Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Mikhail Gorbachev

  • Ronald Reagan: A Nuclear Abolitionist

    Ronald Reagan: A Nuclear Abolitionist

    With the USS Ronald Reagan in Santa Barbara, it is worth reflecting on Ronald Reagan’s legacy with regard to nuclear weapons. According to his wife, Nancy, “Ronnie had many hopes for the future, and none were more important to America and to mankind than the effort to create a world free of nuclear weapons.”

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

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

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

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

    The USS Ronald Reagan has the motto, “Peace through Strength.” President Reagan, like the ship bearing his name, was known for his commitment to this motto, but he never saw nuclear weapons as a strength. In his book, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Paul Lettow quotes Reagan as saying, “I know that there are a great many people who are pointing to the unimaginable horror of nuclear war…. [T]o those who protest against nuclear war, I can only say, ‘I’m with you.’” Lettow also quotes Reagan as stating, “[M]y dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.”

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

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

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

    Working to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons would honor the memory of President Reagan, our only recent president with the vision to seek the total elimination of these weapons. He was a president who understood that US leadership was essential to achieving this goal. It behooves us as citizens of the United States to assure that our next president shares President Reagan’s vision on this issue, picks up the baton of nuclear weapons abolition from him and carries it forward.

    David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort to abolish nuclear weapons.

  • Gorbachev Wages the Good Fight Against WMDs

    The term statesman, in its positive sense, can be applied to only a few current and former heads of state. One of them is Mikhail Gorbachev.

    The former Soviet president spoke out forcefully in London last week at the kickoff of a new campaign called Come Clean. Launched by Greenpeace, Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and other non-governmental organizations, the campaign is designed to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction. “If they exist, sooner or later there will be disastrous consequences,” he said. “It is not enough to safeguard them. They must be abolished.”

    This forthright repudiation of such weapons is not an afterthought for the man who once ruled the world’s largest nation. Quite the contrary. He began speaking out against nuclear dangers even before he assumed the top leadership post in the Soviet Union and initiated the transformation of his country into a relatively peaceful, democratic society. Addressing the British parliament in December 1984, Gorbachev declared that “the nuclear age inevitably dictates new political thinking. Preventing nuclear war is the most burning issue for all people on earth.”

    After becoming Soviet party secretary in March 1985, Gorbachev stepped up his attack upon nuclear weapons. Speaking to the French parliament that October, he declared that, as there could be “no victors in a nuclear war,” the time had come “to stop the nuclear arms race.” Faced with the “self-destruction of the human race,” people had to “burn the black book of nuclear alchemy” and make the 21st century a time “of life without fear of universal death.” In January 1986, Gorbachev unveiled a three-stage plan to eliminate all nuclear weapons around the world by the year 2000.

    As these elements of such thinking were put into place, Eduard Shevardnadze, the new Soviet foreign minister, exulted. Henceforth, he wrote, Soviet security would be “gained not by the highest possible level of strategic parity, but the lowest possible level,” with “nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction … removed from the equation.” The world was well on its way to the INF treaty, the START I treaty, and the end of the Cold War.

    American conservatives, of course, have dished up a very different version of events. In it, Gorbachev and other courageous Soviet reformers are simply airbrushed out of the picture. Instead, the Reagan administration’s military buildup is said to have overawed Soviet bureaucrats and “won” the Cold War.

    But this triumphalist interpretation has nothing behind it but the self-interest of U.S. officials. None of the Soviet leaders of the time have given it any credit whatsoever. Gorbachev himself shrugged off the idea of Soviet capitulation to U.S. power as American political campaign rhetoric, but added: “If this idea is serious, then it is a very big delusion.”

    What did move Gorbachev to take his antinuclear stand was the critical perspective on nuclear weapons advanced by the mass nuclear disarmament campaign of the era. Meeting frequently with leaders of this campaign, he adopted their ideas, their rhetoric and their proposals.

    “The new thinking,” he said, “absorbed the conclusions and demands of … the public and … of the movements of physicians, scientists and ecologists, and of various antiwar organizations.”

    Although President Reagan also deserves credit for fostering nuclear disarmament and the end of the Cold War, it is not for his dangerous and expensive weapons systems. As Colin Powell observed, what Reagan contributed was “the vision and flexibility, lacking in many knee-jerk Cold Warriors, to recognize that Gorbachev was a new man in a new age offering new opportunities for peace.”

    Gorbachev’s sincerity in seeking nuclear disarmament is further exemplified by his activities since leaving public office in 1991. Time and again, he has spoken out against the dangers of nuclear weapons. In January 1998, he joined an array of other former national leaders who signed an appeal for nuclear abolition.

    It is sad to see how far the U.S. government has strayed from that vision. Although the Bush administration talks about the danger of WMDs, they are only the WMDs of other nations. It has no plan for comprehensive nuclear disarmament. Furthermore, it has withdrawn from the ABM treaty, rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and is currently promoting legislation to build new nuclear weapons.

    What this nation badly needs is a farsighted statesman like Mikhail Gorbachev.

    Lawrence S. Wittner teaches at the University at Albany. His latest book is “Toward Nuclear Abolition.”

  • A Plea Not to Revive Nuclear Arms Race

    AS EARLY AS 1985, President Reagan and I, at our first summit, said that nuclear war can never be won, and must never be fought. Even then we knew something very important about the inadmissibility of nuclear war.

    Today, it is just as true that if nuclear war, on any scale, were ever to be unleashed, or were ever to become a reality, it would threaten the very existence of life on earth.

    It is particularly important to keep this in mind, in the wake of the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan. All must condemn those tests and the dangerous era which they rekindle.

    What is not being discussed by the established nuclear powers today is that the process of nuclear disarmament has been stalled for several years now; it is just marking time. I believe we have not been properly using the opportunities that were open since the end of the Cold War, the possibility to move toward a really new world order based on stability, democratic cooperation and equality, rather than on the hegemony of one country.

    Instead, the geopolitical games are continuing; we are seeing those old geopolitical games in places such as Bosnia, and we know the dangerous potential of such conflicts.

    During the Cold War, many of those wars in small places festered for decades and became worse because the two superpowers and the two military alliances were self-interestedly fueling the hostilities.

    During the years of the arms race, the United States and the Soviet Union spent $10 trillion each on weapons production. It is true that the danger of nuclear war has significantly diminished, but it has not disappeared for good. The so-called conventional wars and regional wars are still claiming thousands of lives and tremendous resources, as well as ravaging nature, the unique source of life on our planet.

    After the Cold War, instead of defense conversion, we are still seeing the continuation of defense production, of the arms trade and weapons-export policies.

    After the breakup of the Soviet Union, while Russia was immersed in its domestic problems, the United States captured 70 percent of the world weapons-trade market, while not doing much for defense conversion.

    The result is that Russia, too, has decided to step up the production and transfer of the most sophisticated weapons, and is pushing in the same direction and trying to capture that market.

    Behind this is the underlying assumption of defense and security planning in most countries: that all the time we should consider the possibility of war.

    Thus we see the arms race, weapons production and also the increasing sophistication of arms, including very exotic weapons.

    And at the same time we see poverty, backwardness and disease in territories that account for almost two-thirds of the population of the world. So, as we face the 21st century, let us think about what is happening.

    It is a trap to perpetuate those systems that existed during the Cold War — relaunching the arms race and planning on the supposition of a resumption of war.

    We must say very firmly to the United States and Russia that in dragging their feet on further nuclear disarmament, they are setting a bad example for others.

    We should also once again raise the issue of missiles, intermediate- and shorter-range missiles, because those are weapons of a particularly regional nature. We should do more not just to limit the nuclear-arms race, but to move even further, toward the elimination and abolition of nuclear arms.

    Certainly we should bear in mind, in cooperating with less-developed countries in the area of commercial nuclear power, that we should always be vigilant that this is not taken further, and does not stimulate the production of nuclear weapons.

    Finally, we should put an end to the myth that nuclear weapons guarantee peace. Everyone, for example, should understand that security on the Indian subcontinent has not improved because of recent developments; it has deteriorated sharply.

    We should do all we can to help Pakistan and India understand that they’re not gaining anything. They’re actually losing a lot by embarking on the nuclear path. In the context of the conflict that has been festering in that region, this is an ominous development. We should work hard to ensure that India and Pakistan sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty without delay. The 20th century has seen more bloodshed and cruelty than the whole rest of human history, and has left us a complex and challenging heritage. The tradition of resolving national and international problems by force, violence and arms is a political disease of our epoch.

    We must do away with it — which is the great and noble imperative of our time.