Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: North Korea

  • Why Are We Planning to Walk Across the DMZ that Separates North and South Korea?

    Almost two years ago, when Christine Ahn proposed international women peacemakers walk across the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) which separates North and South Korea as an important action to help support Korean women and men working for reconciliation and reuniting of Korean families, I couldn’t resist. This was an important first step in establishing a peace process in which women and civil community would be included.

    Although many hurdles must still be jumped, including affirming support from three governments—North Korea, South Korea and the United States representing the United Nations Command.  The UN command at the DMZ has said it would facilitate our crossing once South Koreas Government gives its approval —a small team of women are planning a historic walk of 30 international women peacemakers from twelve different countries to cross the DMZ on 24th May, 2015, International Women’s Disarmament Day.  Some of the women participating are:  Gloria Steinem, Hon.Chair, Ann Wright (USA), Suzuyo Takazato (Japan), Abigail Disney (USA), Hyun-Kyung Chung (SouthKorea/USA). Many people have asked, “Why are they planning to walk across the DMZ that separates North and South Korea?” Maybe the real question should be, “Why not?”

    In many countries around the world, women are walking and calling for an end to war and for a de-militarized world. As the DMZ is the most highly militarized border in the world, women peacemakers believe it is only right, whilst working all their lives in their own countries for disarmament and demilitarization, that they should walk in Korea, in solidarity with their Korean sisters, who want to see an end to the 70 year old conflict to reunify millions of Korean families. Seventy years ago, as the Cold War was being waged, the United States unilaterally drew the line across the 38th parallel—later with the former Soviet Union’s agreement—dividing an ancient country that had just suffered 35 years of Japanese colonial occupation. Koreans had no desire or decision-making power to stop their country from being divided; now seven decades later the conflict on the Korean peninsula threatens peace in the Asia Pacific and throughout our world.

    The international women recognize that one of the greatest tragedies arising out of this man-made cold war politics and isolation is the tearing apart of Korean families and their physical separation from each other. In Korean culture, family relations are deeply important and millions of families have been painfully separated for 70 years.  Although there was a period of reconciliation during the Sunshine Policy years between the two Korean governments where many families had the joy of reunion, but the vast majority remain separated.  Many elders have sadly died before reunion with families, and most are getting older now.  How wonderful if the governments of both North and South allowed the remaining elders the joy and peace of mind of being able to meet, kiss and hold their loved ones, before they die. We are all wishing and praying—and walking—for this to happen for the Korean elders. Also due to western sanctions and isolationist policies put on the North Korean people, their economy has suffered. Whilst North Korea has come a long way from the 1990s when up to one million died from famine, many people are still very poor and lack the very basics of survival. During a visit to Seoul in 2007, one aid worker told me most people in South Korea would love to pack their car with food, drive an hour up the road, into North Korea, to help their Korean brothers and sisters if the governments would agree to open the DMZ and let them cross over to see each other! Many of us take for granted that we can visit family, and we find it hard to imagine that pain of separation still felt by Korean families who cannot travel an hour up the road, through the DMZ to visit their families.

    We international women want to walk for peace in North and South Korea, and hope the Governments will support our crossing the DMZ, recognizing that we are seeking to do this because we care for our Korean brothers and sisters. We want to plant a seed that Korean people, too, can be free to cross the DMZ in their work to build reconciliation, friendships and trust and put an end to the division and fear which keeps them in a state of war instead of peace.

    The DMZ with its barbed wire, armed soldiers on both sides, and littered with thousands of explosive landmines is a tragic physical manifestation of how much the Korean people have suffered and lost in war. Yet from all my encounters with the Korean people, all they wish for is to be reconciled and live in peace with each other. In recognizing the wishes of the Korean people, I believe the political leaders of North Korea, South Korea, United States and all governments involved must play their parts to help Korea move from war to peace.

    For the 30 international women who travel from over a dozen countries, we wish to go to Korea to listen to the Korean peoples stories, hopes and dreams, to tell them we love them, and join in solidarity with them in their work, and ours, in building a nonkilling, demilitarized Korea, Asia and World.

    For more information, visit www.womencrossdmz.org.

    Mairead Maguire is a Nobel Peace Laureate and a member of the NAPF Advisory Council.

  • Fueling the Nuclear Fire in North Korea

    Santa Barbara, CA – While tensions appear to have eased between North Korea and the U.S. in the past few weeks, the U.S.- North Korean nuclear crisis is not over. Any overt action by either country could easily reignite an already volatile and dangerous situation.

    It is in this context that later this month, on May 21, the U.S. plans to launch a Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 4,200 miles away. The test was originally scheduled for early April, at the height of the current U.S.-North Korea nuclear crisis. At that time, U.S. officials postponed the test, stating they did not want to provoke a response from North Korea.

    So one must ask, has anything truly changed between North Korea and the U.S. since early April? Is a missile launch really any less provocative now than it was then? The answer is clearly that missile testing remains provocative. The posturing and exchanges that the world has been witnessing are capable of spiraling out of control and resulting in nuclear war today, just as they were a month ago.
    David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said, “The testing of a Minuteman III nuclear missile at this time is a clear example of U.S. double standards. The government believes that it is fine for the U.S. to test-fire these missiles when we choose to do so, while expressing criticism when other countries conduct missile tests. Clearly U.S. leaders would be highly critical if North Korea were to conduct a long-range missile test, now or at any time. We seem to have a blind spot in our thinking about our own tests. Such double standards encourage nuclear proliferation and make the world a more dangerous place.”

    One must also consider that each missile test is a clear reminder of the United States’ continued reliance on nuclear weapons in spite of proclamations by the Obama administration of the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world. Nor should one overlook the tens of millions of dollars spent on each missile test at a time when the U.S. economic recovery is still weighing in the balance.

    Clearly this upcoming long-range missile test is more than just a test. It is a provocative move in a nuclear war game. A game where there is no winner.

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    For further comment, contact Rick Wayman, Director of Programs of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, at rwayman@napf.org or (805) 965-3443. Outside of regular office hours, please contact Rick Wayman at (805) 696-5159. You may also contact David Krieger at dkrieger@napf.org or (805) 965-3443.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation — The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s mission is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders.  Founded in 1982, the Foundation is comprised of individuals and organizations worldwide who realize the imperative for peace in the Nuclear Age. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit organization with consultative status to the United Nations.  For more information, visit www.wagingpeace.org.

  • Fueling the Fire in North Korea

    Santa Barbara, CA – While tensions appear to have eased between North Korea and the U.S. in the past few weeks, the U.S.- North Korean nuclear crisis is not over. Any overt action by either country could easily reignite an already volatile and dangerous situation.

    It is in this context that later this month, on May 21, the U.S. plans to launch a Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 4,200 miles away. The test was originally scheduled for early April, at the height of the current U.S.-North Korea nuclear crisis. At that time, U.S. officials postponed the test, stating they did not want to provoke a response from North Korea.

    So one must ask, has anything truly changed between North Korea and the U.S. since early April? Is a missile launch really any less provocative now than it was then? The answer is clearly that missile testing remains provocative. The posturing and exchanges that the world has been witnessing are capable of spiraling out of control and resulting in nuclear war today, just as they were a month ago.

    David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said, “The testing of a Minuteman III nuclear missile at this time is a clear example of U.S. double standards. The government believes that it is fine for the U.S. to test-fire these missiles when we choose to do so, while expressing criticism when other countries conduct missile tests. Clearly U.S. leaders would be highly critical if North Korea were to conduct a long-range missile test, now or at any time. We seem to have a blind spot in our thinking about our own tests. Such double standards encourage nuclear proliferation and make the world a more dangerous place.”

    One must also consider that each missile test is a clear reminder of the United States’ continued reliance on nuclear weapons in spite of proclamations by the Obama administration of the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world. Nor should one overlook the tens of millions of dollars spent on each missile test at a time when the U.S. economic recovery is still weighing in the balance.

    Clearly this upcoming long-range missile test is more than just a test. It is a provocative move in a nuclear war game. A game where there is no winner.
    #  #  #

    For further comment, contact Rick Wayman, Director of Programs of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, at rwayman@napf.org or (805) 965-3443. Outside of regular office hours, please contact Rick Wayman at (805) 696-5159.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation — The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s mission is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders.  Founded in 1982, the Foundation is comprised of individuals and organizations worldwide who realize the imperative for peace in the Nuclear Age. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit organization with consultative status to the United Nations.  For more information, visitwww.wagingpeace.org. 

  • Nuclear Roulette Has No Winners

    This article was originally published by Truthout.

    David KriegerThe United States and North Korea are playing a dangerous game of Nuclear Roulette.  The US is taking actions that threaten North Korea, such as conducting war games with US ally South Korea, including practice bombing runs that send nuclear-capable B-2 bombers from Missouri to the Korean Peninsula.  The North Koreans, in turn, are blustering, declaring they are in a state of war with South Korea, which technically is true since a truce and not a peace agreement ended the Korean War in 1953.  North Korean leaders have also cancelled the “hot line” with Seoul and are threatening nuclear attacks on the US, its troops and its allies.

    North Korea withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 and has since tested nuclear devices on three occasions (2006, 2009 and earlier this year).  It has also tested medium- and long-range missiles and is developing capabilities to threaten the US and its allies with nuclear weapons.  The US has responded to the North Korean tests by holding talks with other countries in Northeast Asia and putting increasingly stringent sanctions on North Korea.  The US also continues to regularly test its long-range, nuclear-capable missiles from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.  Tensions in Northeast Asia continue to rise.

    Nuclear threats are an integral part of nuclear deterrence.  For nuclear deterrence to work effectively, it is necessary for an opponent to believe a nuclear threat is real.  When the US joins South Korea in playing war games with nuclear-capable aircraft on the Korean Peninsula, the message of threat is clear to the North Korean leaders.  Equally clear is the message from North Korea to the US with its nuclear tests and bluster: North Korea has a nuclear capability that could cause unacceptable harm to the US, its troops and its allies.

    From an objective perspective, each country has the capability to cause the other (or its troops or allies) horrific damage.  While they are pounding on their chests and demonstrating that they are in fact crazy enough to use nuclear weapons, they are engaged in a drama that hopes to dissuade the other side from actually doing so.  Both countries should take note of this.

    The dangerous game of Nuclear Roulette is built into the nuclear deterrence paradigm.  Each time the hammer of the gun is cocked and the gun is pointed at the other side’s head, the barrel of the opponent’s gun is also pointed at one’s own head.  An accident or miscalculation during a time of tension could trigger a nuclear holocaust.

    Yes, of course the United States is the stronger of the two countries and would fare better, perhaps far better, in a nuclear war, but that isn’t good enough.  Yes, North Korea could be destroyed as a functioning country, but at what cost?  In addition to the terrible cost in lives of North Koreans, the US and its allies would also pay a heavy price: first, in the deaths of US troops stationed in the Northeast Asian region; second, in the deaths and devastation of US allies, South Korea and Japan, and possibly of the US itself; and third, in the loss of stature and credibility of the US for having engaged in nuclear warfare that destroyed the lives of potentially millions of innocent North Koreans.

    Nuclear Roulette has no winners.  It is a game that no country should be playing.  But the leaders of countries with nuclear weapons tend to believe these weapons make their own country more secure.  They do not.  They risk everything we hold dear, all we love, and they undermine our collective sense of decency.  The only way out of the Nuclear Roulette dilemma is to unload the gun and assure that it cannot be used again by any side.

    We can do far better than we are doing.  For the short term, the US should stop conducting provocative war games in the region and instead offer some diplomatic carrots rather than sticks.  The US would go far to defuse a dangerous situation by again offering to support North Korea in providing food and energy for its people.  For the longer term, the US should lead the way forward by using its convening power to commence negotiations for a new treaty, a global Nuclear Weapons Convention, to achieve the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Dealing with a Nuclear North Korea

    This article was originally published by Politico.


    Bennett RambergOnce again North Korea befuddles.


    On the cusp of receiving food aid from the United States as the quid pro quo for opening the Yongbong nuclear complex to international inspectors and a halt in missile testing, Pyongyang wasted little time to turn “progress” into a sink hole.


    The rub: a three-stage North Korean rocket set to launch a small satellite into orbit in the next few days. The concern, the data gleaned from the launch will mature Pyonygang’s ambition to build an intercontinental ballistic missile that could threaten the United States with a nuclear warhead.


    Maturation has been long in coming. North Korea first replicated the Soviet Scud rockets it acquired from Egypt decades ago, and has slowly developed a healthy inventory of short- and intermediate-range missiles. But the long-range rocket proved to be another matter. Its 2006 and 2009 launch attempts failed.


    In anticipating each, Washington first pouted, but then returned to efforts to coax Pyongyang back to the six-party talks to can fulfill the North’s 2005 nuclear disarmament pledge. For a time, Kim Jong Il did return, but winked — attempting to pocket any benefits he could, while continuing to modernize his secret nuclear enrichment enterprise.


    This has left Washington uncertain, as the new Kim prepares the missile launch. There are no perfect options. But there are at least four imperfect alternatives to deal with the North’s missile and nuclear programs, First, continue the policy of coaxing. Second, attempt further to isolate the regime. Third, use force to halt the most threatening nuclear elements. Or, fourth, accept what cannot be changed and learn to live with a nuclear armed North Korea.


    Coaxing is business as usual. Trying to get Pyongyang to reliably say “uncle” and give up the bomb does not seem to be in the cards. The international community has tried and tried again since South Korea, Russia, China and Japan joined the United States and North Korea in the six-party talks in 2003. The approaching rocket launch, coupled with reports that Pyongyang may yet test another nuclear weapon, suggests that the new Kim intends to continue the path of the old to stay in power.


    The second option might be called the Bolton approach. Former U.N. Amb. John Bolton has written many articles pressing for strict isolation of Pyongyang, to bring down the regime. He advocates detaching Pyongyang from “international financial markets, ramping up efforts to prevent trade in weapons…and pressuring China to adhere to existing UN sanctions resolutions.”


    The major impediment is that Beijing refuses to go along — making the strategy a chimera.


    Force marks a third option. Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry and Assistant Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, writing in The Washington Post and Time magazine in 2006, called on the Bush administration to initiate a submarine cruise missile strike to destroy Pyongyang’s long-range rockets on the launch pad. They argued, “the risk of inaction will prove far greater” for the United States — even at the risk of igniting a new Korean war.


    Carter is now deputy secretary of defense. But there is no public talk that his proposal has any traction today in the Obama administration.


    This leaves a fourth option — accepting what we can’t change while attempting to reduce nuclear risks. The stark fact remains that without regime change — which was key in the elimination of other nuclear arsenals, including the former Soviet republics and South Africa — North Korea will remain a nuclear armed state. Washington’s challenge is to assure that Pyongyang never uses the arsenal out of malice or fear.


    North Korea’s use of its arsenal without provocation seems farfetched. More than anything, the leadership seeks to stay in power. It must know that any nuclear launch would result in the regime’s demise in the devastating U.S. and allied response that would be sure to follow.


    Nonetheless, there remains the specter that North Korea could launch due to fear of preemption or as part of an escalating incident. Reducing these risks ought to be the priority.


    This requires better communication between Washington and Pyongyang. At the very least, there should be a negotiated hot-line, replicating the Cold War link between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Better yet, full diplomatic relations could reduce the likelihood of major misunderstanding.


    Neither a hot line nor diplomatic relations should be seen as reward to the North, but rather the realization that a nuclear Pyongyang is likely to be part of the northeast Asian landscape for the foreseeable future.


    Assuming otherwise — without taking the necessary measures to reduce risk — could create is a far greater problem for the United States than either proceeding with the failed policies of the past or the impractical options advanced by some.

  • North Korean Delusions

    Martin HellmanReading the mainstream media, you’d be forgiven if you thought the only problems with North Korea’s nuclear weapons program were a direct result of that rogue nation’s “nut job” leaders. The most recent example is the coverage of a talk on nuclear proliferation given my friend and colleague, Dr. Siegfried Hecker. While he’s now a professor here at Stanford, in his former life, he was Director of Los Alamos from 1986 to 1997, so “when Sig talks, people listen.” The AP dispatch starts off as follows:



    A U.S. scientist who visited a secret North Korean nuclear site last year says Pyongyang may seek to launch a third atomic test to enable it to develop a small fissile warhead that can be carried by a missile.


    Nowhere in the article does it say what I’ve heard Hecker say many times before, and what is the essence of his advice on what to do about North Korea’s nuclear program: If we continue to make unilateral nuclear disarmament (by the North) a precondition to talks, they won’t talk. (Would we, if the tables were reversed?) If we don’t talk, they’ll build more bombs, better bombs, and export their nuclear technology.


    On the other hand, if we will temporarily put denuclearization aside and address some of their legitimate security concerns – we’ve threatened to attack them repeatedly, and Obama’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review leaves open the possibility of our using nuclear weapons against them – Hecker is convinced by his seven visits there that we can get what he calls “three NO’s for one YES:” no more bombs, no better bombs, and no export in return for our treating them with some respect and reducing the level of threat that they feel from us and South Korea.


    When he gave a guest lecture in my seminar on “Nuclear Weapons, Risk and Hope,” Hecker told the class that many people in Washington agree with him, but tell him that his suggestions are impossible because of domestic politics. If the president were to treat North Korea with some respect and address their security concerns, he’d be accused of rewarding bad behavior. While there’s some truth in that perspective, isn’t that what nuclear deterrence is all about?


    Returning to the impossibility of rationally approaching North Korea’s nuclear program, what Hecker hears in D.C. makes clear that the solution lies not with our supposed leaders, who must follow the crowd, but with individual citizens like you and me. Until enough of us start demanding rational nuclear policies, we’ll live in a world where it is just a matter of time before the unthinkable happens. If we can find the courage to say that the nuclear emperor needs some new clothes, we could move to a world that not only is safe from nuclear annihilation, but also much safer in general. Please help by sharing this message with your friends and reading at least the home page of my related web site.

  • New Think and Old Weapons

    Every four years the White House issues a “nuclear posture review.” That may sound like an anachronism. It isn’t. In a world where the United States and Russia still have more than 20,000 nuclear weapons — and Iran, North Korea and others have seemingly unquenchable nuclear appetites — what the United States says about its arsenal matters enormously.

    President Obama’s review was due to Congress in December. That has been delayed, in part because of administration infighting. The president needs to get this right. It is his chance to finally jettison cold war doctrine and bolster America’s credibility as it presses to rein in Iran, North Korea and other proliferators.

    Mr. Obama has already committed rhetorically to the vision of a world without nuclear weapons. But we are concerned that some of his advisers, especially at the Pentagon, are resisting his bold ambitions. He needs to stick with the ideas he articulated in his campaign and in speeches last year in Prague and at the United Nations.

    These are some of the important questions the posture review must address:

    THEIR PURPOSE: Current doctrine gives nuclear weapons a “critical role” in defending the United States and its allies. And it suggests they could be used against foes wielding chemical, biological or even conventional forces — not just nuclear arms. Mr. Obama’s aides have proposed changing that to say that the “primary” purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack against the United States or its allies. This still invites questions about whether Washington values — and might use — nuclear forces against non-nuclear targets.

    Given America’s vast conventional military superiority, broader uses are neither realistic nor necessary. Any ambiguity undercuts Washington’s credibility when it argues that other countries have no strategic reason to develop their own nuclear arms. The sole purpose of American nuclear forces should be to deter a nuclear attack against this country or its allies.

    HOW MANY: President George W. Bush disdained arms control as old think, and Washington and Moscow have not signed an arms reduction treaty since 2002. Mr. Obama launched negotiations on a new agreement that would slash the number of warheads each side has deployed from 2,200 to between 1,500 and 1,675. The talks are dragging on, but there is hope for an agreement soon. Both sides should go deeper.

    The review should make clear that the United States is ready to move, as a next step, down to 1,000 deployed warheads — military experts say half that number is enough to wipe out the assets of Russia, which is no longer an enemy. China, the only major nuclear power adding to its arsenal, is estimated to have 100 to 200 warheads. The treaty being negotiated says nothing about the nearly 15,000 warheads, in total, that the United States and Russia keep as backups — the so-called hedge. And it says nothing about America’s 500 short-range nuclear weapons, which are considered secure, or Russia’s 3,000 or more, which are chillingly vulnerable to theft.

    The review should make clear that there is no need for a huge hedge, and that tactical weapons have an utter lack of strategic value — as a prelude to reducing both. Certainly no general we know of could imagine exploding a warhead on a battlefield. Today’s greatest nuclear danger is that terrorists will steal or build a weapon. That is best countered by halting proliferation and securing and reducing stockpiles and other material.

    NEW WEAPONS: The United States built its last new warhead in 1989. So when aides to President George W. Bush called for building new weapons, with new designs and new capabilities, it opened this country to charges of hypocrisy and double standards when it demanded that North Korea and Iran end their nuclear programs.

    Mr. Obama has said that this country does not need new weapons. But we are concerned the review will open the door to just that by directing the labs to study options — including a new weapons design — for maintaining the arsenal. The government has a strong and hugely expensive system for ensuring that the stockpile is safe and reliable. Mr. Obama has already vastly increased the labs’ budgets. The review should make clear that there is no need for a new weapon.

    ALERT LEVELS: The United States and Russia each still have about 1,000 weapons ready to fire at a moment’s notice. Mr. Obama has rightly described this as a dangerous cold war relic. The review should commit to taking as many of those forces off hair-trigger alert as possible — and encourage Russia to do the same.

    •

    In April, Mr. Obama will host a much needed summit meeting on the need to better secure nuclear material from terrorists. In May, Washington will encourage a United Nations-led conference to strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the bedrock, and battered, agreement for curbing the spread of nuclear arms.

    President Obama will also have to persuade the Senate to ratify the Start follow-on treaty, and we hope he will quickly press the Senate to approve the test ban treaty. He is also working with allies to revive nuclear talks with North Korea and to impose tougher sanctions on Iran. Getting the nuclear posture review right is essential for moving all of this ahead.

  • North Korea Nuke Test Makes Nuclear Abolition More Important Than Ever

    This article was originally published by YES! Magazine

    North Korea’s nuclear testing heightens and underlines the dangers of a world in which nuclear arms are spreading.

    The news media treats the North Korea’s nuclear weapons program as a story of a bad actor threatening international security, giving it the sort of attention rarely given to calls for constructive action to eliminate the danger of nuclear weapons. In particular, the frayed Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is seldom mentioned, nor the obligation contained in the treaty for the nuclear powers, including the U.S., to eliminate nuclear stockpiles.

    The contrast hits home in Hiroshima, Japan, the first city attacked with an atomic bomb. Just eight days before the North Korean test, the city’s daily newspaper, the Chugoku Shimbun, released an appeal from 17 Nobel Peace Prize laureates for citizens and governments to act for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Outside of Japan, the laureates’ Hiroshima-Nagasaki Declaration has received almost no media attention.

    When North Korea held its nuclear test, however, Hiroshima immediately became a media stage, and legitimately so: Citizens gathered in an outdoor protest. At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, a clock tracking the number of days since the world’s last nuclear test, which had been approaching 1,000, went back to one. Reporters sought out aging survivors for their comments. Suzuko Numata, an 85-year-old interviewed by Japan’s Mainichi newspaper from her bed at a home for the elderly, raised the real issue looming behind the North Korean test: a world in which nuclear weapons continue to be seen by some nations as something to be sought rather than as a threat to all humans.

    Just days before the Nobel Prize winners’ declaration, one of the signers, International Atomic Energy Authority head Mohamed ElBaradei, told the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper that existing agreements on nonproliferation are out of date and that he fears big growth in the number of nuclear powers. The story received at best limited attention, despite ElBaradei’s prominence and expertise.

    Then, there are the admirable efforts of some of the most prominent former U.S. national security leaders to generate momentum for a non-nuclear world. The group includes former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn. They did get space on the Wall Street Journal to write about their ideas, twice. Until recently, however, one was more likely to come across any details of their undertaking in a progressive magazine like YES! than in the main news media. But, as Shultz told YES! Magazine’s editor Sarah van Gelder for the summer 2008 edition, his group was engaging with leaders from all of the nuclear powers, including officially unacknowledged possessor Israel.

    Shultz said, “The Nonproliferation Treaty in Article 6 says that those who don’t have nuclear weapons will have access to nuclear power technology and they won’t try to get nuclear weapons, and those who do have nuclear weapons will phase down their importance eventually to zero. People are looking for governments to live up to that treaty.”

    More recently, though, the group received considerable media attention, because they met with President Barack Obama in the White House to endorse the vision for a nuclear-free world he unveiled in Prague earlier this spring. By speaking out, Obama has begun to make nonproliferation a more appealing story to a wider spectrum of the media.

    Certainly, the Nobel Peace Prize groups’s spearhead Mairead Maguire, ElBaradei, the Dalai Lama, Muhammad Yunus, and the rest of their group hope Obama can begin to make a difference. The head of Chugoku Shimbun’s Hiroshima Peace Media Center, Akira Tashiro, wrote the appeal, which was revised before publication to take account of Obama’s speech in Prague.

    The appeal’s timing was designed to fall a year ahead of a U.N. conference to review the treaty, including the duty of nuclear states to work towards disarmament. The 2005 review failed to produced substantive agreement, but observers say that the presence of the Obama administration has improved the atmosphere at a just-completed preparatory conference for 2010.

    For the treaty’s future, North Korea, Iran, or other states with nuclear ambitions are no more than half the problem. The Nobel laureates’ Hiroshima-Nagasaki Declaration says, “We are deeply troubled by this threat of proliferation to non-nuclear weapon states, but equally concerned at the faltering will of the nuclear powers to move forward in their obligation to disarm their own nations of these dreadful weapons.”

    In the same YES! edition as the Shultz interview, author Jonathan Schell wrote of the potential for a safer world if the nuclear powers would bargain to give up their bombs in exchange for enforceable promises by others to stay out of the nuclear business.

    In sorting through the likely reasons behind North Korea’s nuclear test this week, David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Peace Age Foundation, came to a related point: “North Korea’s nuclear testing is a manifestation of a deeper problem in the international system, that of continuing to have a small group of countries possess and implicitly threaten the use of nuclear weapons for deterrence or any other reason.”

    In an interview, Tashiro said he hoped that Americans would support nuclear disarmament on the grounds—expressed by Shultz, Kissinger, and others—of the threat created by proliferation and the potential for terrorists to acquire nuclear materials. But, to come to that conclusion, Americans need more information on the issue than they usually receive.

    Even with Obama talking about ending nuclear weapons, he and other nations’ leaders will need the support of an informed, engaged public if they are to create meaningful progress toward nuclear disarmament. In their conclusion, the declaration signers say, “As Nobel Peace laureates, we call on the citizens of the world to press their leaders to grasp the peril of inaction and summon the political will to advance toward nuclear disarmament and abolition.” That idea resonates in Hiroshima, a city that tries to make a better future out of horrible suffering. Perhaps as the world comes to terms with the dangerous possibilities of a nuclear-armed North Korea and Iran, the obligations of the current nuclear power to work towards abolition will get the attention required for action.

    Joe Copeland wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Joe, who is part of the online news startup Seattle PostGlobe, is a visiting researcher at the Hiroshima Peace Institute on a Fulbright grant for journalists. While in Japan, he has a blog at www.hiroshimastories.com. The views are his own.

  • Maybe We Should Take the North Koreans at Their Word

    Shortly after North Korea exploded its second nuclear device in three years on Monday morning, it released a statement explaining why. “The republic has conducted another underground nuclear testing successfully in order to strengthen our defensive nuclear deterrence.”(1) If the Obama Administration hopes to dissuade Pyongyang from the nuclear course it seems so hell bent on pursuing, Washington must understand just how adroitly nuclear arms do appear to serve North Korea’s national security. In other words, perhaps we should recognize that they mean what they say.

    From the dawn of history until the dawn of the nuclear age, it seemed rather self-evident that for virtually any state in virtually any strategic situation, the more military power one could wield relative to one’s adversaries, the more security one gained. That all changed, however, with Alamogordo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the Cold War’s long atomic arms race, it slowly dawned on “nuclear use theorists” – whom one can hardly resist acronyming as NUTS – that in the nuclear age, security did not necessarily require superiority. Security required simply an ability to retaliate after an adversary had struck, to inflict upon that opponent “unacceptable damage” in reply. If an adversary knew, no matter how much devastation it might inflict in a first strike, that the chances were good that it would receive massive damage as a consequence (even far less damage than it had inflicted as long as that damage was “unacceptable”), then, according to the logic of nuclear deterrence, that adversary would be dissuaded from striking first. What possible political benefit could outweigh the cost of the possible obliteration of, oh, a state’s capital city, and the leaders of that state themselves, and perhaps more than a million lives therein?

    Admittedly, the unassailable logic of this “unacceptable damage” model of nuclear deterrence – which we might as well call UD – failed to put the brakes on a spiraling Soviet/American nuclear arms competition that began almost immediately after the USSR acquired nuclear weapons of its own in 1949. Instead, a different model of nuclear deterrence emerged, deterrence exercised by the capability completely to wipe out the opponent’s society, “mutually assured destruction,” which soon came to be known to all as MAD. There were other scenarios of aggression – nuclear attacks on an adversary’s nuclear weapons, nuclear or conventional attacks on an adversary’s closest allies (in Western and Eastern Europe) – that nuclear weapons were supposed to deter as well. However, the Big Job of nuclear weapons was to dissuade the other side from using their nuclear weapons against one’s own cities and society, by threatening to deliver massive nuclear devastation on the opponent’s cities and society in reply. “The Department of Defense,” said an Ohio congressman in the early 1960s, with some exasperation, “has become the Department of Retaliation.”(2)

    Nevertheless, those who engaged in an effort to slow the arms race often employed the logic of UD in their attempts to do so. “Our twenty thousandth bomb,” said Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project that built the world’s first atomic weapons, as early as 1953, “will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two thousandth.” (3) “Deterrence does not depend on superiority,” said the great strategist Bernard Brodie in 1965.(4) “There is no foreign policy objective today that is so threatened,” said retired admiral and former CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1998, “that we would É accept the risk of receiving just one nuclear detonation in retaliation.”(5)

    Consider how directly the logic of UD applies to the contemporary international environment, to the twin nuclear challenges that have dominated the headlines during most of the past decade, and to the most immediate nuclear proliferation issues now confronting the Obama Administration. Because the most persuasive explanation for the nuclear quests on which both Iran and North Korea have embarked is, indeed, the notion that “deterrence does not depend on superiority.” Deterrence depends only an ability to strike back. Iran and North Korea appear to be seeking small nuclear arsenals in order to deter potential adversaries from launching an attack upon them – by threatening them with unacceptable damage in retaliation.

    Neither North Korea nor Iran could hope to defeat its most powerful potential adversary – the United States – in any kind of direct military confrontation. They cannot repel an actual attack upon them. They cannot shoot American planes and missiles out of the sky. Indeed, no state can.

    However, what these countries can aspire to do is to dissuade the American leviathan from launching such an attack. How? By developing the capability to instantly vaporize an American military base or three in Iraq or Qatar or South Korea or Japan, or an entire U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf or the Sea of Japan, or even an American city on one coast or the other. And by making it implicitly clear that they would respond to any kind of assault by employing that capability immediately, before it’s too late, following the venerable maxim: “Use them or lose them.” The obliteration of an entire American military base, or an entire American naval formation, or an entire American city, would clearly seem to qualify as “unacceptable damage” for the United States.

    Moreover, to deter an American attack, Iran and North Korea do not need thousands of nuclear warheads. They just need a couple of dozen, well hidden and well protected. American military planners might be almost certain that they could take out all the nuclear weapons in these countries in some kind of a dramatic lightning “surgical strike.” However, with nuclear weapons, “almost” is not good enough. Even the barest possibility that such a strike would fail, and that just one or two nuclear weapons would make it into the air, detonate over targets, and result in massive “unacceptable damage” for the United States, would in virtually any conceivable circumstance serve to dissuade Washington from undertaking such a strike.

    In addition, it is crucial to recognize that Iran and North Korea would not intend for their nascent nuclear arsenals to deter only nuclear attacks upon them. If the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States disappeared tomorrow morning, but America’s conventional military superiority remained, it still would be the case that the only possible military asset that these states could acquire, to effectively deter an American military assault, would be the nuclear asset.

    The “Korean Committee for Solidarity with World Peoples,” a mouthpiece for the North Korean government, captured Pyongyang’s logic quite plainly just weeks after the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. “The Iraqi war taught the lesson that ‘the security of the nation can be protected only when a country has a physical deterrent force’”(6) Similarly, a few weeks earlier, just before the Iraq invasion began, a North Korean general was asked to defend his country’s nuclear weapons program, and with refreshing candor replied, “We see what you are getting ready to do with Iraq. And you are not going to do it to us.”(7)

    It really is quite a remarkable development. North Korea today is one of the most desperate countries in the world. Most of its citizens are either languishing in gulags or chronically starving. And yet – in contrast to all the debate that has taken place in recent years about whether the United States and/or Israel ought to launch a preemptive strike on Iran – no one seems to be proposing any kind of military strike on North Korea. Why not? Because of the mere possibility that North Korea could impose unacceptable damage upon us in reply.

    Perhaps the most remarkable thing about UD is that it seems every bit as effective as MAD. North Korea today possesses no more than a handful of nuclear warheads, and maintains nothing like a “mutual” nuclear balance with the United States. In addition, the retaliation that North Korea can threaten cannot promise anything like a complete “assured destruction.” To vaporize an American carrier group in the Sea of Japan, or a vast American military base in South Korea or Japan, or even an American city, would not be at all the same thing as the “destruction” of the entire American nation – as the USSR was able to threaten under MAD.

    And yet, MAD and UD, it seems, exercise deterrence in precisely the same way. Astonishingly, it seems that Washington finds itself every bit as thoroughly deterred by a North Korea with probably fewer than 10 nuclear weapons as it did by a Soviet Union with 10,000. Although UD hardly contains the rich acronymphomaniacal irony wrought by MAD, it appears that both North Korea and Iran intend now to base their national security strategies solidly upon it.

    There is very little reason to suppose that other states will not soon follow their lead.

    President Obama, of course, to his great credit, has not only made a nuclear weapon-free Iran and North Korea one of his central foreign policy priorities, he has begun to chart a course toward a nuclear weapon-free world. In a groundbreaking speech before a huge outdoor rally in Prague on April 5th, he said, “Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” (Unfortunately, he followed that with the statement that nuclear weapons abolition would not “be achieved quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime,” suggesting that neither he nor the nuclear policy officials in his administration fully appreciate the magnitude and immediacy of the nuclear peril. Do they really think the human race can retain nuclear weapons for another half century or so, yet manage to dodge the bullet of nuclear accident, or nuclear terror, or a nuclear crisis spinning out of control every single time?)

    The one thing we can probably say for sure about the prospects for universal nuclear disarmament is that no state will agree either to abjure or to dismantle nuclear weapons unless it believes that such a course is the best course for its own national security. To persuade states like North Korea and Iran to climb aboard the train to abolition would probably require simultaneous initiatives on three parallel tracks. One track would deliver foreign and defense policies that assure weaker states that we do not intend to attack them, that just as we expect them to abide by the world rule of law they can expect the same from us, that the weak need not cower in fear before the strong. Another track would deliver diplomatic overtures that convince weaker states that on balance, overall, their national security will better be served in a world where no one possesses nuclear weapons, rather than in a world where they do-but so too do many others. And another track still would deliver nuclear weapons policies that directly address the long-simmering resentments around the world about the long-standing nuclear double standard, that directly acknowledge our legacy of nuclear hypocrisy, and that directly connect nuclear non-proliferation to nuclear disarmament.

    The power decisively to adjust all those variables, of course, does not reside in Pyongyang or Tehran. It resides instead in Washington.

    ——-

    (1) The Washington Post, May 25, 2009.

    (2) Quoted in Daniel Lang, An Inquiry Into Enoughness: Of Bombs and Men and Staying Alive (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 167.

    (3) Quoted in Ibid., p. 38.

    (4) Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971 – first published in 1965), p. 274, quoted in Sarah J. Diehl and James Clay Moltz, Nuclear Weapons and Nonproliferation: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2002), p. 34.

    (5) Quoted in The Nation, Special Issue Containing Jonathan Schell’s interviews with several nuclear policy professionals and intellectuals, February 2/9, 1998, p. 40.

    (6) Quoted in Securing Our Survival: The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, Tilman Ruff and John Loretz, eds. (Boston: IPPNW, 2007), p. 37.

    (7) Don Oberdorfer, PBS, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, October 9, 2006, quoted in Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), p. 141.

    Tad Daley is the Writing Fellow with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Nobel Peace Laureate disarmament advocacy organization. His first book, Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in January 2010.

  • Remarks to the Third Session of the Preparatory Committee for the 2010 NPT Review Conference

    Excellences, Ladies and Gentlemen,

    I am pleased to welcome you to the United Nations as we open this important third session of the Preparatory Committee for the 2010 Review Conference of the States parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

    For too long, the nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation agenda has been stagnating in a Cold War mentality.

    In 2005, the world experienced what might be called a disarmament depression. The NPT Review Conference that year ended in disappointment. The UN World Summit outcome contained not even a single line on weapons of mass destruction.

    Today, we seem to be emerging from that low point. The change has come in recent weeks. But it is unfolding against a backdrop of multiple threats that, while urgent, tend to obscure the urgency of the disarmament and non-proliferation agenda.

    The global economic crisis, climate change and the outbreak of the H1N1 flu virus are all reminders that we live in an interdependent world. They demand a full and forceful multilateral response. At the same time, nuclear weapons remain an apocalyptic threat. We cannot afford to place disarmament and non-proliferation on a backburner. Let us not be lulled into complacency. Let us not miss the opportunity to make our societies safer and more prosperous.

    Excellencies,

    I have been using every opportunity to push for progress. I discussed non-proliferation and disarmament with Russian President Medvedev and U.S. President Obama. I welcome the joint commitment they announced last month to fulfill their obligations under article VI of the NPT.

    I am particularly encouraged that both countries are committed to rapidly pursuing verifiable reductions in their strategic offensive arsenals by replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with a new, legally-binding pact. I hope their example will serve as a catalyst in inspiring other nuclear powers to follow suit.

    Other developments also merit attention.

    On Iran, I encourage the country’s leaders to continue their cooperation with the IAEA with a view to demonstrating the entirely peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme.

    I also encourage them to re-engage in the negotiating process with the EU 3+3 and the EU High Representative on the basis of the relevant Security Council resolutions, and in line with the package of proposals for cooperation with Iran.

    With respect to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, despite the current serious challenges, I continue to believe that the Six-Party process is the best mechanism to achieve the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner.

    I therefore urge the DPRK to return to these talks so that everybody can resolve their respective concerns through dialogue and cooperation, based on the relevant Security Council resolutions as well as multilateral and bilateral agreements.

    I also urge all states to end the stalemate that has marked the international disarmament machinery for too long. To strengthen the NPT regime, it is essential that the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty enters into force without further delay, and that the Conference on Disarmament begins negotiations on a verifiable fissile material treaty. I commend President Obama’s commitment to ratify the CTBT, and urge all countries that have not done so to ratify the Treaty without conditions.

    Hopes for a breakthrough on the deadlocked disarmament agenda have been building. We have seen a cascade of proposals. Elder statesmen, leaders of nuclear-weapon states, regional groups, various commissions and civil society representatives have elaborated proposals for slaying the nuclear monster.

    Their voices may be varied, but they are all part of the same rising chorus demanding action on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. Concerns about nuclear terrorism, a new rush by some to possess nuclear arms, and renewed interest in nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels have only heightened the need for urgent action.

    Excellencies,

    The work you do in the next two weeks will be critical. You must seize the moment and show your seriousness.

    This preparatory session must generate agreements on key procedural issues and substantive recommendations to the Review Conference.

    The Review Conference must produce a clear commitment by all NPT states parties to comply fully with all of their obligations under this vital Treaty.

    I urge you to work in a spirit of compromise and flexibility. I hope you will avoid taking absolute positions that have no chance of generating consensus. Instead, build bridges, and be part of a new multilateralism. People understand intuitively that nuclear weapons will never make us more secure.

    They know that real security lies in responding to poverty, climate change, armed conflict and instability.

    They want governments to invest in plans for growth and development, not weapons of mass destruction.

    If you can set us on a course towards achieving a nuclear-weapon-free world, you will send a message of hope to the world.

    We desperately need this message at this time. I am counting on you, and I am supporting all of your efforts to succeed, now and at the Review Conference in 2010.

    Thank you.

    Ban Ki-moon is Secretary-General of the United Nations. This address was delivered at the opening session of the Third Preparatory Committee of the 2010 NPT Review Conference at the United Nations in New York.