Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: NPT

  • No Nuclear Weapons: An Interview with George Shultz

    Article originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

    George Shultz was there when nuclear disarmament slipped through our fingers. Today, he says, action is even more urgent. Sarah van Gelder interviews George Shultz, former Secretary of State.

    Twenty years ago, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev came within a hair’s breadth of agreeing to phase out their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The encounter took place at Reykjavik, Iceland, and one of the people who was there was Secretary of State George Shultz. When the proposal came up, he is reported to have said, “Let’s do it!”

    Today, from his office at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, he’s back on the case. In collaboration with former Senator Sam Nunn, William Perry, who was secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, this veteran of the Cold War is taking on what may be the biggest threat to human security.

    YES! executive editor Sarah van Gelder spoke to Secretary Shultz in March 2008, shortly after he returned from Oslo, where he led the third in a series of conferences on eliminating nuclear weapons—this one involving representatives of all the countries of the world that have nuclear weapons.

    Sarah: Can the United States be secure without its nuclear stockpile?
    Shultz: You’re going to be more secure if there are no nuclear weapons in the world, because if you achieve this goal, you won’t be risking having nuclear weapons blow up in one of our cities.

    At the conferences abroad I’ve been attending, it was certainly borne in on me that the notion of a two-tiered world—where some countries can have nuclear weapons and others can’t—is getting less and less acceptable.

    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.

    Sarah: Is it possible to verify that nuclear weapons have been eliminated?
    Shultz: That’s one of the main subjects to be worked on. The British government has volunteered to take on verification—to try to think through how you work it out.

    We have the START Treaty between the United States and Russia that includes the best verification procedures of anything that’s been developed. It expires in December of 2009, so we’re suggesting that the treaty be extended so as not to lose those verification provisions.

    Sarah: How would it affect our relative power in the world if nuclear weapons were eliminated?
    Shultz: At a meeting in Washington, DC, about a year ago, Henry Kissinger said, “The thing that I lost sleep over, and that I agonized about more than anything else when I was in office, was what would I say if the president ever asked my advice on whether to use a nuclear weapon, knowing that a hundred thousand or maybe more would be killed, and if there were a nuclear exchange, it would be in the billions.”

    Now that we know so much about these weapons and their power, they’re almost weapons that we wouldn’t use. So I think we’re better off without them.

    Of course the United States has such awesome conventional power, I think probably that on the relative balance we would be well off.

    Sarah: Do you think there can be nuclear energy without proliferation?
    Shultz: If you get the nuclear fuel cycle under control, yes. But I listen to people talk about nuclear power plants, and they hardly ever mention the issue. I don’t think people are alert to this problem.

    In terms of the nuclear fuel cycle, there is just as strong a feeling that you don’t want to have another two-tiered system, in which some countries are allowed to enrich uranium and others aren’t. I think there’s going to have to be an international regime on that.

    Sarah: Why is the reaction today so different from the reaction to President Reagan’s proposal at Reykjavik to eliminate nuclear weapons?
    Shultz: After Reykjavik, you may remember, the reaction was very negative. Margaret Thatcher came over, practically summoned me to the British ambassador’s residence, and she read me out: How could I possibly take part in such a discussion?

    I think it has dawned on people that we’ve gone to sleep on this subject. The proliferation problems are growing, and the amount of nuclear fissile material around is large, and some of it isn’t well safeguarded. We have a terrorist phenomenon, and the non-proliferation treaty is fraying at the edges. So maybe we should do something a little different.

    Sarah: You just returned from a conference in Norway on the abolition of nuclear weapons. What happened there?
    Shultz: Sam Nunn and I went. Henry Kissinger and Bill Perry were not able to go. Twenty nine countries were represented—all the countries with nuclear weapons, including Israel. The people there had their doubts, but they were intrigued; they can see there is a danger—a tipping point problem.

    We’re getting to the point where proliferation could get out of control. If a terrorist group gets a nuclear weapon or the fissile material from which they can make one, they aren’t getting it for deterrence. They are getting it to use it.

    The Doctrine of Deterrence justified nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The deterrent impact of Mutual Assured Destruction kept an uneasy peace, although if you were involved, you knew that there were more close calls than you were comfortable with.

    At the end of the Cold War, more countries were acquiring nuclear weapons, and others were aspiring to have them.

    The Gulf states all want nuclear power plants, and if you enrich your own uranium—as the Iranians aspire to do—you can enrich it for a weapon. When the fuel is spent, it can be reprocessed into plutonium. If nuclear power spreads—as the people who are worried about global warming are pushing for—then the problem of the nuclear fuel cycle emerges. All of these things together give you that uneasy feeling.

    Sarah: Have you had a response from the leading presidential contenders?
    Shultz: I haven’t seen anything from Senator McCain. Senator Obama has made a statement supporting what we’re doing. Senator Clinton has been a little less forthcoming than Senator Obama, but has indicated interest.

    I hope that I, or Henry, or someone can get a chance to talk to Senator McCain before long.

    Sarah: Is there active opposition to your initiative to eliminate nuclear weapons?
    Shultz: There are people who think that the idea is not a good idea and that it will never happen. Mostly, however, they say that they are in favor of the steps that we’ve identified. So we say, OK, let’s get going on the steps that we can do today that will make the world safer.

    Sarah: What response have you had from the Russians to this proposal?
    Shultz: No formal response. But, at our meeting in London, two former Russian foreign ministers were there, one of whom, I understand, is close to the current regime. When he finished speaking, I said, “Igor, will you let me translate what you said? It is that as far as Russia is concerned, the door is open.” He said, “That’s a fair translation. We’re ready to think about it.”

    That’s as good as you can get.

    Sarah: What is the first thing you would like the next president to do to move this process forward?
    Shultz: I’m not trying to prescribe for the next president. We’re trying to get the building blocks ready. We’ve talked to people from some other countries, and they’re interested enough so that if the United States, working with Russia, were to take this initiative and get other people to join, it might be pretty exciting. And it might once again put us in the role of doing something that people feel good about.

    There is quite a list of people—large numbers of former secretaries of state, defense, and national security advisors—who have publicly stated their support. So we’d be in a position to say to a new president, “If you decide to go this way, here are a bunch of people from both sides of the aisle who are willing to stand up behind you and applaud.”

    Sarah van Gelder interviewed George Shultz as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is Executive Editor of YES! Magazine.

  • The Non-Proliferation Treaty and Human Survival

    The Non-Proliferation Treaty and Human Survival

    In the vastness of the universe there is only one place we know of where life exists. That place, of course, is our planet, our Earth. Our planet has been hospitable to the evolution of life, resulting in the development of complex life forms, including homo sapiens, the “knowing” ones. We are “knowing” because we have the capacity to perceive and reflect upon our surroundings, our vision reaching to the far ends of the universe itself.

    We humans are nature’s mirror. We were created by the conditions of the universe, but in a sense it is also true that, by our perceptions and reflections, we create the universe. A well-known philosophical riddle asks whether a tree falling in the forest would make a sound if there were no one there to hear it. In the same way, but on a larger scale, we might ask if the universe itself would exist if there were no creatures like ourselves capable of perceiving and reflecting upon it.

    All of this is to say that human beings are special. In the long span of universe time, the appearance of humans is just a few short ticks on the cosmic clock. Yet, in that short span of time we have achieved remarkable intellectual, spiritual and artistic heights. We have also created tools capable of destroying much of life, including ourselves. By our cleverness in creating nuclear weapons, we have placed our own future on the planet in danger.

    With the existence of the future of our species in jeopardy, we are faced with a choice. We can confront this existential threat with ignorance, apathy and denial, or we can join together to end this threat of our own making. Choosing the latter route would mean accepting responsibility for our common future and acting to assure it.

    The diplomats from many nations of the world who negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) had a solution to the nuclear weapons threat to humanity. They sought to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to other states, and they also sought to eliminate the nuclear weapons already in the arsenals of those states that possessed them. Their efforts resulted in Article VI of the Treaty, in which the nuclear weapons states were required to engage in “good faith” negotiations for nuclear disarmament.

    The NPT was opened for signatures in 1968, and we are still waiting for those “good faith” negotiations for complete nuclear disarmament. In 1995, an NPT Review and Extension Conference was held on the 25th anniversary of the Treaty entering into force. Many civil society organizations argued at this conference that the NPT should not be extended indefinitely, since it would give the equivalent of a blank check to the nuclear weapons states who had so badly failed in fulfilling their Treaty obligations for its first quarter century.

    But the United States, along with the UK and France, argued for an indefinite extension. They twisted arms and, in the end, prevailed. And the warnings that they would approach their obligations for “good faith” negotiations with the same disdain or indifference with which they had approached them in the past have proven true.

    At the five-year NPT Review Conferences and the Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) meetings in between, the United States and its allies have fought against recognition of their obligations under Article VI of the Treaty. They distribute slick public relations brochures that gloss over the lack of progress in complying with Article VI. They resist accepting even the responsibility to engage in the good faith negotiations to which they have committed themselves. Their goal seems to be to deflect criticism, while actually doing virtually nothing to promote a world free of nuclear weapons.

    At the NPT Review Conferences and PrepComs, civil society organizations come to plead on behalf of humanity. They are given a few hours on the program to make their impassioned pleas, but often find that the official delegates to the conference are unwilling even to come to hear what they have to say. Over the years, the expectations that the delegates to the NPT will achieve any substantial progress have continued to diminish.

    I am no longer interested in the charades that are played by the delegates to the NPT representing the governments of the nuclear weapons states. I want to see some meaningful action on their part. We have a right to expect and demand such action.

    At stake is the future of our species. It is time for countries to stop playing cynical games that seek to avoid existing NPT obligations to eliminate nuclear weapons. Mutually Assured Destruction is unacceptable, whether it be between the US and Russia or India and Pakistan. Mutually Assured Delusions are also unacceptable. It is time for the UK and France to stop relying upon nuclear weapons because these weapons make them feel like they are still important world powers. Israel needs to end its nuclear weapons program before other Middle East countries follow its example. Other countries, for example those in NATO, need to step out from under the US nuclear umbrella and stop being enablers of the nuclear addiction of a small number of states.

    The only way out of our nuclear dilemma is for the countries of the world to demand that the Article VI obligation for “good faith” negotiations for nuclear disarmament be fulfilled. The US will have to provide leadership or it is unlikely that substantial progress will be possible. If the US doesn’t act, it is unlikely that Russia will do so, and without Russian participation, it is unlikely that significant progress will be possible with the UK, France and China.

    The NPT, with its membership of nearly all the world’s countries, provides an appropriate forum for the countries of the world to negotiate a new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons. Once negotiations are planned, the non-NPT states (Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea) should be invited to join. Alternatively, the United States, as the world’s most militarily powerful country, could under new leadership use its convening capacity to initiate negotiations among the nine nuclear weapons states, leading to a Nuclear Weapons Convention with universal participation.

    Civil society has already prepared a draft Nuclear Weapons Convention. It has been introduced to the United Nations by the Republic of Costa Rica and Malaysia. The draft treaty is feasible. It is desirable. It could be accomplished relatively quickly. All that is required is the political will of the nuclear weapons states. Without this political will, the human future remains in peril. It is the 21st century equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns, but with far graver potential consequences for our common future.

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

  • The New Nuclear Risk

    Article appeared in the Guardian’s Comment is Free site on March 31, 2008.

    Humans love to suppress abstract dangers. They react only after they get their fingers burned. In handling nuclear risks, however, we can hardly get away with such childlike behaviour.

    To begin with, the old system of nuclear deterrence, which has survived particularly in the US and Russia since the cold war’s end, still involves lots of risks and dangers. While the international public largely ignores this fact, the risks remain.

    To be sure, in the 1990’s the US and Russia reduced their nuclear arsenals from 65,000 to approximately 26,000 weapons. But this number is still almost unimaginable and beyond any rational level needed for deterrence. Moreover, there are another 1,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of other nuclear states.

    A second cause for worry is that the world is poised to enter a new nuclear age that threatens to be even more dangerous and expensive than the cold war era of mutually assured destruction. Indeed, the outlines of this new nuclear age are already visible: the connection between terrorism and nuclear weapons; a nuclear-armed North Korea; the risk of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East triggered by Iran’s nuclear program; a new definition of state sovereignty as “nuclear sovereignty”, accompanied by a massive increase in the number of small and medium-sized nuclear states; possible collapse of public order in nuclear Pakistan; the illegal proliferation of military nuclear technology; the legal proliferation of civilian nuclear technology and an increase in the number of “civilian” nuclear states; the nuclearisation of space, triggering an arms race among large nuclear powers.

    Important political leaders, especially in the two biggest nuclear powers, the US and Russia, know today’s existing risks and tomorrow’s emerging ones all too well. Yet nothing is being done to control, contain, or eliminate them. On the contrary, the situation is worsening.

    Vital pillars of the old arms-control and anti-proliferation regime have either been destroyed – as was the case with the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty – or substantially weakened, as with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Responsibility for this lies largely with the Bush administration, which, by terminating the ABM treaty, not only weakened the international control systems for nuclear weapons, but also sat on its hands when confronted with the NPT’s imminent collapse.

    At the beginning of the 21st century, proliferation of military nuclear technology is one of the major threats to humanity, particularly if this technology falls into terrorists’ hands. The use of nuclear weapons by terrorists would not only result in a major humanitarian tragedy, but also would most likely move the world beyond the threshold for actually waging a nuclear war. The consequences would be horrific.

    Nearly equally worrisome is the nuclear redefinition of state sovereignty because it will not only lead to a large number of small, politically unstable nuclear powers, but will also increase the risk of proliferation at the hands of terrorists. Pakistan would, most likely, no longer be an isolated case.

    An international initiative for the renewal and improvement of the international control regime, led by both big nuclear powers, is urgently needed to meet these and all other risks of the new nuclear age. For, if disarmament is to become effective, the signal must come from the top – the US and Russia. Here the commitment to disarmament, as agreed in the NPT, is of prime importance.

    The NPT – a bedrock of peace for more than three decades – is based on a political agreement between nuclear and non-nuclear states: the latter abstain from obtaining nuclear weapons while the former destroy their arsenals. Unfortunately, only the first part of this agreement was realised (though not completely), while the second part still awaits fulfilment.

    The NPT remains indispensable and needs urgent revision. However, this central pillar of international proliferation control is on the brink of collapse. The most recent review conference in New York, in May 2005, ended virtually without any result.

    The essential defect of the NPT is now visible in the nuclear dispute between Iran and the United Nations Security Council: the treaty permits the development of all nuclear components indispensable for military use – particularly uranium enrichment – so long as there is no outright nuclear weapons program. This means that in emerging nuclear countries only one single political decision is required to “weaponise” a nuclear program. This kind of “security” is not sufficient.

    Another controversial issue also has also come to the fore in connection with the current nuclear conflict with Iran: discrimination-free access to nuclear technology. Solving this problem will require the internationalisation of access to civilian nuclear technology, along with filling the security gap under the existing NPT and substantially more far-reaching monitoring of all states that want to be part of such a system.

    Leaders around the world know the dangers of a new nuclear age; they also know how to minimise them. But the political will to act decisively is not there, because the public does not regard nuclear disarmament and arms control as a political priority.

    This must change. Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation are not questions of the past. They need to be addressed today if they are not to become the most dangerous threats tomorrow.

    Joschka Fischer, a leader of the Green Party for nearly 20 years, was Germany’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005. A leader in the Green Party for nearly 20 years, he is now a visiting professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.

  • Japan’s Role in Building Peace in the Nuclear Age

    Japan’s Role in Building Peace in the Nuclear Age

    It is a pleasure to be with you in this 50th anniversary year of the Ozaki Foundation. I am an admirer of this Foundation and of the life and work of Ozaki Yukio. He was a man of principle and of the people and, as such, a man of peace.

    In the latter part of his life, Ozaki Yukio wrote, “The only reason for my persevering at my advanced age was that I might live…so as to contribute what I could to the creation of a new world.” He envisioned contributing toward a world at peace, a noble vision. “I dreamed I would find a way,” he wrote, “for the peoples of the five continents to live in peace.”

    Ozaki was an early proponent of the principle of the “Common Heritage of Mankind,” one of the most important concepts of the modern era. He wrote, “The world’s land and resources should be used for the benefit of all mankind…. The greatest obstacle to attaining this global perspective is the narrow-minded ambition of nations that seek to prevail over others by the exercise of wealth and power.”

    I think that Ozaki Yukio would have agreed with Lao Tzu, who said: “Those who would take over the Earth and shape it to their will never, I notice, succeed.” In other words, imperialism is a recipe for disaster. Every empire that has ever existed has experienced at some point the pain, suffering and humiliation of defeat. This was true in the ancient world and throughout history. It was true in the 20th century, and there is no doubt that it will prove to be true in the 21st century. But today, in the Nuclear Age, the stakes are higher; the future of civilization and even human survival hang in the balance.

    For the past 25 years I have been the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, an organization that I helped to found in 1982. The Foundation has three principal goals: to abolish nuclear weapons; to strengthen international law, particularly as it pertains to the prevention of war and the elimination of nuclear arms; and to empower a new generation of peace leaders to carry on the struggle for a more peaceful world, free of the overriding nuclear weapons threat to humanity.

    One of the key formative events in my own life, placing me on the path to work for peace and a nuclear weapons-free world, was an early visit at the age of 21 to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Memorial Museums. At these museums, I learned a lesson that was not part of my education in the United States. In the US, we were taught the perspective of those above the bombs. It was a story of scientific and technological triumph, a story of victors with little reference to loss of life and the suffering of the victims. At the Peace Memorial Museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was a human story, a tragedy of massive death and destruction. It was a story told from the perspective of those beneath the bombs, and a warning about our common future: we must eliminate these weapons before they eliminate us.

    Nuclear Weapons and the Imperative of Peace

    There are many reasons to oppose nuclear weapons. They are long-distance killing devices, instruments of annihilation that kill indiscriminately – men, women and children; the aged and the newly born; soldiers and civilians. Because they kill indiscriminately, their threat or use is both immoral and illegal. They are weapons that can destroy cities, countries and civilization. They threaten all that is human, all that is sacred, all that exists. If this were not enough, these weapons make cowards of their possessors and, because they concentrate power in the hands of the few, are anti-democratic.

    The creation of nuclear weapons has changed the world. It has made peace an imperative – an imperative brought about by the massive destructive potential of nuclear weapons. This imperative has been recognized by insightful individuals from the onset of the Nuclear Age.

    Almost immediately after learning of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the great writer and philosopher Albert Camus wrote, “Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only battle worth waging.”

    More than fifty years ago, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and nine other prominent scientists issued the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, in which they stated: “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war.” But Russell and Einstein were right. We must face this alternative, difficult as it is.

    No nation knows the painful truth about the devastation of nuclear weapons better than Japan, the only country to have suffered such devastation. Those who survived the atomic bombings, the hibakusha, are the ambassadors of the Nuclear Age. Their voices are fading as they grow older and die, but listening to their wisdom may be our best hope for ridding the world of these terrible instruments of death and destruction.

    The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Cenotaph states, “Let all souls here rest in peace; for we shall not repeat the evil.” This thought was echoed in the statement of the then President of the International Court of Justice, Mohammed Bedjaoui, when he referred to nuclear weapons as “the ultimate evil” in his 1996 Declaration that accompanied the Advisory Opinion of the Court on the illegality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons.

    In the end, nuclear weapons are weapons of the weak. They are a great equalizer, capable of giving a small state or a terrorist group the ability to destroy our cities and even bring a great nation to its knees. For the sake of civilization and humanity, these weapons and those who support continued reliance upon them must not be tolerated. To tolerate these weapons is to assure that eventually they will be used – by accident or design.

    Deterrence is not defense, and can fail due to miscommunication. It has come close to failing on numerous occasions, many much less well known than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, even though there is little to no need for deterrence among the major powers, there are still 26,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of nine countries, and 3,500 of these in the arsenals of the US and Russia remain on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired within moments of an order to do so.

    I am certain that were Ozaki Yukio alive today, he would be a leader in the global effort to abolish nuclear weapons and would be active in the Mayors for Peace, an organization of mayors throughout the world led by Mayor Akiba of Hiroshima. The Mayors for Peace currently has a 2020 Vision Campaign to ban nuclear weapons by the year 2020. It is a campaign that makes sense for mayors, given that cities remain the major targets of these weapons. One World
    We live on a single precious planet, the only one we know of in the universe that supports life. No matter where lines are drawn on the Earth as boundaries of states, we are a part of one planet and one people. We must unite in protecting the planet and preserving it for future generations.

    In addition to the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, we live in a world that is threatened by global warming, what Al Gore, the 2007 Nobel Peace Laureate, described as “an inconvenient truth.” But if global warming is an inconvenient truth, how much more so is nuclear war. In both cases, the present and future are jeopardized by massive devastation.

    War and structural violence – that is, violence that is built into the societal framework – are prevalent in our world. Each year, war claims countless victims, mostly innocent civilians. It is widely reported that more than 90 percent of the victims of wars today are civilians. In the Iraq war, some 4,000 American soldiers have died, but the number of Iraqis killed, mostly civilians, is reported to be over 1.2 million. That is a ratio of 1 to 300. It is more aptly characterized as a slaughter than a war. In Darfur, genocide has continued unabated for years, with the international community seemingly helpless to stop the killing.

    The structural violence in our world, like war, is a deep stain on the human record. Half the world’s people still live on less than two dollars a day, while the world spends some $1.2 trillion on arms. Of this, the United States spends nearly half, more than the combined totals of the next 32 countries.

    For just a small percentage of global military spending, every child on the planet could receive an education. For a similarly small percentage of military spending, everyone on the planet could have clean water, adequate nutrition and health care. Something is terribly wrong with our ability to organize ourselves to live justly on our planet.

    Our world is one in which human life is devalued for many, and greed is often rewarded. It is a world often not kind to children. Each hour, 500 children die in Africa; 12,000 each day. They die of starvation and preventable diseases, not because there is not enough food or medicine, but because these are not distributed to those who need them. Our world is also not very wise in preparing for the future. We are busy using up the world’s resources, particularly its fossil fuels, and in the process polluting the environment. So hungry and greedy are we for energy and other resources that we pay little attention to the needs and well-being of future generations. Our lifestyles in the richer countries are unsustainable, and they are foreclosing opportunities for future generations that will be burdened by diminishing resources and a deteriorating environment.

    We live in an interdependent world. Borders cannot make us safe. Nor can oceans. We can choose to live together in peace, or to perish together in nuclear war. We can choose to live together with sustainable lifestyles or to perish together as our technologies destroy our environment. We can choose to live together in a world with justice and dignity for all, or to perish together in a world of vast disparity, in which a small minority lives in luxury and overabundance, while the majority of humanity lives in deep poverty and often despair.

    War No Longer Makes Sense

    War no longer makes sense in the Nuclear Age. The stakes are too high. In a world with nuclear weapons, we roll the dice on the human future each time we engage in war. Nuclear weapons must be eliminated and the materials to make them placed under strict international control so that we don’t bring life on our planet to an abrupt end.

    Leaders who take their nations to war without the sanction of international law must be held to account. This is what the Allied leaders concluded after World War II, when they held the Axis leaders to account for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. No leader anywhere on the planet should be allowed to stand above international law.

    Every citizen of Earth has rights, well articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights agreements. We should all know our rights under international law, which include the rights to life, liberty, security of person, and freedom from torture. There is also a human right to peace. We must take responsibility for assuring these rights for ourselves and others across the planet.

    If someone were to observe our planet from outer space, that person might conclude that we do not appreciate the beauty and bounty of our magnificent Earth. I hope you will never take for granted this life-sustaining planet. The planet itself is a miracle, as is each of us. As miracles, how can we engage in wars, or allow our children to engage in wars, that kill other miracles?

    Japan’s Unique Capacity

    Japan is a country uniquely qualified to lead the world toward peace and a world free of nuclear weapons. Japan has great strengths, it has made great mistakes, and it has seemingly learned important lessons.

    Japan is a country with a long history and deep traditions. It is a country with an extraordinary aesthetic, which can be seen in its gardens, its architecture, its arts of tea ceremony, flower arrangement and pottery, its literature and film.

    But along with the subtle imperfect beauty of its aesthetic, Japan has had a history of feudal hierarchy and militarism. It has been an imperial power, colonizing other nations and committing serious crimes against them. It has fought in brutal wars, suffered defeat at the hands of the Allied powers in World War II, and emerged as a stronger, more peaceful and decent nation.

    One of the most remarkable things about Japan as a nation has been its unique ability to transform itself, first with the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century, then with its growth into a modern economic and military power, and finally with its astounding rebound from its military defeat in the second half of the 20th century.

    Japan turned the ashes of war and defeat into an energetic and vital economy and democratic political structure. It is the only country in the world with a “peace constitution.” Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution forbids war forever as an instrument of state power. It states:

    “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. “In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

    This is an extraordinary commitment. It is a beacon to the world, and should be viewed with pride by all Japanese citizens. Despite the attempts of some Japanese political leaders to reinterpret and evade the essential provisions of Article 9, it has thus far held up.

    Japan is the only country in the world to have had two of its cities destroyed by atomic weapons. Its people learned that human beings and atomic weapons cannot co-exist, and as a result the survivors of the atomic bombings, the hibakusha, have been ardent advocates of a nuclear weapons-free world, not wanting others to suffer the fate that they suffered. In 1971, the Japanese Diet adopted three non-nuclear principles: “Japan shall neither possess nor manufacture nuclear weapons, nor shall it permit their introduction into Japanese territory.”

    In recent years, the Japanese government has provided some leadership at the United Nations by sponsoring a resolution on “Renewed determination towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons,” but this seems to be more rooted in words on paper than in action. More is needed.

    Post-War Uneasiness

    Despite its success in rebuilding its economy in the post-World War II period, its unique peace constitution and its position in relation to nuclear weapons, one senses uneasiness in the current state of Japan. Tradition is under assault in modern Japan. The people, and particularly the youth, seem pulled toward Western values of materialism with their emphasis on consumer lifestyles.

    There are periodic challenges to the peace constitution and to Japan’s non-nuclear principles. These values seem to remain in conflict with Japan’s longer and deeper connections to hierarchical authority and military might. Japan seems a reluctant leader toward a nuclear weapons-free world. It has the technology and enough plutonium to rapidly become a major nuclear weapons power. Despite its constitutional limitations, Japan has developed a powerful Self-Defense Force, and is among the top few military spenders in the world.

    Japan has maintained a close relationship with the United States, and the US continues to ask more of Japan in its participation in multilateral military operations. Japan participated in a small non-combat role in the “Coalition of the Willing” in the war in Iraq, although the Japanese government is ambiguous about this participation. The US has pushed Japan to join it in the development and implementation of missile defenses in Northeast Asia. Japan also allows the US armed forces to occupy many military bases in Japan and to use Japanese ports for its Navy. Japan sits willingly under the US nuclear umbrella.

    Thoughtful Japanese citizens might well ask: Who are we? Is Japan following its own destiny? Has Japan become a vassal state of the US? Should Japan preserve Article 9 of its Constitution? Can Japan preserve Article 9 of its Constitution? There is clearly tension in Japan’s aspirations for itself and in its alliance with the US, the country that ended the war against Japan with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    Japan has prospered in peace. Now it must decide whether it chooses to lead in peace, or to be a vassal to the United States, as that country – my country – seeks to spread its imperial might throughout the globe. The world stands perilously balanced at the nuclear precipice, and Japan, as the only country in the world that has experienced nuclear devastation, could be the country to lead the way back from the precipice.

    One may well ask: If Japan leads, who would follow? There is no way to answer this question until the first steps are taken. At a minimum, in attempting to provide this leadership, Japan would honor the survivors and the dead of those bombings. It would instill in its behavior a sense of national purpose – that of ending the nuclear weapons threat to humanity.

    Rather than accept the militant leadership of the United States, Japan needs to provide the moral leadership of which it is uniquely capable. For its own independence and the good of the world, Japan must be firm in its commitment to its peace constitution and to its non-nuclear principles.

    As a good friend of the United States, Japan could help lead it toward ending its reliance on nuclear weapons and fulfilling its responsibilities under the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the US we have a saying, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” The US has been driving drunk in its use of power in Iraq and its reliance upon nuclear weapons. Japan must be truly a friend and learn to say No to the United States:

    No to reliance on nuclear arms, including by means of the US nuclear umbrella;

    No to missile defenses;

    No to US nuclear armed ships docking at Japanese ports (the Kobe Formula has provided a good example);

    No to participation in any form in illegal wars of aggression, such as the Iraq War;

    No to extending the leases on US military bases in Japan.

    No to the US-India nuclear deal, which will undermine years of international efforts to control nuclear proliferation.

    There is also much to which Japan can say Yes.

    Yes to international cooperation for peace, not war.

    Yes to convening a Nuclear Weapons Convention, and to sustained leadership for a nuclear weapons-free world. The first meeting of states to rid the world of nuclear weapons could be held in Hiroshima, the first city to suffer nuclear devastation.

    Yes to the establishment of a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone in Northeast Asia.

    Yes to bringing all weapons-grade fissionable materials under strict international control.

    Yes to an insistence on resolving conflicts between states by peaceful means, including mandatory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.

    Yes to giving its full support to the International Criminal Court to hold leaders accountable for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    Yes to working to protect the oceans, the air, the Arctic and Antarctica, and outer space as the Common Heritage of Mankind for present and future generations. If Japan chooses to follow this path, it will honor its finest traditions and, drawing from its unique experiences in recent history, give leadership to forces all over the world struggling for peace.

    Individual Responsibility

    Nothing changes without individuals taking responsibility and taking action. We all need to realize that with rights come responsibilities. Change does not occur magically. It occurs because individuals engage with societal problems and take actions to create a better world. Often change occurs person to person. Each of us can be an agent for change in the world. We are each as powerful as we choose to be.

    We can each start by choosing peace and making a firm commitment to peace with justice. This means that we make peace a central issue and priority in our lives and demonstrate peace in all we do. We can live peace, educate for peace, speak out for peace, and support and vote for candidates who call for peace. In choosing peace, we also choose hope, rather than ignorance, complacency or despair. Hope gives rise to action, and action in turn gives rise to increased possibility for change and to further hope. It is a spiral in which action deepens commitment, which leads to more action.

    Like others who have chosen the path of peace – Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama – we must realize that it will not be a quick or easy journey. The path will require of you courage, compassion and commitment. The rewards may be few, except your own understanding of the necessity of the journey.

    The path to peace will require persistence. You may be tempted to leave the path, but what you do for peace you do for humanity. In the struggle for a better world and a more decent future, we are not allowed to give up – just as Ozaki Yukio never gave up during his life and as his daughter, Sohma Yukika, has never given up during her long life.

    Our efforts to create a culture of peace are a gift to humanity and the future. What better gift could we give to our fellow citizens of the planet and to future generations than our courage, compassion and commitment in the cause of peace?

    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.

  • The High Price of Arrogance and the Bitter Harvest of Hypocrisy

    The Twin Horsemen of the New Apocalypse:

    Slowly, the nuclear genie escapes from the carefully constructed bottle of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, threatening the world with annihilation.

    Inexorably, global warming advances across the decades as temperatures climb, fires rage, glaciers melt, droughts escalate, hurricanes intensify, habitats shrink, species disappear.

    These, then are the twin horsemen of the new apocalypse: the prospect of nuclear war and the reality of global warming.

    No biblical prophesy this. The pale riders mounted upon these steeds are men, and they wait eagerly at the gate, their time come at last. Arrogance is their vehicle; hypocrisy their fuel.

    We are Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds

    Imagine a world in which more than twenty-five countries possessed nuclear weapons, instead of the nine that do now. Imagine that number relentlessly growing, decade by decade until a hundred or more nations – all but the very poorest – were capable of detonating a nuclear device and initiating a nuclear holocaust. In such a world, the unthinkable would become the inevitable.

    The only reason we’re not living in that world today is that in 1968, the international community seized a rare moment of sanity and produced the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, stuffing the nuclear genie back in its bottle.

    Led by Ireland and Finland, 189 states signed the treaty.

    The NNPT was supposed to work as follows: Nations who had not yet developed nuclear weapons agreed not to pursue a nuclear arsenal. In return, nations possessing nuclear weapons agreed “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

    In short, the treaty was a quid-pro-quo. Nuclear have-nots agreed not to obtain nuclear weapons in exchange for nuclear haves agreeing to take real, verifiable steps to get rid of theirs.

    Now imagine a nation that broke this grand bargain, and risked bringing forth death and destruction of biblical proportion. That nation exists. It is US.

    Listen.

    At the time of the treaty, South Africa, Egypt, Argentina, Brazil, and several other countries who were actively developing nuclear weapons suspended their programs. Five nations – the US, Russia, Britain, China, and France agreed to suspend active programs and begin negotiations to dismantle their stockpile. Countries capable of constructing nuclear weapons, including Australia, Norway, Japan, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Finland, South Korea, and host of others then had no incentive to initiate programs, and the world was moved a little further from the brink of a nuclear insanity. There have been leaks. Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all developed nuclear weapons.

    But for years, the dream of a nuclear free world was a powerful card the world could play in constraining the spread of this deadly ambition.

    No longer.

    The nuclear haves – led by the US – have steadfastly ignored their responsibilities under this treaty. Indeed, under Bush, the US has scrapped the ABM treaty, sought funding for a new generation of nuclear weapons, and proposed to resume testing of nuclear devices, even as we’ve insisted that others abandon efforts to produce them. Thus, we approach the world as an arrogant hypocrite, and seem surprised that it is not working.

    Climate: the slow-motion nuclear war

    Forget wars, famine, pestilence and death. They are merely the stepchildren of global warming.

    Hyperbole?

    Consider this. The cumulative energy embedded in all fossil fuels is on the same order of magnitude as the energy that would be released from detonating all of the world’s nuclear devices. So if we burn all of those reserves, in terms of energy, it is the equivalent of an all out nuclear war. But wait, you say, even if we were to burn all those reserves, it would take place over three centuries, hardly the same as a nuclear conflagration.

    Fair enough, but try this little thought experiment, and in the words of Aldo Leopold, think like a mountain. In terms of geologic time, three centuries is virtually indistinguishable from an instant.

    Over the four and a half billion years the earth has existed, the systems that sustain us have been sculpted carefully from the ether. Life appeared some 3.8 billion years ago – simple procaryotes living off of methane and sulfur. Oxygenators became dominant about a billion years later, and slowly, the orange sky turned blue. Painstakingly, the world we know evolved until a scant million years ago hominids something like ourselves appeared. Homo Sapiens – man the wise – evolved about fifty thousand years ago, and in the last ten thousand years, blessed with a relatively benign climate, we began our march towards civilization.

    Now we look through the lens of our own life span and declare three centuries to be a long time. But to that mountain, the blinding death-flash of a nuclear holocaust, and the three hundred year combustion of fossil fuels are less distinguishable, and the consequences may be too. In a very real sense, climate change could play out like a slow-motion nuclear war, sans radioactive fallout.

    Just as with the nuclear threat, the US is the biggest impediment to progress, and the biggest cause of the problem. In 2005, the US released 7.1 billion tons of GHGs. To put that in context, the US – with about five percent of the world’s population – emitted about twenty five percent of the world’s greenhouse gasses. Cumulatively, the US contribution to global warming dwarfs any other country’s, and it will do so long after China supplants us as the largest annual emitter.

    The Origins of Arrogance

    Given the fact that we sit astride this heinous record of disregarding all elements of a sane world, on what basis do we now object to Iran or any country seeking to develop a nuclear capability? Certainly not moral grounds.

    How do we, the worlds biggest energy pig, justify our failure to ratify the Kyoto climate accords, and our failure to honor our obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which we did sign and ratify?

    Do we simply assert that we are different? Special in some way?

    A sizable number of neocons take precisely that point of view, referring to the US as the “Exceptional Nation.” Indeed, it is this notion which has animated our foreign policy to one degree or another since the fall of the Soviet Union. Under Bush, it has become an almost religious conviction.

    Presumably, this exceptionalism gives us the right to retain our nuclear weapons, expand our arsenal, and prevent anyone else – even those we threaten – from developing them. It could even be used to justify the fact that we continue to spew out GHG at more than six times the global per capita average.

    It’s worth examining the roots of this notion of the US as the exceptional nation. It was coined by De Tocqueville in the 1830’s, and predicated on his observation that the US was unique in that it had no feudal tradition, was more centered on rights, merit, religious beliefs, and was more egalitarian. This, according to De Tocqueville, set us apart from the more state-centered societies of Europe, and allowed democracy to flourish here, more than anywhere else.

    But it’s a big leap to go from there, to where the neocons would take us – the US as exempt from the civilizing treaties of the global community, by virtue of this exceptionalism.

    Of course, the problem with this arrogant stance is that it only works if other countries accept the neocons’ self-designated version of the US as “exceptional.”

    If they don’t – and why should they?- then our wholesale rejection of civilizing agreements such as the Land Mine Treaty, the Tobacco Treaty, the World Court, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Kyoto Climate Protocol looks less like De Tocqueville’s exceptionalism and more like ignorant and arrogant jingoism.

    Add to this list of ignominy that the US supports trade agreements that exploit labor and harm the environment and that, under Bush, we have consistently bad-mouthed the UN, essentially ignored the Geneva Conventions, preemptively invaded a sovereign nation, scuttled the chemical and biological weapons treaties, ignored our obligations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (to which we are a signatory) and publicly defended torture (water boarding is defined as torture in our own laws and in international laws) and “rendition,” as well as acted to limit the freedom and rights of our own citizens by subverting both the First and Fourth Amendments, and the necon case for exceptionalism becomes little more than a weak justification for a destructive form of jingoism that does more to limit freedom than champion it.

    The Harvest of Hypocrisy

    With a record of hypocrisy like this is it any wonder that a foreign policy based on arrogance is a complete failure? Might it not be at least a partial answer to the question, why do they hate us and, more to the point, why do they hate us even more now than they did in 2001? Certainly, arrogance without portfolio is the weakest platform from which to negotiate and lead.

    We the People of the United States have a choice about our country’s and the world’s destiny, and we will make that choice in the 2008 elections. On the one hand, we can choose to elect leaders who will continue to act as if we are not subject to the civilizing rules of the international community, while insisting others are. Down this path lies permanent confrontation, continuous wars and occupations, inevitable nuclear proliferation and nuclear brinksmanship, destruction of the climate that has sustained us since we appeared on the planet, a US that is increasingly isolated in the international community, and a world that is hurtling towards nuclear devastation and environmental destruction.

    On the other hand, we can choose to be truly exceptional, not simply by honoring our international obligations, but by actively leading the world community toward peace, prosperity and sustainability. This is not only ethically correct, it is strategically smart, and it would make the US a leader in all the ways mere military might cannot.

    Imagine a world in the process of destroying its nuclear weapons instead of its climate. Imagine the stature and influence that would accrue to the country leading that effort.

    It would have a moral authority that would be unambiguous and undeniable.

    Ghandi defeated Great Britain with the that kind of moral authority. Imagine, now, a nation with the military and economic power the US possesses, but blessed with Ghandi’s ethical leverage, too.

    Such a nation could walk across the world stage a colossus, and others would be forced to follow. It would be capable of building coalitions, blessed with allies, and capable of being a force for good that would be virtually unprecedented in human history. It would indeed be an exceptional nation.

    There is, in fact, only one country capable of becoming that nation. Us. If we were to choose this path, we would truly deserve to be known as the exceptional nation, and it would be others who designated us so, not an arrogant and belligerent claim we made on our own behalf.

    That’s the real opportunity cost of the Bush administration and the Republican doctrine; that’s the prize that will be lost if we allow the Democratic Party to be led by men and women of little vision and less courage, more interested in following polls than leading nations.

    There is no other country that can deliver us from this apocalypse; there is no other time we can choose to lead. It happens now, or it can’t happen. If we fail to call our nation to meet its destiny, the twin horses of the new apocalypse will ride, and we will sit astride them.

    Our votes and our voices will determine which it will be.

    This is either the blessing or the tragedy of our time.

    John Atcheson’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several work journals.

  • No Nukes, No Proliferation

    The rising anxieties about nuclear weapons are rooted in two major and parallel developments: a renaissance of nuclear power and a resurgence of old-fashioned national security threats that supposedly had ebbed with the end of the Cold War.

    After the well publicized accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979 and Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, opposition to nuclear power was so strong that many reactor plants were shut down, plans for new ones were canceled and virtually no new reactor was built over the past decade. With the spiraling price of oil caused by a spike in demand and disruptions to supply, the economics of nuclear power has changed. With the accelerating threat of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the balance of environmental risk has shifted. Adding technological developments, the politics of constructing and operating nuclear power reactors has also altered.

    The net result is plans for building several reactors to add to the 435 reactors in 30 countries that provide 15 percent of the world’s electricity today. Asia will account for 18 of the 31 planned new reactors. The spurt in Chinese and Indian demand is a function of booming economic growth and population. In Japan and South Korea interest in nuclear power arises from lack of indigenous oil and gas resources and the desire for energy security and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

    This throws up three clusters of concern:

    • How do we ensure that the plants are operated with complete safety?
    • How do we secure the plants against theft, leakage and attacks of weapons-sensitive material, skills and knowledge?
    • How do we build firewalls between civilian and weapons-related use of nuclear power?

    These concerns extend also to the international trade in nuclear material, skills and equipment. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, observed in 2004 that “Nuclear components designed in one country could be manufactured in another, shipped through a third, and assembled in a fourth for use in a fifth.”

    The challenge on the national security front is fourfold. First, the five Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty-licit nuclear powers–Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States–have ignored their NPT obligation to disarm. Instead they are busy enlarging, modernizing and upgrading their nuclear arsenals and refining nuclear doctrines to indicate retention and expanded use of these weapons for several decades yet. The lesson to others? Nuclear weapons are indispensable in today’s world and becoming more useful for dealing with tomorrow’s threats.

    Second, three states outside the NPT–India, Israel and Pakistan–have been accepted, more or less, as de facto nuclear weapons powers.

    Third, as an intergovernmental agreement, the NPT doesn’t cover nonstate groups, including terrorists, who might be pursuing nuclear weapons. The turmoil in Pakistan, with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf playing the “loose nukes” card to retain U.S. backing, highlights the related danger of links between rogue elements of security forces and extremists.

    Fourth, some countries may be cheating on their NPT obligations and seeking nuclear weapons by stealth. The drumbeats of war being sounded in Washington on Iran bring back memories of 2002-03. This is a story we’ve heard before. We didn’t like the ending the first time and are unlikely to like it any better the next time round.

    The disquieting trend of a widening circle of NPT-illicit and extra-NPT nuclear weapons powers in turn has a self-generating effect in drawing other countries into the game of nuclear brinksmanship. The renaissance of nuclear power cannot be explained solely by the interest in nuclear energy for civilian uses.

    What might be the solution? Of the 27,000 nuclear weapons in existence today, 12,000 are deployed and ready for use, with 3,500 on hair-trigger alert. To begin with, some practical and concrete measures are long overdue: Bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force; negotiating a verifiable fissile materials treaty; retrenching from launch-on-warning postures, standing down nuclear forces. That is, reviving, implementing and building on agreements for reducing the role, readiness and numbers of nuclear weapons in defense doctrines and preparations.

    But these amount to tinkering, not a bold and comprehensive vision of the final destination. What we need are rules-based regimes on the principles of reciprocity of obligations, participatory decision-making and independent verification procedures and compliance mechanisms.

    U.S. presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., declared, “America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons.” In January, three former U.S. secretaries of defense and state–George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger–and Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, called on Washington to take the lead in the abolition of nuclear weapons. The national security benefits of nuclear weapons, they argued, are outweighed by the threats posed to U.S. security by uncontrolled proliferation.

    The symbiotic link between nonproliferation and disarmament is integral to the NPT, the most brilliant half-successful arms control agreement in history. The number of countries to sign it–188–embraces virtually the entire family of nations. But the nuclear arsenals of the five NPT nuclear powers expanded enormously. With almost four decades having elapsed since 1968, the five NPT nuclear powers are in violation of their solemn obligation to disarm, reinforced by the advisory opinion of the World Court in 1996 that the NPT’s Article 6 requires them to engage in and bring to a conclusion negotiations for nuclear abolition.

    Despite this history and background, a surprising number of arms control experts focus solely on the nonproliferation side to demand denial of technology and materiel to all who refuse to sign and abide by the NPT, and punishment of any who cross the threshold. The term “nonproliferation ayatollahs” is applied pejoratively to them. The latest episode in this long-running and tired serial is the United States, Britain and France threatening Iran with war to stop it from acquiring–not using, merely acquiring–nuclear weapons. From where do the leaders of nuclear-armed Britain and France derive the moral authority to declare that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable?

    Nuclear weapons could not proliferate if they did not exist. Because they do, they will. The policy implication of this logic is that the best guarantee of nuclear nonproliferation is nuclear disarmament through a nuclear weapons convention that bans the possession, acquisition, testing and use of nuclear weapons, by everyone. This would solve the problem of nonproliferation as well as disarmament. The focus on nonproliferation to the neglect of disarmament ensures that we get neither. If we want nonproliferation, therefore, we must prepare for disarmament.

    Too many, including the government of Japan, have paid lip service to this slogan, but not pursued a serious program of action to make it a reality. The elegant theorems, cogent logic and fluent reasoning of many authoritative international commissions, including the Tokyo Forum, have made no discernible dent on the old, new and aspiring nuclear powers. A coalition between nuclear-armed and nonnuclear countries, led perhaps by India–which has crossed the threshold from a disarmament leader to a hypocritical nuclear power–and Japan, the only country to have suffered an atomic attack, might break the stalemate and dispel the looming nuclear clouds.

    Time is running out for the hypocrisy and accumulated anomalies of global nuclear apartheid. Either we will achieve nuclear abolition or we will have to live with nuclear proliferation followed by nuclear war. Better the soft glow of satisfaction from the noble goal realized of nuclear weapons banned, than the harsh glare of the morning after of these weapons used.

    Ramesh Thakur, distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and professor of political science at the University of Waterloo in Canada, is the author of The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  • Meeting the Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons

    Meeting the Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons

    A recent conference on “The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons” brought together experts from ten countries, including the US, Russia, China, India, Germany and Japan, for two days of intensive discussions. The conference, which was held in San Francisco, was sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the Toda Institute for Peace and Policy Research. The participants examined the obstacles in the way of achieving a world free of nuclear weapons.

    There was general agreement that the United States, as the world’s most militarily and economically powerful country, needed to lead the way. Many participants noted that the United States is currently leading the way, but in the wrong direction – toward continued reliance upon nuclear weapons rather than toward their elimination. One participant pointed out that the United States is currently using nuclear weapons in a manner analogous to holding a loaded gun to someone’s head, threatening to shoot if they do not do as you instruct them. There was strong agreement that a US attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities would not only be a major crime, but would result in Iran’s withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the likely development of a well-protected program to achieve a nuclear arsenal.

    It was acknowledged that, in addition to preventing a US attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities, a series of steps are needed to reduce nuclear dangers and advance prospects for complete nuclear disarmament. These steps need to be taken in the context of a vision of a nuclear weapons free world. Among the steps called for were reductions in nuclear arsenals; de-alerting of nuclear arsenals (taking the weapons off hair-trigger alert status); ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; agreement on a verifiable Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty; the strengthening of international agreements to control the nuclear fuel cycle and prevent nuclear proliferation; and legally binding commitments to No First Use of nuclear weapons.

    It has been a long-standing policy of the Chinese government to commit to No First Use, and to orient their nuclear doctrine accordingly. If all states adhered to this policy, and backed it up with their nuclear doctrine, there would be assurance that nuclear weapons states would not initiate a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear weapons state and would be restrained from first-use against another nuclear weapons state. This is currently the policy of only China and India among the nuclear weapons states. The United States continues to frame its nuclear weapons policy in terms of “all options are on the table.”

    The Chinese participant, a retired army general, thought that the only legitimate use of nuclear weapons was for deterrence. Other participants questioned whether deterrence, which relies on rationality, was a rational strategy and pointed out the many ways in which deterrence could fail by miscommunication, miscalculation or a failure of rationality in a time of crisis. It was acknowledged that deterrence cannot work against terrorist organizations that would not be locatable.

    Participants emphasized the importance of attaining a Nuclear Weapons Convention that would set forth a plan for the phased, verifiable, irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons. A draft Nuclear Weapons Convention has already been created by civil society organizations and has been submitted by Costa Rica to the United Nations.

    The Russian participant in the conference, an academic, suggested that many existing treaties between the US and Russia are in jeopardy due to the policies of the United States related to developing new nuclear weapons and moving missile defense components into countries in Eastern Europe. While the US claims these defenses are to protect against Iranian missiles, the Russian political and military leaders do not assess the situation in this way; they conclude US missile defenses have serious security implications for both Russia and China.

    The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty between the US and Russia could be in particular jeopardy. This treaty led to the elimination of a whole class of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. Over 4,000 nuclear warheads and 2,692 missiles were eliminated (1,846 by the USSR and 846 by the US). There was support for saving the existing treaties by acting to assure that there were no new nuclear weapons (such as the US is planning with its so-called Reliable Replacement Warhead); no nuclear weapons in space; limitations on deployment of missile defenses; de-alerting; reestablishing the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, extending the START I agreement, which is set to expire in December 2009, and completing ratification of the START II agreement to bring it into force; strengthening the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (Moscow Treaty) by making it verifiable, irreversible and indefinite; agreeing to the elimination of tactical nuclear weapons; and working to achieve expanded Nuclear Weapons Free Zones and a Nuclear Weapons Convention.

    The conference was unique in bringing forth the important role of youth in the effort to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. There were suggestions for increasing the education of the post-Cold War generation on nuclear dangers. There were also suggestions for focusing on the moral issues of threatening either first use or retaliatory use of nuclear weapons, and bringing people of faith into the discussion of these issues.

    Among the ideas for change emphasized were a Nuclear Threat Convention (outlawing nuclear threats); increased development of transnational coalitions for abolishing nuclear weapons; reaching out to the public explaining the successes that have been achieved and building momentum for a Nuclear Weapons Convention; building support in cities by joining the Mayors for Peace Campaign for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons; de-legitimizing nuclear weapons use; and supporting a UN Decade of Nuclear Disarmament.

    One participant, a former president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, summed up the dilemma of achieving security in the Nuclear Age in this way: “The paradox of the Nuclear Age is that the greater the striving for power and security through nuclear weapons, the more elusive the goal of human security.” He added, “The greatest priority for the future is to ensure that there will be a future.”

    David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org)

  • Is Peace that Difficult?

    Reprinted from The Age, August 28, 2007 edition.

    At the end of the Cold War there was an opportunity for the world to create a new collective security order. In 1991, after decades of blockages in the Security Council, it authorized armed intervention to stop the Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. In the same period, Russia and the United States took steps to reduce the number of deployed non-strategic nuclear weapons: the Chemical Weapons Convention was adopted in 1993, the Non-Proliferation Treaty was prolonged indefinitely after renewed commitments by nuclear weapon states to take get serious about disarmament; a Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty was negotiated and adopted in 1996; and at the review conference of the NPT in 2000, countries agreed on 13 practical steps to disarmament.

    But the window of opportunity soon closed. The US embarked on unilateralism. In 2003, the UN Security Council was said to be irrelevant if it did not agree with the US and its coalition of the willing.

    By the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, US confidence and trust in international negotiations, particularly in dealing with disarmament issues, was at a record low. And tensions continue to grow. Instead of negotiations towards disarmament, nuclear weapon states are renewing and modernizing their nuclear arsenals.

    In 2006, North Korea tested a nuclear device. After a US decision to place components of its missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia declared its withdrawal from the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. China has demonstrated its space war capabilities by shooting down one of its own weather satellites.

    These developments are worrying and somewhat paradoxical. At a time when there are no longer any ideological differences between the main powers, when the economic and political interdependence between states and regions reaches new heights, and when the revolution in information technology brings the world into the living rooms of billions of people, we ought to be able to agree on steps to restrain our capacity for war and destruction.

    So, where do we go from here?

    There is some movement indicating that key actors may be moving back to multilateral approaches and diplomacy. The failure and vast human cost of the military adventures in Iraq and Lebanon may have demonstrated the limitations of military strategies to achieve foreign policy objectives. The shift in strategy towards North Korea in negotiations over its nuclear program and the resumption of the six-party talks is encouraging. Waving a big stick may be counterproductive. An alternative path, containing suitable carrots, needs to be offered. It remains to be seen if this approach will be taken also in the case of Iran.

    For the past few years, I have chaired the independent international Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, with 14 experts from different parts of the world. In June 2006, I presented our report, Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear Biological and Chemical Arms. We made 60 recommendations on how to revive disarmament and restore the confidence in the international disarmament and non-proliferation regime.

    The commission urged all states to return to the fundamental undertakings made under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty is based on a double bargain: the non-nuclear weapons states committed themselves not to develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear weapon states committed themselves to negotiate towards disarmament.

    So long as the nuclear weapon states maintain that they need nuclear weapons for their national security, why shouldn’t others? The commission concluded that one of the most important ways to curb weapons’ proliferation is working to avoid states feeling a need to obtain nuclear weapons.

    The co-operative approach needs to be complemented by the enforcement of the test-ban treaty, a cut-off treaty on the production of fissile material for weapons, and effective safeguards and international verification to prevent states as well as non-state actors from acquiring nuclear weapons.

    I hope the window of opportunity is not yet shut. There may still be time to wake up and turn back to co-operative solutions to contemporary security challenges.

    The new generation of political leaders has an unprecedented opportunity to achieve peace through co-operation. We do not have the threat of war between the military powers hanging over our heads. Admittedly, there are flashpoints that need to be dealt with constructively — such as Kashmir, the Middle East, Taiwan and so on. But the numbers of armed conflicts and victims of armed conflicts have decreased. Never before have nations been so interdependent and never before have peoples of the world cared so much for the wellbeing of each other. Prospects are great for a functioning world organization devoted to establishing peace, promoting respect for universal human rights and securing our environment for future generations.

    If all can agree that we need international co-operation and multilateral solutions to protect the earth against climate change and the destruction of our environment, to keep the world economy in balance and moving, and to prevent terrorism and organized crime, then should it be so difficult to conclude that we also need to co-operate to stop shooting at each other?

     

    Dr Hans Blix is president of the World Federation of United Nations Association and was director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997.

  • We Want Results on Disarmament

    Speech to Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference, Washington, DC

    Thank you very much for that welcome and for those very kind words,

    I expect that many – perhaps all – of you here today read an article which appeared in the Wall Street Journal at the start of this year. The writers would be as familiar to an audience in this country as they are respected across the globe: George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn.

    The article made the case for, and I quote, “a bold initiative consistent with America’s moral heritage”. That initiative was to re-ignite the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and to redouble effort on the practical measures towards it.

    The need for such vision and action is all too apparent.

    Last year, Kofi Annan said – and he was right – that the world risks becoming mired in a sterile stand-off between those who care most about disarmament and those who care most about proliferation. The dangers of, what he termed, such mutually assured paralysis are dangers to us all. Weak action on disarmament, weak consensus on proliferation are in none of our interests. And any solution must be a dual one that sees movement on both proliferation and disarmament – a revitalisation, in other words, of the grand bargain struck in 1968, when the Non-Proliferation Treaty was established.

    What makes this the time to break the stand-off ?

    Today the non-proliferation regime is under particular pressure. We have already seen the emergence of a mixture of further declared and undeclared nuclear powers. And now, two countries – Iran and North Korea, both signatories of the NPT – stand in open defiance of the international community. Their actions have profound and direct implications for global security. Each of them also raises the serious prospect of proliferation across their region.

    In the case of Iran, in particular, if the regime is trying to acquire nuclear weapons – and there are very few either in that region or outside it who seriously doubt that that is the goal – then it is raising the spectre of a huge push for proliferation in what is already one of the most unstable parts of the world.

    That alone makes the debate on disarmament and non-proliferation we have to have today different in degree: it has become more immediate and more urgent.

    On top of that, we must respond to other underlying trends that are putting added pressure on the original non-proliferation regime. One of those, just one, is the emergence of Al Qaeda and its offshoots – terrorists whom we know to be actively seeking nuclear materials.

    Another though is the anticipated drive towards civil, nuclear power as the twin imperatives of energy security and climate security are factored into energy policy across the world. How can we ensure this does not lead to either nuclear materials or particularly potentially dangerous nuclear know-how – particularly enrichment and reprocessing technologies – being diverted for military use or just falling into the wrong hands? How do we do so without prejudice to the economic development of countries that have every right under the NPT to develop a civil, nuclear capability.

    And last there are some very specific triggers for action – key impending decisions – that are fast approaching. The START treaty will expire in 2009. We will need to start thinking about how we move from a bilateral disarmament framework built by the US and Russia to one more suited to our multi-polar world.

    And then in 2010 we will have the NPT Review Conference itself. By the time that is held, we need the international community to be foursquare and united behind a global non-proliferation regime. We can’t afford for that conference to be a fractured or fractious one: rather we need to strengthen the NPT in all its aspects.

    That may all sound quite challenging – I meant it to. But there is no reason to believe that we cannot rise to that challenge.

    Let’s look at some of the facts. Despite the recent log-jam, the basic non-proliferation consensus is and has been remarkably resilient. The grand bargain of the NPT has, by and large, held for the past 40 years. The vast majority of states – including many that have the technology to do so if they chose – have decided not to develop nuclear weapons. And far fewer states than was once feared have acquired and retained nuclear weapons.

    Even more encouragingly, and much less well known outside this room, many more states – South Africa, Libya, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Argentina, Brazil – have given up active nuclear weapons programmes, turned back from pursuing such programmes, or – as the case of the former Soviet Union countries – chosen to hand over weapons on their territory.

    And of course the Nuclear Weapons States themselves have made significant reductions in their nuclear arsenals, which I will come to later.

    So we have grounds for optimism; but we have none for complacency. The successes we have had in the past have not come about by accident but by applied effort. And we will need much more of the same in the months and years to come. That will mean continued momentum and consensus on non-proliferation, certainly. But, and this is my main argument today, the chances of achieving that are greatly increased if we can also point to genuine commitment and to concrete action on nuclear disarmament.

    Given the proliferation challenges we face, it is not surprising that so much of our focus should be on non-proliferation itself.

    For the reasons I gave a moment ago, stopping and reversing nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran has to remain a key priority for the whole international community.

    With North Korea the best hope to reverse their nuclear programme remains patient multilateral diplomacy underpinned by sanctions regimes.

    As for Iran, the generous offer the E3+3 made in June 2006 is still on the table. Sadly Iran has chosen not to comply with its international legal obligations, thereby enabling negotiations to resume. That forced us to seek a further Security Council Resolution. And we will do so again if necessary.

    The US contribution on Iran has, naturally, been critical. It made the Vienna offer both attractive and credible – showing that the entire international community was willing to welcome Iran back into its ranks provided that it conformed to international norms on the nuclear file and elsewhere. And I have no doubt that the close co-operation between the US, Europe, Russia and China has been a powerful point of leverage on the Iranians. We must hope that it succeeds.

    The US has also taken the lead on much of the vital work that is going on to prevent existing nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists and rogue states. That framework is perhaps more robust than ever before – the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, the Proliferation Security Initiative, the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism and efforts to prevent the financing of proliferation.

    Meanwhile, there is some imaginative work going on aimed at persuading states that they can have guaranteed supplies of electricity from nuclear power without the need to acquire enrichment and reprocessing technologies. For example, the work on fuel supply assurances following the report of the IAEA expert group; the US’s own Global Nuclear Energy Partnership initiative on more proliferation-resistant technologies; and the UK’s own proposal for advanced export approval of nuclear fuel that cannot subsequently be revoked – the so-called “enrichment bond”.

    But the important point is this: in none of these areas will we stand a chance of success unless the international community is united in purpose and in action.

    And what that Wall Street Journal article, and for that matter Kofi Annan, have been quite right to identify is that our efforts on non-proliferation will be dangerously undermined if others believe – however unfairly –that the terms of the grand bargain have changed, that nuclear weapon states have abandoned any commitment to disarmament.

    The point of doing more on disarmament, then, is not to convince the Iranians or the North Koreans. I do not believe for a second that further reductions in our nuclear weapons would have a material effect on their nuclear ambitions.

    Rather the point of doing more is this: because the moderate majority of states – our natural and vital allies on non-proliferation – want us to do more. And if we do not, we risk helping Iran and North Korea in their efforts to muddy the water, to turn the blame for their own nuclear intransigence back onto us. They can undermine our arguments for strong international action in support of the NPT by painting us as doing too little too late to fulfil our own obligations.

    And that need to appear consistent, incidentally, is just as true at the regional level. The international community’s clear commitment to a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in successive UN resolutions has been vital in building regional support for a tough line against Iran.

    So what does doing more – and indeed being seen to do more – on disarmament actually mean?

    First, I think we need to be much more open about the disarmament steps we are already taking or have taken. Here in the long-standing, and perhaps understandable, culture of increased secrecy that surrounds the nuclear world we may be our own worst enemy. There is little public remembrance or recognition of the vast cuts in warheads – some 40 000 – made by the US and the former USSR since the end of the Cold War. Nor, for that that matter, the cuts that France and the UK have made to our much smaller stocks. We all need to do more, much more, to address that. And I welcome the US State Department’s recent moves in that direction.

    But we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that this was a problem only of perception– simply of a failure to communicate, although that failure is very real. The sense of stagnation is real enough. The expiry of the remaining US-Russia arms control deals; the continued existence of large arsenals; the stalemate on a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty. They all point to an absence of debate at the highest levels on disarmament and a collective inability thus far to come up with a clear, forward plan.

    What we need is both vision – a scenario for a world free of nuclear weapons. And action – progressive steps to reduce warhead numbers and to limit the role of nuclear weapons in security policy. These two strands are separate but they are mutually reinforcing. Both are necessary, both at the moment are too weak.

    Let me start with the vision because, perhaps, that is the harder case to make. After all, we all signed up to the goal of the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons back in 1968; so what does simply restating that goal achieve today?

    More I think than you might imagine. Because, and I’ll be blunt, there are, I was going to say some, but I think many who are in danger of losing faith in the possibility of ever reaching that goal.

    That would, I think, be a grave mistake. The judgement we made forty years ago, that the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons was in all of our interests – is just as true today as it was then. For more than sixty years, good management and good fortune have meant that nuclear arsenals have not been used. But we cannot rely just on history to repeat itself.

    It would be a grave mistake for another reason, too. It underestimates the power that commitment and vision can have in driving action.

    A parallel can be drawn with some of those other decades-long campaigns conducted as we’ve striven for a more civilised world.

    When William Wilberforce began his famous campaign, the practice of one set of people enslaving another had existed for thousands of years. He had the courage to challenge that paradigm; and in so doing helped with many others to bring an end to the terrible evil of the transatlantic slave trade.

    Would he have achieved half as much, would he have inspired the same fervour in others if he had set out to ‘regulate’ or ‘reduce’ the slave trade rather than abolish it? I doubt it.

    Similarly the Millennium Development Goals, the cancellation of third-world debt, increased overseas aid were all motivated by the belief that one day, however far off it might seem, we could “Make Poverty History”.

    So too with nuclear weapons. Believing that the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons is possible can act as a spur for action on disarmament. Believing, at whatever level, that it is not possible, is the surest path to inaction. If there will always be nuclear weapons, what does it matter if there are 1000 or 10 000?

    And just as the vision gives rise to action, conversely so does action give meaning to the vision. As that Wall Street Journal article put it, and again I quote: “Without the bold vision, the actions will not be perceived as fair and urgent. Without the actions, the vision will not be perceived as realistic or possible”

    By actions, I do not mean that the nuclear weapons states should be making immediate and unrealistic promises – committing to speedy abolition, setting a timetable to zero.

    The truth is that I rather doubt – although I would wish it otherwise – that we will see the total elimination of nuclear weapons perhaps in my lifetime. To reach that point would require much more than disarmament diplomacy, convoluted enough though that is in itself. It would require a much more secure and predictable global political context.

    That context does not exist today. Indeed it is why, only a few months ago, the UK took the decision to retain our ability to have an independent nuclear deterrent beyond the 2020s.

    But acknowledging that the conditions for disarmament do not exist today does not mean resigning ourselves to the idea that nuclear weapons can never be abolished in the future. Nor does it prevent us from taking steps to reduce numbers now and to start thinking about how we would go about reaching that eventual goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons.

    That is why in taking the decision to retain our ability to have nuclear weapons, the UK government was very clear about four things. First that we would be open and frank with our own citizens and with our international partners about what we were doing and why. It is all being done upfront and in public – not as in the past, behind the scenes. Second that we would be very clear and up front that when the political conditions existed, we would give up our remaining nuclear weapons. Third that we were not enhancing our nuclear capability in any way and would continue to act strictly in accordance with our NPT obligations. And fourth that we would reduce our stock of operationally available warheads by a further 20 per cent – to the very minimum we considered viable to maintain an independent nuclear deterrent.

    This was our way – and I can assure you it was a difficult process – to resolve the dilemma between our genuine commitment to abolition and our considered judgement that sadly now was not the time to take a unilateral step to totally disarm.

    It’s the same dilemma every nuclear weapons state faces. And we can all make the same choices in recommitting to the goal of abolition and taking practical steps towards achieving that goal.

    Practical steps include further reductions in warhead numbers, particularly in the world’s biggest arsenals. There are still over 20 000 warheads in the world. And the US and Russia hold about 96 per cent of them.

    Almost no-one – politician, military strategist or scientist – thinks that warheads in those numbers are still necessary to guarantee international security. So it should not be controversial to suggest that there remains room for further significant reductions. So I hope that the Moscow Treaty will be succeeded by further clear commitments to significantly lower numbers of warheads – and include, if possible, tactical as well as strategic, nuclear weapons.

    Since we no longer live in a bipolar world, those future commitments may no longer require strict parity. They could be unilateral undertakings. Certainly the UK experience – and indeed the United States’ own experience with the reduction of its tactical weapons in Europe – is that substantial reductions can be achieved through independent re-examination of what is really needed to deter: that approach has allowed the UK to reduce our operationally available warheads by nearly half over the last ten years from what was already a comparatively low base. We have also reduced the readiness of the nuclear force that remains. We now only have one boat on patrol at any one time, carrying no more than 48 warheads – and our missiles are not targeted at any specific sites.

    Commitments like these need not even be enshrined in formal treaties. The UK’s reductions, after all, are not. But clearly both the US and Russia will require sufficient assurance that their interests and their strategic stability will be safeguarded. Part of the solution may be provided by the extension of the most useful transparency and confidence building measures in the START framework, should the US and Russia agree to do so.

    And I should make clear here again, that when it will be useful to include in any negotiations the one per cent of the world’s nuclear weapons that belong to the UK, we will willingly do so.

    In addition to these further reductions, we need to press on with both the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and with the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty. Both limit – in real and practical ways – the ability of states party to develop new weapons and to expand their nuclear capabilities. And as such they therefore both play a very powerful symbolic role too – they signal to the rest of the world that the race for more and bigger weapons is over, and that the direction from now on will be down and not up. That’s why we are so keen for those countries that have not yet done so to ratify the CTBT. The moratoriium observed by all the nuclear weapon states is a great step forward; but by allowing the CTBT to enter into force – and, of course, US ratification would provide a great deal of impetus – we would be showing that this is a permanent decision, a permanent change and in the right direction.

    At the same time, I believe that we will need to look again at how we manage global transparency and global verification. This will have to extend beyond the bilateral arrangements between Russia and the US. If we are serious about complete nuclear disarmament we should begin now to build deeper relationships on disarmament between nuclear weapon states.

    For our part, the UK is ready and willing to engage with other members of the P5 on transparency and confidence building measures. Verification will be particularly key – any future verification regime for a world free of nuclear weapons will need to be tried and tested. In my opinion, it will need to place more emphasis on the warheads themselves than the current arrangement which focuses primarily on delivery systems. That will become particularly true as numbers of warheads drop.

    And we have to keep doing the hard diplomatic work on the underlying political conditions – resolving the ongoing sources of tension in the world, not least in the Middle East and between Pakistan and India. We also need to build a more mature, balanced and stable relationship between ourselves and Russia.

    And since I have the non-proliferation elite gathered in one room, let me emphasise the importance this and future UK governments will place on the agreement of an international and legally binding arms trade treaty. Conflicts across the globe are made more likely and more intense by those who trade all arms in an irresponsible and unregulated way. And an arms trade treaty would contribute to a focus on arms reduction and help build a safer world.

    And when it comes to building this new impetus for global nuclear disarmament, I want the UK to be at the forefront of both the thinking and the practical work. To be, as it were, a “disarmament laboratory”.

    As far as new thinking goes, the International Institute of Strategic Studies is planning an in-depth study to help determine the requirements for the eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons. We will participate in that study and provide funding for one of their workshops, focussing on some of the crucial technical questions in this area.

    The study and subsequent workshops will offer a thorough and systematic analysis of what a commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons means in practice. What weapons and facilities will have to go before we can say that nuclear weapons are abolished? What safeguards will we have to put in place over civil nuclear facilities? How do we increase transparency and put in place a verification regime so that everyone can be confident that no-one else has or is developing nuclear weapons? And finally – and perhaps this is perhaps the greatest challenge of all – what path can we take to complete nuclear disarmament that avoids creating new instabilities themselves potentially damaging to global security.

    And then we have these new areas of practical work. This will concentrate on the challenge of creating a robust, trusted and effective system of verification that does not give away national security or proliferation sensitive information.

    Almost a decade ago, we asked the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment to begin developing our expertise in methods and techniques to verify the reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons. We reported on this work throughout the last Non-Proliferation Treaty review cycle. Now we intend to build on that work, looking more deeply at several key stages in the verification process – and again report our findings as soon as possible.

    One area we will be looking at further is authentication – in other words confirming that an object presented for dismantlement as a warhead is indeed a warhead. There are profound security challenges in doing that. We need to find ways to carry out that task without revealing sensitive information. At the moment we are developing technical contacts with Norway in this area. As a non-nuclear weapons state they will offer a valuable alternative perspective on our research.

    Then we will be looking more closely at chain of custody issues – in other words how to provide confidence that the items that emerge from the dismantlement process have indeed come from the authenticated object that went into that process to begin with. Here we face the challenge of managing access to sensitive nuclear facilities. We have already carried out some trial inspections of facilities to draw lessons for the handling of access under any future inspections regime.

    And last we intend to examine how to provide confidence that the dismantled components of a nuclear warhead are not being returned to use in new warheads. This will have to involve some form of monitored storage, with a difficult balance once again to be struck between security concerns and verification requirements. We are currently working on the design concepts for building such a monitored store, so that we can more fully investigate these complex practical issues.

    The initiatives I have announced today are only small ones. But they are, I hope you will agree, in the right direction – a signal of intent and purpose to ourselves and to others. We will talk more and do more with our international partners – those who have nuclear weapons, and those who do not – in the weeks and months to come.

    I said earlier that I am not confident, cannot be confident, that I would live to see a world free of nuclear weapons. My sadness at such a thought is real. Mine, like yours, is a generation that has existed under the shadow of the bomb – knowing that weapons existed which could bring an end to humanity itself. We have become almost accustomed to that steady underlying dread, punctuated by the sharper fear of each new nuclear crisis: Cuba in 1962, the Able Archer scare of 1983, the stand-off between India and Pakistan in 2002.

    But there is a danger in familiarity with something so terrible. If we allow our efforts on disarmament to slacken, if we allow ourselves to take the non-proliferation consensus for granted, the nuclear shadow that hangs over us will lengthen and it will deepen. And it may, one day, blot out the light for good.

    So my commitment to that vision, truly visionary in its day, of a world free of nuclear weapons is undimmed. And although we in this room may never reach the end of that road, we can take thos first further steps down it. For any generation, that would be a noble calling. For ours, it is a duty.

  • The ABCs of Nuclear Disarmament

    The chilling announcement that our government is preparing to replace our entire nuclear arsenal with new hydrogen bombs comes on the heels of a call for nuclear abolition by no less a peace activist than Henry Kissinger, joined by old cold warriors Sam Nunn, George Schultz, and William Perry in a recent Wall Street Journal Editorial.
    We’ve been pushing our luck for more than 60 years since the first and only two atomic bombs to be used in war were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 214,000 people in the initial days, and causing numerous cases of cancers, mutations and birth defects in their radioactive aftermath, new incidences of which are still being documented today. During these sixty years of the nuclear age, every site worldwide, involved in the mining, milling, production and fabrication of uranium, for either war or for “peace”, has left a lethal legacy of radioactive waste, illness, and damage to our very genetic heritage. Bomb and reactor-created plutonium stays toxic for more than 250,000 years and we still haven’t figured out how to safely contain it.
    For the world to have a real chance to deal with nuclear proliferation and avoid a tragic repetition of Hiroshima, it’s clear that we must eliminate the bombs as well as the nuclear power reactors that too often serve as bomb factories for metastasizing nuclear weapons states. On the 20th Anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, Gorbachev called for the phasing out of nuclear power and the establishment of a $50 billion solar fund.
    There are nine nuclear weapons states in the world today. The original five, the US, UK, Russia, China, and France, in the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) promised to give up their nuclear weapons in return for a promise from all the other countries of the world not to acquire them. To sweeten the deal, the NPT promised all the other countries an “inalienable right” to “peaceful” nuclear technology, which Iran is now relying on as a member of the treaty. Only India, Pakistan and Israel, refused to go along, India arguing that the treaty was discriminatory. Since the NPT was signed, India, Pakistan, Israel, and now North Korea, have joined the nuclear club. It has been noted by several distinguished Commissions that so long as any one country has nuclear weapons, others will want them.
    There are 27,000 nuclear bombs on the planet today, 26,000 of which are in the US and Russia, with the remaining 1,000 located in the seven other nuclear weapons states. To make progress on nuclear abolition, the US and Russia will have to cut their enormous stockpiles and then call all the other nations to the table to negotiate a treaty for nuclear disarmament. They are all on record as willing to enter disarmament negotiations if the US and Russia get serious. There is an offer on the table from Russia to the US to discuss further cuts in the US-Russian arsenals. Putin called, several years ago, for cuts to 1,500 or even less nuclear weapons each, which would be a signal to the seven other nuclear weapons states to join the talks. Gorbachev tried to convince Reagan to abolish all nuclear weapons but rescinded his offer because Reagan wouldn’t agree to give up his Star Wars program and keep weapons out of space. China, repeatedly calls in the UN for negotiations to begin on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons. In June, 2006, Putin called again for negotiations on new reductions.
    The silence from the US has been deafening. Rather, it is has rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, while pressing to plant our missiles right under Russia’s nose in Poland and the Czech Republic, despite promises given to Gorbachev when the wall came down, that if he didn’t object to a reunified Germany entering NATO, we would not expand NATO. This fall, the US was the only country in the world to have voted against negotiations for a treaty banning weapons in space, as we adhere to our brazen space mission to “dominate and control the military use of space to protect US interests and investments”. The newly announced hydrogen bomb to replace the entire nuclear arsenal is the product of an $8 billion annual program for the development of new nuclear weapons, and we have revised our nuclear weapons policy to include the right to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear attacks.
    A Plan for Avoiding Nuclear Proliferation
    Civil Society has produced a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention, drafted by lawyers, scientists and policy makers in the Abolition 2000 Global Network for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, which is now an official UN document. It lays out all the steps for disarmament, including how to proceed with dismantlement, verification, guarding and monitoring the disassembled arsenals and missiles to insure that we will all be secure from nuclear break-out. It’s not as if we don’t know how to do it! Congresswoman Lynne Woolsey has proposed a resolution calling on the president to negotiate a treaty to ban the bomb.
    So here’s the plan.

    1. The US must honor its own NPT agreement for nuclear disarmament by putting a halt to all new weapons development and taking up Putin’s offer to negotiate for deeper US-Russian cuts..
    2. Once the US and Russia agree to go below 1,000 bombs, take up China’s offer to negotiate a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons and call all the nuclear weapons states to the table..
    3. As part of the negotiation, agree to Russia and China’s annual proposal in the UN to ban all weapons in space. Other countries will not be willing to give up their nuclear “deterrent” so long as the US continues its massive military buildup to achieve “full spectrum dominance” of the planet through space..
    4. Call for a global moratorium on any further uranium mining and nuclear materials production..
    5. Close the Nevada test site just as France and China have closed their sites in the South Pacific and Gobi Desert.
    6. Restrict the role of the nuclear-industry dominated International Atomic Energy Agency to only monitoring and verifying compliance with nuclear disarmament measures, and prohibit any further commercial activity to promote “peaceful” nuclear technology.
    7. Establish an International Sustainable Energy, which would supercede the NPT’s promise of an “inalienable right” to “peaceful” nuclear technology as we phase out nuclear power. Since every one of the earth’s 442 nuclear power reactors is a potential bomb factory, we wouldn’t be dealing with a full deck if we thought we could eliminate nuclear weapons, without dealing with their evil twins, nuclear reactors.
    8. Fund the International Sustainable Energy with the $250 billion in tax breaks and subsidies now going to the fossil, nuclear, and industrial biomass industries, and jump-start a 21st Century sustainable energy future.
    9. Reject plans for international “control” of the civilian nuclear fuel cycle. It’s just so 20th Century– a top-down, centralized model, to be run by preferred members of the nuclear club which will set up another hierarchical and discriminatory regime of nuclear “haves and have nots”, contribute to more radioactive pollution and health and terrorism hazards, and is doomed to fail. Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates recently indicated they are trying to get in under the wire and develop their “peaceful” nuclear technology before the US and its colonial old boys network establishes another discriminatory regime of nuclear apartheid. To prevent proliferation and the possibility of nuclear war as well as fossil-fuel driven climate catastrophes equal to nuclear war in destructive power, sensible folks know we must deal holistically by eliminating nuclear weapons as we phase out nuclear power and mobilize for safe, clean, sustainable energy–negotiating an end to the nuclear age.
    10. Establish the Bronx Project to clean up the mess created by the Manhattan Project, by isolating nuclear materials from the environment and providing a rational containment system during the eons their radioactivity will co-exist with us on earth.

     

    Alice Slater is the New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a founder of the Abolition 2000 Global Network for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.