.

    To enforce such a set of rights for future generations, we need to create a criminal conceptualization that designates the worst offenses against these rights as crimes against future generations, the worst crimes being those that would foreclose the future altogether or that would make life on the planet untenable. Two areas of human activity that would clearly fit into this category of foreclosing the future are nuclear war and climate change. Both have the potential to destroy human life on our planet, along with much other life.

    Responsibilities towards Future Generations

    Rights cannot exist in a vacuum. Along with rights, there must be concomitant responsibilities, including responsibilities to assure the rights of future generations. On November 12, 1997, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) solemnly proclaimed the UNESCO Declaration on the Responsibilities of Current Generations towards Future Generations. The Declaration was composed of 12 Articles covering a full range of responsibilities towards future generations. The two Articles most closely related to preserving a human future and a future for life on the planet are Articles 3 and 4.

    Article 3 – Maintenance and perpetuation of humankind – The present generations should strive to ensure the maintenance and perpetuation of humankind with due respect for the dignity of the human person. Consequently, the nature and form of human life must not be undermined in any way whatsoever.

    Article 4 – Preservation of life on Earth – The present generations have the responsibility to bequeath to future generations an Earth which will not one day be irreversibly damaged by human activity. Each generation inheriting the Earth temporarily should take care to use natural resources reasonably and ensure that life is not prejudiced by harmful modifications of the ecosystems and that scientific and technological progress in all fields does not harm life on Earth.

    The Declaration calls for “intergenerational solidarity.” Such solidarity with future generations requires that current generations take responsibility for assuring that the policies of those in power today will not lead to foreclosing the future for generations yet to be born. Thus, the importance of conceptualizing crimes against future generations cannot be evaded by the people of the present. A strong example of such crimes can be found in the example of policies promoting the possession, threat or use of nuclear weapons. Such policies constitute assaults upon future generations, as well as upon present life on the planet.

    Nuclear Weapons and International Law

    In the record of human history, survival chances have been enhanced by affiliation with the tribe and later with the nation-state. Such affiliations have provided a defense against the aggression of other groups. Violent conflicts between tribes and later nations have given rise to the pattern of warfare that has characterized human behavior from its earliest history. Technological innovations in warfare, such as the stirrup, crossbow, machinegun, airplane and submarine have given advantage to one side or another.

    What characterizes the Nuclear Age is the innovation of a form of weaponry that makes possible the destruction of the species. Nuclear weapons, which are weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction, have the capacity to foreclose the future of human life on the planet. The philosopher John Somerville coined a new term for the potential of nuclear weapons – omnicide, meaning the death of all. He reasoned that humans had moved from suicide, to genocide, to the potential of omnicide. The threat or use of nuclear weapons constitutes the ultimate crime against the future, the crime of omnicide, including the destruction of the human species.

    In 1996, the International Court of Justice issued an Advisory Opinion on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. The Court found, “The destructive power of nuclear weapons cannot be contained in either space or time. They have the potential to destroy all civilization and the entire ecosystem of the planet.” It further found that “the use of nuclear weapons would be a serious danger to future generations.” Even setting aside the blast effects of nuclear weapons, the Court found, “Ionizing radiation has the potential to damage the future environment, food and marine ecosystem, and to cause genetic defects and illness in future generations.”

    The Court unanimously concluded that any threat or use of nuclear weapons that violated international humanitarian law would be illegal. This meant that there could be no legal threat or use of nuclear weapons that was indiscriminate as between civilians and combatants, that caused unnecessary suffering, or that was disproportionate to a prior attack. Despite the fact that there could be virtually no threat or use of nuclear weapons that did not violate international humanitarian law, the Court also found on a split vote that “in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”

    In light of the above conclusions, the Court found unanimously, “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.” Thus, the Court was clear in reaffirming the obligation to nuclear disarmament in Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Although this aspect of the Court’s opinion does not specifically refer to the rights of future generations, adherence by the nuclear weapons states to “nuclear disarmament in all its aspects” would eliminate the possibility of nuclear weapons foreclosing the future by eliminating the weapons. Unfortunately, the political leaders of the nuclear weapons states have not fulfilled their obligations under international law.

    Nuclear Weapons Possession as Criminal Behavior

    Today there are nine states in the world that possess nuclear weapons: the US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. If we know that nuclear war could foreclose the future and would be a crime against future generations, does that make the possession of nuclear weapons by these states a crime against the future? Arguably, possession alone, without use or threat of use, is not a crime. But to take the inquiry one step deeper, is it possible that there can be possession without at least the implicit threat of use? In order to eliminate the possibility of threat or use of nuclear weapons, a state at a minimum would need to have a policy of “No First Use,” and would have to separate its warheads from delivery vehicles so that there could not be an inadvertent use of the weapons. While this would be better nuclear policy than one that left open the possibility of first use, it would not eliminate the possibility of a second use of the weapons, which would escalate a nuclear war, kill great numbers of innocent civilians, impact the health of children of the victims and even place the future of humanity at risk. Thus, the conclusion seems inescapable that the possessionof nuclear weapons by a state undermines future justice and constitutes a continuing crime against future generations.

    Individual Accountability for Criminal Acts

    The possession of nuclear weapons can be viewed as a crime of state, and this crime would apply to the nine states in possession of nuclear weapons. But beyond state criminal activity, there should also be culpability for the crime against the future by the leading state and military officials that support and promote nuclear weapons possession, as well as policies that make nuclear war more likely and total nuclear disarmament less likely. In addition, corporations, corporate executives and scientists who contribute to the maintenance and improvement of nuclear weapons should also be considered culpable for committing a crime against future generations.

    It is fundamental to criminal law that individuals have culpability for crimes, and that individual accountability not be covered over by state or corporate culpability. At the Nuremburg Tribunals following World War II, the principle was upheld that all individuals who commit crimes under international law are responsible for such acts, and this is true even if they are high government officials and domestic law does not hold such acts to be crimes. Along with responsibility goes individual accountability for crimes against future generations.

    The Need for a Taboo against Nuclear Arms

    In the present global environment, the possession of nuclear weapons is not viewed as a crime against future generations or even broadly as a crime against the present, but rather as a normative behavior of powerful states. There is a strong need to change this general orientation toward nuclear weapons through education about their dangers and their capacity to foreclose the future. One of the best reasons to eliminate nuclear weapons is that they have the potential to eliminate the human species, now or in the future. So long as nuclear weapons exist and are held in the arsenals of some countries, the danger of the use of these weapons under some conditions, by accident or design, cannot be entirely excluded. In addition, the existence of these weapons in the arsenals of some states creates pressures for other states to acquire such weaponry.

    It is essential to establish a norm that the possession of nuclear weapons is a crime against future generations, a crime that can only be prevented by the total elimination of these weapons. A taboo must be established that puts nuclear weapons in the same category of unacceptable behaviors as cannibalism, incest, slavery and torture, a taboo that ostracizes those who contribute to maintaining these weapons and who set up obstacles to their elimination.

    Signs of Hope

    1. The vast majority of states in the world support a world free of nuclear weapons.
    2. The vast majority of US and Russian citizens support a world free of nuclear weapons.
    3. More than 2100 mayors in some 125 countries throughout the world support the Mayors for Peace 2020 Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons by the year 2020.
    4. More than half the world, virtually the entire southern hemisphere, is covered by nuclear weapons-free zones.
    5. Former high-level US policy makers, including former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn, have spoken out in favor a world free of nuclear weapons.
    6. Norway’s government pension fund has set a powerful example by divesting from companies providing components for nuclear weapons.
    7. Legal measures to return to the International Court of Justice are being taken to challenge the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament obligations.
    8. University students are showing increased concern for university involvement in nuclear weapons research and development.
    9. Leading scientists, including the late Nobel Laureates Hans Bethe and Joseph Rotblat, are calling upon scientists in all countries to cease working on nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.
    10. UK Minister of Defense Des Browne has proposed a conference of the five principal nuclear weapons states to address the technical challenges of verifying nuclear disarmament.

    Providing Hope with Teeth

    While these signs of hope hold promise, far more needs to be done to establish a taboo against the possession, threat and use of nuclear weapons that will result in a world free of nuclear weapons. Organizations such as the World Future Council need to take a leadership role in promoting the concept of future justice and crimes against future generations, identifying those particular crimes, such as nuclear war and the antecedent possession, threat or use of nuclear weapons, which are capable of foreclosing the future.

    Those of us alive on the planet now are the trustees for future generations. We have the responsibility to assist in passing the world on intact to the next generation. We must act in intergenerational solidarity with those who are not yet present. In the words of the Cousteau Society’s Bill of Right for Future Generations, we must act “as if in the very presence of those future generations whose rights we seek to establish and perpetuate.”

    Among the tools needed to succeed in passing the world on intact to future generations is the identification of crimes against future generations to underpin the establishment of taboos against such crimes. Also needed is a system of accountability to ostracize and otherwise punish individuals, regardless of their office, who are engaged in the preparation or commission of such crimes. The possession, threat or use of nuclear weapons is unquestionably among the most serious of these crimes. Future justice is not a possibility in a world without a future.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and a Councilor of the World Future Council (www.worldfuturecouncil.org).

  • Judge Christopher Weeramantry Recieves NAPF Lifetime Achievement Award

    Judge Christopher Weeramantry Recieves NAPF Lifetime Achievement Award

    On April 12, 2008, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation presented a Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Peace Leadership to Judge Christopher Weeramantry of Sri Lanka. Judge Weeramantry is a former Supreme Court Justice of Sri Lanka and former Vice President of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. He was also a professor of law at Monash University in Australia.

    Judge Weeramantry currently heads the Weeramantry International Centre for Peace Education and Research. He views justice as the prerequisite to peace, and peace education as a prerequisite to justice. He is an active educator, lecturing throughout the world and writing prolifically. He is the author of more than 20 books and 200 articles related to peace, cross-cultural understanding and international law. He is an expert on the moral influences of religions on international law, and is currently completing a book on the influences of five major religions on peace and international law.

    Judge Weeramantry has received many honors for his tireless work for peace and justice. In 2006, he was awarded the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education for his “indefatigable campaign for peace education, promotion of human rights, intercultural faith and understanding.” In 2007, he received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, “for his lifetime of groundbreaking work to strengthen and expand the rule of international law.” In 2007, Judge Weeramantry also received Sri Lanka’s highest civil honor, “conferred for exceptionally outstanding and most distinguished service to the nation.”

    As a judge on the International Court of Justice, Judge Weeramantry wrote a lengthy dissent to the Court’s Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons. The Court found that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be generally illegal, but held open the possibility of legality in an extreme circumstance in which the very survival of a state was at stake. In his dissent, Judge Weeramantry concluded that there was no instance in which the threat or use of nuclear weapons could be considered legal under international law. Judge Weeramantry’s dissent in this case remains the most comprehensive and important legal opinion written on this critical issue.

    In his acceptance speech upon receiving the Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Judge Weeramantry spoke on “Peace, International Law and the Rights of Future Generations.” He pointed out that the 20th century had begun with high hopes for peace on the heels of the 1899 Hague Peace Conference. The Conference, convened by Czar Nicholas of Russia, sought to avert the resort to war in the 20th century. But, the judge pointed out, as we all know, the 20th century was witness to two devastating world wars. Judge Weeramantry described the 20th century as the century of lost opportunity. He characterized the 21st century as the century of last opportunity.

    The judge expressed the concern that unless the international community is able to resolve conflicts peacefully and abolish its most destructive weapons, we may foreclose the human future. Thus, each of us alive on the planet today has special responsibilities to assure that the decisions made today will not destroy the planet for ourselves or future generations.

    The Lifetime Achievement Award of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is presented to “outstanding individuals who have made significant long-term contributions to building a more peaceful world.” Its purpose, like other Foundation awards, is to honor distinguished individuals and to shine a light on peace leadership as a model to inspire a larger societal commitment to peace and to help empower a new generation of peace leaders.

    Previous recipients of the Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award are former Canadian Senator Douglas Roche (2005); psychiatrist and author Dr. Robert Jay Lifton (2005); scientist of conscience Sir Joseph Rotblat (1997); civil society leader for the law of the sea Elisabeth Mann Borgese (1995); and two-time Nobel Laureate Dr. Linus Pauling (1991). The Foundation is proud to add Judge Christopher Weeramantry to this list of distinguished previous honorees.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a councilor of the World Future Council.

  • UN Voting on Nuclear Disarmament Shows Abysmal US Record

    UN Voting on Nuclear Disarmament Shows Abysmal US Record

    Each year the United Nations considers resolutions that seek to limit, control or eliminate the dangers that nuclear weapons pose to the inhabitants of the planet. In general, these resolutions can be described as nuclear disarmament measures.*

    In 2007, in the 62nd General Assembly of the United Nations, 20 resolutions on nuclear disarmament were considered. Of these, five were not voted upon. Of the 15 resolutions that were voted upon by the UN General Assembly in 2007, only one country in the world, the United States, had a record of opposing all of them. It is an abysmal voting record, and the people of the United States should be aware of the dangerous and obstructionist role their government is playing in opposing a serious agenda for nuclear disarmament.

    The votes of the nine nuclear weapon states are listed in the chart below. Countries were given one point for each Yes vote, zero points for each abstention, and a point was taken away for each No vote:

    China Pakistan N. Korea India Russia UK Israel France US
    Yes (+1) 11 10 11 8 5 3 1 2 0
    No (-1) 0 0 2 3 1 9 8 10 15
    Abstain (0) 4 5 0 4 8 3 6 3 0
    Vote Tally 11 10 9 5 4 -6 -7 -8 -15

    United States

    In three of the votes, the United States was the only country in the world to vote against the resolutions. The resolutions called for:

    1. Giving security assurances to non-nuclear weapons states that nuclear weapons would not be used against them;
    2. Supporting the Treaty on the South-East Asia Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone;
    3. Supporting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, to permanently end all nuclear weapons testing.

    Four other resolutions had only three votes against, and in each case the US was one of the three. These resolutions called for:

    1. Supporting a nuclear-weapon-free southern hemisphere (US, France, UK opposed);
    2. Decreasing the operational readiness of nuclear weapons systems (US, France, UK opposed);
    3. A UN conference on eliminating nuclear dangers (US, France, UK opposed);
    4. Supporting renewed determination toward the elimination of nuclear weapons (US, India, North Korea opposed).

    France & United Kingdom

    The other nuclear weapons states had more positive voting records, although in the case of the UK and France, only slightly more so. Both France and the UK voted Yes on a resolution highlighting the risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and on supporting for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The UK’s other Yes vote was on renewed determination towards elimination of nuclear weapons.

    Russia & China

    Russia’s sole No vote was on supporting the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the illegality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. Of the five principal nuclear weapons states, China had by far the best voting record, casting no negative votes.

    Israel, India, Pakistan & North Korea

    The other nuclear weapons states, those outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, are Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Israel cast only one Yes vote, on support of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. India, Pakistan and North Korea were more supportive of nuclear disarmament resolutions, voting Yes a majority of the time. North Korea did not vote on two resolutions.

    Weapons in Space

    One other aspect of UN voting on disarmament measures deserves comment, that of disarmament aspects of outer space. On the two measures on this subject, the countries of the world voted overwhelmingly in favor of keeping outer space free of weapons. The first vote was on prevention of an arms race in outer space. Out of 180 countries voting on this resolution, 179 voted in favor. Only the United States voted against and Israel abstained. On the second measure on transparency and confidence building in outer space, 181 countries voted. Again, only the US voted against the measure, and only Israel abstained.

    In the area of nuclear disarmament, as well as in keeping outer space free of weapons, the US has shown itself to be an obstacle to progress. In a time when the world badly needs leadership toward a saner and safer future, the US has chosen to oppose progress on nuclear disarmament in many ways, including its votes in the UN General Assembly.

    In many respects the US government has demonstrated by its votes in the UN General Assembly its disdain for the deep concerns of the vast majority of the rest of the international community as well as of the American people. Such behavior leaves the US and the world a more dangerous place and undoubtedly contributes to the extremely low level of respect in which the US is held throughout most of the world.

    * The voting records of countries on these resolutions can be found in the Winter 2007 issue of Disarmament Times, a publication of the NGO Committee on Disarmament, Peace and Security.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.