Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear abolition

  • A Powerful Peace

    Article originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

    If the nuclear powers wish to be safe from nuclear weapons, they must surrender their own.

    With each year that passes, nuclear weapons provide their possessors with less safety while provoking more danger. Possession of nuclear arms provokes proliferation. Both nourish the global nuclear infrastructure, which in turn enlarges the possibility of acquisition by terrorist groups.

    The step that is needed to break this cycle can be as little doubted as the source of the problem. The double standard of nuclear haves and have-nots must be replaced by a single standard, which can only be the goal of a world free of all nuclear weapons.

    What is it that prevents sensible steps toward nuclear abolition from being taken? The answer cannot be in doubt, either. It is the resolve of the world’s nuclear powers to hold on to their nuclear arsenals. Countries that already have nuclear arms cite proliferation as their reason for keeping them, and those lacking nuclear arms seek them in large measure because they feel menaced by those with them.

    A double-standard regime is a study in futility—a divided house that cannot stand. Its advocates preach what they have no intention of practicing. It is up to the nuclear powers to take the first step.

    Their nuclear arsenals would be the largest pile of bargaining chips ever brought to any negotiating table. More powerful as instruments of peace than they ever can be for war, they would likely be more than adequate for winning agreements from the non-nuclear powers that would choke off proliferation forever.

    The art of the negotiation would be to pay for strict, inspectable, enforceable nonproliferation and nuclear-materials-control agreements in the coin of existing nuclear bombs. What would be the price to the nuclear powers, for example, of a surrender by the nuclear-weapons-free states of their rights to the troublesome nuclear fuel cycle, which stands at the heart of the proliferation dilemma? Perhaps reductions by Russia and the United States from two thousand to a few hundred weapons each plus ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty?

    Further reductions, now involving the other nuclear powers, might pay for establishment and practice of inspections of ever-greater severity, and still further reductions might buy agreements on enforcement of the final ban on nuclear arms. When nuclear weapons holdings reached zero, former nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states, abolitionists all, would exercise a unanimous will to manage, control, roll back, and extirpate all nuclear weapon technology.

    A world from which nuclear weapons had been banned would, of course, not be without its dangers, including nuclear ones. But we must ask how they would compare with those now approaching.

    Let us suppose that the nuclear powers had agreed to move step by step toward eliminating their own arsenals. The iron chains of fear that link all the nuclear arsenals in the world would then be replaced by bonds of reassurance. Knowing that Russia and the United States were disarming, China could agree to disarm. Knowing that China was disarming, India could agree to disarm. Knowing that India was ready to disarm, Pakistan could agree to disarm as well. Any country that decided otherwise would find itself up against the sort of united global will so conspicuous by its absence today.

    During the Cold War, the principal objection in the United States to a nuclear-weapon-free world was that you could not get there. That objection melted away with the Soviet Union, and today the principal objection is that even if you could get there, you would not want to be there. The arguments usually begin with the observation that nuclear weapons can never be disinvented, and that a world free of nuclear weapons is therefore at worst a mirage, at best a highly dangerous place to be. It is supposedly a mirage because, even if the hardware is removed, the know-how remains. It is said to be highly dangerous because the miscreant re-armer, now in possession of a nuclear monopoly, would be able to dictate terms to a helpless, terrorized world or, alternately, precipitate a helter-skelter, many-sided nuclear arms race.

    This conclusion seems reasonable until you notice that history has taught an opposite lesson. Repeatedly, even the greatest nuclear powers have actually lost wars against tiny, backward nonnuclear adversaries without being able to extract the slightest utility from their colossal arsenals. Think of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, or the U.S. in Vietnam, or Britian in Suez.

    If, in the 60 years of the nuclear age, no great power has won a war by making nuclear threats against even tiny, weak adversaries, then how could a nuclear monopoly by a small country enable it to coerce and bully the whole world? The danger cannot be wholly discounted, but it is surely greatly exaggerated.

    If the nuclear powers wish to be safe from nuclear weapons, they must surrender their own. They should collectively offer the world’s non-nuclear powers a deal of stunning simplicity, inarguable fairness, and patent common sense: we will get out of the nuclear weapon business if you stay out of it. Then we will all work together to assure that everyone abides by the commitment.

    The united will of the human species to save itself from destruction would be a force to be reckoned with.

    Jonathan Schell wrote this article as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Jonathan is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and a senior visiting lecturer at Yale. He has written many books. This article is adapted from his latest, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.

  • Humanity’s Great Future

    Address in Saint Paul’s Cathedral San Diego, California April 27, 2008

    In this ever changing life, upon this glowing transforming globe, I have lived for nearly 100 years, traveling inwardly and outwardly, in my thoughts and in my dreams, realizing that there are no limits to the paths which can be explored in the thunderous days and illuminated nights of this journey.

    I was born in a thunder storm with lightening flickering around my mother’s body. I have landed on a torn beach in Normandy, leaping from a small boat onto a strip of sand covered by parts of bodies and wreckage. I have ridden through villages smashed by allied bombs and shared in the liberation of the city of Paris on a blazing day in August 1944.

    I have ridden with a President threatened by defeat and hidden assassins, and sat close to him on the day of his inauguration when the sky was filled with war planes and thousands of men went marching by. I have worked in a huge office in the Capitol of the United States – an office once occupied by the Supreme Court. I have hidden in a cavern under that majestic building, made fearful by reports of a possible attack by enemy bombers.

    In all many places I have had glimpses of the Creator who shaped all life. I have seen His awesome power in clouds and volcanoes, in giant animals pacing in cages, in the smiles and wails of little children, in old men and women with authority, in the beauty and delight of love and in nightmares when I thought I heard the cries of a dying Savior asking why he had been forsaken.

    I was born in 1914, a year when nations plunged into the catastrophe known as World War I. When President Woodrow Wilson took this country into that war in 1917, proclaiming that it was a war to end war, my father volunteered for military service. He was sent to Camp Funston for training and became a captain in the infantry. But when he went overseas with thousands of other men to crush the German Kaiser, my mother and I felt strangely abandoned.

    My father ordered me to wear a little soldier suit – and forced me to salute him and other men in uniform. He ordered me to take care of my dear mother while he bloodied his hands in the Wilsonian crusade. I did not begin to understand the murderous nature of war until he’d returned from France horribly wounded. I did not recognize him. He had a scarred hole in his neck and he woke up at night in savage struggles, fighting in trenches hand to hand confronting the bloody bowels of men he had ripped open with a bayonet.

    His nightmares afflicted me – and still do. Our house in Kansas City was filled with deep pains I had not earned and those memories have remained with me all the years of my life. I had been taught that God was good but the world he had made reeked with evils.

    To escape from the planet of terror on which I had been born, I leaped toward the stars. It seemed to me that all those glistening spangles in the night skies were there to be explored by voyagers from earth. The stars to me seemed the very signs of God. I was a very religious boy and I felt His arms around me, pulling me into ecstasies.

    In my early teens, I wrote science fiction stories about traveling to other planets. When I saw the astronauts landing on the moon many years later, it seemed to me that they were dressed exactly as I had depicted them in my stories. The explorations of space seemed to me very relevant to the questions I had wrestled with in my youth.

    My first teachers were Catholic nuns who taught me that the powerful God who gleamed in the stars had also made me. This God loved to make stars, beasts and beetles and millions of other living beings and he loved everything he made. He had created me to love Him and to serve Him and to be happy with Him forever. That was what they taught me.

    Yet there were perils which had to be faced. The nuns taught me that there were angels and demons around at all times. Invisible spiritual warfare was even worse than the slaughter in which my father had participated. It was going on around me and around us all. There were dark powers and principalities seeking to devour me and resplendent angels defending me. So they convinced me that I was very important to God and to the enormous power called the devil.

    My favorite teacher was a beautiful nun who was not frightened by the questions I hurled at her. She encouraged me to write stories of wonder, to let my mind run freely, to leap toward the farthest places if I felt like jumping high. She told me that God had given me some of his creative power, some of his courage, some of his strength. I was a pioneer of wonder – so I had to be brave and strong.

    As I tried to spring higher and higher, I encountered the marvelous eloquence of a scientist, Brian Swimme, who declared: “The vastness of this universe could not have been otherwise….This universe, which is 30 billion light years across, is the smallest universe that we can fit into….The universe had to expand at this rate to enable our existence….We belong here. This is our home. This has been our home for 15 billion years. If you altered the universe even just slightly, none of us would even be here. That means that our very existence is implicit! We don’t only stand on our own feet….We stand on the original fireball; we stand on the expansion of the universe as a whole!”

    Now when I stand here in this great center of worship, built by the tremendous surges of creative power, I’m sure that Brian Swimme and other physicists are right. The unfolding of this universe, the Big Bang that occurred billions of years ago, had to happen just as it did.

    The first book of Moses, commonly called Genesis, puts it another way, saying that in the beginning the earth was without form and utterly dark and then there was a great burst of light. The whole process began with the emergence of the shining brightness that brings forth the understanding which transforms everything forever. When God said, “Let there be Light,” everything changed.

    There are many possibilities for despair in the age of turmoil in which we live. I have often reached the edge of darkness but I’ve always been suddenly aware of those ringing words: “Let there be Light.”

    As I gaze at the shining faces that glow before me this morning, I see glorious beings – reaching everywhere.

    You are glorious because you are connected to the starry skies – that blaze above and beyond this hall. You have radiating through you the glory of this vast universe! The Big Bang brought you here!

    I am sure that Albert Einstein had a glimpse of reality when he said that if we could envision what we really are, we would know that we are glowing fields of electro-magnetic energy. We are collections of vibrating molecules composed of dancing atoms filled with positive and negative charges. And yet we are more than all that! The physicist can describe what we are but cannot convey who we are.

    There are auras of light around your amazing bodies, and your immortal souls are visible through your eyes. Look at one another. Listen to one another, to the breathing that goes on, to the heartbeats, to the throbbing of pulses.

    Become fully aware of what towering beings you are. You are far more involved in the survival of your planet, in shaping your future, than you have ever begun to realize.

    You know that humanity is involved in a tragic situation today. You are surrounded by more dangers than any generation before you – and yet you have more strength in big and little matters, more technological knowledge, more allies to help you than you have fully understood.

    How do I dare today to make such statements to you? I dare because I have lived in this body for more than 90 years and in that long life I have experienced many miracles. In my science fiction in the 1920s, I predicted some of the transformations through which humanity has already passed – and glimpsed many more.

    In the presidential election of 1948, I had the privilege of writing speeches for Harry Truman, who had attained the Presidency without seeking it, who had survived a war without expecting to be elevated to the highest levels of political power. In a personal interview he revealed to me the principles he had learned from his mother and from reading the Bible. He felt, as I did, that he had to carry the whole world on his shoulders.

    He had been taught, as I had, that he had to be an obedient servant of the Creator, a man who prayed publicly and privately to carry out his obligations. In his diary, Truman recorded this prayer: “Oh almighty and everlasting God, Creator of Heaven, earth and the Universe, help me to be, to think, to act on what is right because it is right; make me truthful, honest, and honorable in all things….”

    His philosophy was based on confronting what he regarded as reality. In describing how he made what he called the most terrible decision any human had to make in the history of humanity – the use of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities – he spoke in very personal terms. He told me that General LeMay, commander of the B29 Bombers that dropped fire bombs on many places in Japan, thought that Japan could be defeated by those blazing attacks. Truman made a sweeping gesture with his right arm and said: “LeMay told me we didn’t need to use those new atomic weapons. We could burn up Japan from one end to the other. That would have meant setting fire to millions of mothers and children. I couldn’t sanction that!” He leaned toward me: “You know Frank, those Japanese are just as human as we are. Could you have burned up your mother?” I understood his burden. Most of the people in the world felt that the use of the Atom Bombs brought a speedy end to World War II. Mr. Truman believed that, but he thought of it as saving millions of mothers and children.

    Later I served as one of Truman’s representatives on the committee which developed the national Democratic Platform in 1948. Mr. Truman told us that he would treat that platform as much more than an instrument to win votes. He reminded me that he had taken steps to rebuild Europe after World War II. We had supported the United Nations fully and we had pledged fully to participate in international programs leading to the development of the UN, which would truly constitute an effective parliament of the world’s peoples.

    Mr. Truman carried in his wallet a poem by an English writer Alfred Tennyson, predicting the eventual creation of such a parliament. In that poem written in 1842, the English author wrote:

    For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that could be; Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Heard the heavens filled with shouting and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue Till the war drums throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled In the parliament of man, the federation of the world….

    When I was released from the American army in 1945, I was sent by the Associated Press to cover the first sessions of the United Nations. I witnessed Truman’s use of power to get the Soviets to withdraw their soldiers from the Northern part of Iran. I used the knowledge I gained then to write a novel about the United Nations entitled, An Edge of Light, showing Truman’s determination to keep the military strength of nations to be used for the averting of bloody clashes. He insisted that strength had to be an imperative element for maintaining peace. He got the Soviets to back down.

    In my conversations with that President, I was enormously encouraged by his confidence and hope. He predicted that the Soviet system would collapse, and that Americans and Russians would work together in meeting the needs of people in many places. In 1983 I was invited to go to Russia under the auspices of the Council of Citizens to discuss steps toward cooperation. I found that many Soviet leaders were eager for peace with Americans. Truman’s efforts to rebuild Europe were known and appreciated in Moscow.

    In addition to working with Truman and later serving as assistant to the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, I had the benefit of being Vice President of the Fund for the Republic, an educational foundation, dedicated to preserving the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights. With financial backing from the Ford Foundation and other donors, the fund helped many non-profit organizations to uphold civil rights and liberties in a period of expanding challenges to those rights and freedoms.

    The Center for the Study of Democratic institutions created by the fund for the Republic was active for 22 years. It helped to prevent a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It fostered efforts to end the tragic conflict in Viet Nam. It was a pioneer in the environmental movement. It sponsored discussions of the constructive and negative effects of organized religions. It called attention to the positive and negative effects of the mass media, the skeptical clashes between the press and the people, and the destructive impact of commercial television. It published a model Constitution for the World. It brought thousands of people into dialogues and conferences in New York, Geneva,, San Francisco, Washington and many other places. It became “an early warning system” for humanity.

    In my 16 years of participation in the Center’s work I gained a full appreciation of the value of long-range thinking. I read and heard the ideas of brilliant people from every field – atomic scientists, philosophers, generals, military strategists, novelists, bishops, priest, theologians, psychologists, poets, science fiction writers including Aldous Huxley and those who’d experimented with LSD and other mind-altering substances, peace activists, Supreme Court judges, senators, governors, presidential candidates, labor leaders, university administrators, state and local officials, economists and others. I argued with Nobel Prize winners and offered questions to the scholars who were employed by the Center, to make major revisions in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

    On the Center staff, we planned meetings on science and world affairs, on the demands of technology, on the prospects for democracy in the new nations that had arisen after the collapse of the European Colonial Empires, on the possible changes in the American character in an affluent society, and the connection between American problems and world problems. We had an insatiable thirst for knowledge about everything in every area of human activity. We were intensely concerned about the effects of current events on the lives of coming generations. We were accused of fostering a new sin – the sin of intellectual gluttony. I was among those guilty of that sin -of wanting to know everything there was to know about everything. I am still guilty of that thirst to know as much as God does.

    THE NATIONAL PEACE ACADEMY CAMPAIGN

    I left The Center in 1975, after it went through a drastic reorganization. After several years of writing books and articles, I had another chance to engage in a project with impacts on humanity’s future. I was invited to join the board of directors of The National Peace Academy Campaign, which had been created to get congress to approve an idea which had been around for almost two centuries – the formation of a federal institution to “promote and preserve perpetual peace.”

    In 1793, when George Washington was President, two far-seeing citizens – a Black mathematician named Benjamin Banneker and Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of The American Declaration of Independence, deplored the fact that the new nation had a War Department but no Peace Department. They launched a proposal to create a Peace Office for the United States. They didn’t get much support.

    In the 19th Century, various members of Congress and other citizens had tried to bring a Department of Peace into existence, but they couldn’t get enough public backing to put it over. In the 1970s, in the connection with the Bicentennial celebration of the American Republic, Senator Hartke of Indiana and Republican Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon sponsored a bill to “establish an educational institute” to promote understanding of “the process and the state of peace.” The United States had been involved in many wars and they thought it was time for this country “to consider the dimensions of peaceful resolution of differences.” Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, who had been my executive assistant in Averell Harriman’s campaign for the presidency in 1952, held hearings on the Hartke – Hatfield Bill and suggested the formation of a national commission to examine proposals for a Peace Academy. The commission came into existence in 1980, and conducted public hearings in various locations ranging from Hawaii to Massachusetts and finally urged the Congress to establish the Academy. In 1984, through an amendment attached by Senator Hatfield to a huge Defense Department of Appropriations bill, a few million dollars were allocated to make available to what was then called the United States Institute of Peace. At last, the United States had an agency engaged in full time programs for peace. Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson must have rejoiced!

    Remembering my father’s years of nightmares – and the sufferings of wounded men I had seen in World War II, I hoped that my sons and my grandsons – as well as the children of millions of other veterans – would not have to settle disputes by stabbing or shooting or bombing one another. When I spoke in honor of President Truman in a recent meeting in Kansas City, a man in the audience came up and gave me a copy of a science fiction story I had written in the 1920s celebrating the erection of a giant peace tower in the 21st century America, signifying the increasing progress for peace made by Americans.

    When the Peace Academy Campaign was at its height, I was invited to become a founder of another organization with a global mission – The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, launched by David Krieger, Wallace Drew, Charles Jamison and myself in 1982. That Foundation initiates and supports worldwide efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, to strengthen International law and institutions, to use technology responsibly, and to empower young people to create a more peaceful society.

    The Foundation publishes a journal and sponsors and co-sponsors meetings, dialogues and conferences with schools, colleges, universities, women’s organizations, and other peace groups. It has consultative status to the United Nation’s Economic and Social Council, and is recognized by the UN as a Peace Messenger organization.

    I am grateful to be connected to this inspiring foundation. Its vision is a world full of joyful activities, free from aggressive assaults and the threats of mass destruction. We try to develop an atmosphere in which human beings realize how glorious they are, how many gifts they have, how the future may unfold with beauty and unconditional love everywhere.

    We work daily to make that future possible. We honor people who have demonstrated leadership in advancing peace and justice. We have presented awards to educators, scientists, religious leaders, artists and others. Among them are Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, Mairead Maguire of Ireland, The Dalai Lama of Tibet, Dr. Linus Pauling, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Carl Sagan, Paul Ehrlich, Yehudi Menuhin, Queen Noor of Jordan, Senator Claiborne Pell, Jacques Cousteau, Admiral Gene LaRocque and others.

    We also acknowledge the dangers of the modern world. People from 80 countries died in the wreckage of the World Trade Towers in New York after they were attacked from the air. Everyone now knows that terrorists may strike again at any time, anywhere. The “preventive war” launched by the US in Iraq in 2003 has brought many deaths and much suffering to millions of people in the Middle East. The war in Afghanistan destroyed one terrorist group, but there are now reported to be such groups in 65 nations. People everywhere are now fully aware of the vulnerability that has to be faced in big rich countries and small poor ones.

    That awareness of vulnerability has made us all realize that we are all connected. We had a large meeting in Santa Barbara in 2001 to present peace leadership awards to two young people for their bravery.

    One went to Hafsat Abiola, who founded the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy on the African Continent. The other was given to Craig Kielberger, founder of the Free the Children organization, who started a movement that led to the liberation of thousands of children from slave labor.

    When these two young leaders described what they had done, the people there gave them standing ovations. Bursts of admiration and affection flashed through the men and women of all ages in that gathering. The young leaders had shown how constructive human beings could become.

    I thought then of the triumphant joy I had felt on the day in August 1944, when I had taken part in the liberation of Paris. That beautiful city in France had been occupied for years by the gray legions of Hitler’s army. Thousands of Frenchmen had been taken away to German prison camps.

    As a member of General Patton’s army, I had ridden into that city to the sound of applause. I saw the Nazis running. French people came to our trucks and embraced us. We were kissed by bearded men as well as women. We were hailed as Heroes. The city was bubbling like a fountain of champagne.

    In that glorious moment, I remembered the men who had been wounded or killed on the roads after we had moved inland from Normandy. I thought of the bodies on the beach, the torn legs and arms, the eyes and limbs we had passed over. Why had we been spared? Why were we given a share in that tremendous celebration? I had been in a training camp for “replacements” for months before D-Day. Then an officer from General Eisenhower’s headquarters had come to our camp looking for men with journalistic experience. Because I had worked for the Associated Press, I had been taken out of the ranks and given patches on my uniform, which had proclaimed me to an “Army Correspondent.” I still carried a rifle but I was not asked to use it. I was ordered to interview the bloody wounded for the army newspaper Stars and Stripes and hometown publications. I was supposed to depict every soldier as a hero even though he might be crying out for his mother or weeping for his dead friends.

    Even now, I can’t explain why I was pulled from the edge of death and carried into a bright city full of hugs and embraces. Years later, when I was asked by Admiral Hyman Rickover to explain the miracles of my life, I could only bring forth words put into the mouth of Hamlet by the great poet William Shakespeare: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”

    In preparing for the talk I am delivering here today, I examined the draft of the new constitution I helped to write many years ago. In that document, I saw the signs of a global community arising from the efforts of people in many nations. I advocated the creation of a Center for Humanity’s Future at that time.

    I thought then and still do now that the Center should be dedicated to celebration – to foster the release of everyone’s finest thoughts and everyone’s dancing spirit. Celebration means more than a never-ending party, although it does include all aspects of joy, because human beings are at their best when they are joyful, feasting and frolicking.

    This Center could spread the light of eternal sunrise over our beautiful earth. It would honor all the works of compassion going on in many places, sparking many dialogues, and loving exchanges, inviting everyone to open up and communicate with people of all ages.

    Now there are many thousands of non-profit organizations, engaged in providing food and medicines for the poor in many countries, learning from one another, striving to end wars, and to send aid to people struck by hurricanes, tornadoes, epidemics, and other natural disasters. This Center could work with all of them.

    I have to mention that the Center I have described here today is simply a revival of a proposal I made in 1962 in the Saturday Review. It came to the attention of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower through the recommendation of Everett Clinchy, then head of The National Conference of Christians and Jews. Eisenhower endorsed the idea in a letter to me and it also received support from 15 members of the US Senate, but it never went into operation.

    I know that people in this great Cathedral have demonstrated their concerns for humanity’s future in many ways. I am very grateful to the Reverend Richard Lief for giving me a chance to express my confidence in the greatness of human beings.

    I am encouraged by the recent creation in Hamburg, Germany of a World Future Council, which was designed to link moral authority with political power. Jacob Von Uexkull, one of the founders of this Council, recently gave a Frank Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, financed by 100 donors who share these ideas.

    Von Uexkull said, “This Council will work closely with policymakers worldwide to implement national legislation and to create binding international agreements based on best-practices solutions. It will expand the boundaries of what is regarded as politically realistic, building on previous initiatives, which had been too narrowly focused or lacked the necessary follow-ups.” “The World Future Council is a uniquely broad institution with members from governments, parliaments, civil societies, businesses, science and the arts. Councillors – ‘planeary elders,’ global pioneers and visionaries – are world citizens, serving in a personal capacity. I am very happy that David Krieger, President of the NAPF, has accepted the invitation to join the Council, as has Frances Moore-Lappe, author of Diet for a Small Planet.”

    Today I have taken you with me through the long journey of my life, which began in 1914 and still continues (to my amazement) with high vitality.

    In closing, I must say that this speech today is a song of thanksgiving – for all the blessings, for all the wonderful people who have helped me and guided me – for the Franciscans, the Catholics of all kinds, the good Protestants, for Harry Truman, for Robert Hutchins, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eleanor Roosevelt, Barbara Mandigo Kelly, Christine Boesch, for the Liefs, for Fr. Virgil Cordano, for Terry and Mary, for Stephen and Misa, Carol Ann Manzi and Tom Heck, for Maryellen Kelley, Sisters of the Holy Nativity, Fabio Duran, Ernest Hemingway and thousands of others who have inspired me to believe in the greatness of humanity.

    Frank Kelly is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • Global Article 9 Campaign to Abolish War Launched in Japan

    ARTICLE 9: JAPANESE CONSTITUTION: 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. (2) 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.

    After World War II, the victorious allied powers, implementing a transition to democracy in Japan, required Japan to forego any future aggressive military action by including a provision in their new Constitution to renounce war and the threat or use of force. But by 1950, following the outbreak of the Korean War, when US General MacArthur ordered the establishment of a 75,000-strong Japanese National Police Reserve equipped with US Army surplus materials, numerous assaults have been made on the integrity of Article 9. By 1990, Japan was ranked third in military spending after the US and the Soviet Union, until 1996 when it was outspent by China and dropped to fourth place. Today, the US-Japanese joint Theater Missile “Defense” which in reality poses an “offensive” threat to China, as well as the US military bases in Japan, and other US-Japanese military cooperation have further undermined the spirit of Article 9. Presently, the Bush Administration is creating an all out assault on the peace constitution, pressuring the Japanese government to amend Article 9 in order to permit Japanese soldiers to serve in the wars of the Empire, providing fresh cannon fodder for battles in Iraq and Afghanistan and other imperial adventures yet undeclared.

    The citizen activists of Japan are resisting the US led assault on their beloved peace constitution. This May in Tokyo, at the launch of a Global Article 9 Campaign to Abolish War, organized by the Japanese NGO, Peaceboat, 15,000 people showed up for the first day’s plenary and over 3,000 people had to be turned away from the filled-to-capacity convention center, causing the organizers to set up an impromptu program outdoors for the overflow crowd where keynote speakers, including Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate, rallied the participants to call on their government to preserve their constitution’s provision for the renunciation of war. This unprecedented turnout to uphold Japan’s constitution, launched a Global Article 9 Campaign to Abolish War with more than 22,000 people attending the three day meeting in Tokyo, and 8,000 more gathering in Hiroshima, Osaka, and Sendai to organize for peace. More than 40 countries were represented at the various plenaries and workshops with over 200 international visitors, which examined opportunities to reinforce and expand Article 9 in a new 21st century context. Article 9 was promoted not only as a disarmament measure for all the nations of the world, but as a means of redistributing the world’s treasure, now wasted at the rate of over one trillion dollars per year to feed the murderous war machine, using those funds to restore the health of the planet and end poverty on earth.

    One of the most moving and inspiring presentations was the shared experiences of a young Iraqi Sunni soldier, Kasim Turki, who quit fighting in the middle of a fierce battle in Ramadhi and has now organized a team working to rebuild schools and hospitals in Iraq, joined by Aidan Delgado, an American Iraq war vet, who also laid down his arms in the middle of a battle in Iraq and took conscientious objector status, refusing to ever kill again.. The two young soldiers and former enemies have become friends, sharing experiences and urging the abolition of military power and war. Their presentations were welcomed resoundingly by the participants who were inspired and moved by their fierce devotion to peace.

    Although cruel wars have been common throughout human history, there has been nothing like the enormous speed up of destructive war, fueled by science and technology, suffered in this last century, starting with 20 million deaths after World War I and ending with well over 100 million deaths by the end of the 20th Century– the horrors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda– only a few of the tragic catastrophes rendered by the instruments of war. Yet it was only in 1969, less than 40 years ago, that humanity landed on the moon and, for the first time saw the image of our fragile, beautiful blue planet, floating in space, giving us a new perspective of a unified world, sharing this small spaceship earth. It could only have been a profound influence on our consciousness that is bound to help us shift from the paradigm of war and technological domination and control to a more balanced nurturing interdependent vision for the health of earth’s inhabitants in an expanded understanding of Article 9.

    The US Constitution was imperfect at its drafting, failing to consider slaves as people or to recognize women’s right to vote. Evolving consciousness led to the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women. Similarly, it is hoped, by the many participants who gathered in Japan, that a transformed earth consciousness will perfect the original limited vision of the “Renunciation of War” infusing the Article 9 initiative for a global effort to stop all violence on the planet, not only for Japan, but for the whole earth. We discussed not only the violence of wars in the traditional meaning but in an expanded context of destruction against all living things and the very living systems of our planetary home itself– or as Professor Keibo Oiwa at at Meiji Gakuin University characterized it in the workshop, “Linking Environment and Peace”, a Pax Ecologia.

    And as we met in Tokyo, half way around the world in Berlin, only a few days earlier, Germany convened a meeting of sixty nations to launch a Campaign for IRENA, an International Renewable Energy Agency, see www.irena.org, to facilitate new reliance around the world on the safe, abundant, free energy of the sun, wind, and tides, foregoing resource wars and food shortages, currently plaguing the earth’s people as a result of a non-sustainable out of date energy regime of fossil, nuclear and biofuels. Irene, the Greek word for peace adds a unique resonance to this critical initiative to shift our dependence on energy to benign sources, plentifully distributed around our planet for all to access peacefully. Support for the establishment of IRENA was issued in the final statement of the Article 9 conference to the participants at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Conference which convened at the same time in Geneva to address issues of nuclear disarmament and proliferation.

    Currently, only one other country, Costa Rica, has a constitutional provision similar to Japan’s to abolish war. At the close of the conference, Carlos Vargas, representing Costa Rica, invited the organizers to his country for a follow up planning meeting to expand the Article 9 Campaign to make peace provisions a reality in every national constitution around the world. For more information, see http://www.article-9.org/en/index.html ; http://www.peaceboat.org/english/index.html

    Alice Slater is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s New York representative (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • A Treaty to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

    Article first appeared on the History News Network

    Although few people are aware of it, there has been considerable progress over the past decade toward a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons.

    For many years, there had been a substantial gap between the pledges to eliminate nuclear weapons made by the signatories to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 and the reality of their behavior. To remedy this situation, in 1996 the New York-based Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy—the U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms—began to coordinate the drafting of a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention. Formulated along the lines of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which entered into force in 1997, this model nuclear convention was designed to serve as an international treaty that prohibits and eliminates nuclear weapons.

    Although the late 1990s proved a difficult time for nuclear arms control and disarmament measures, the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, joined by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and the International Network of Engineers Against Proliferation, continued its efforts. Consequently, in 2007, these organizations released a new model treaty, revised to reflect changes in world conditions, as well as an explanatory book, Securing Our Survival.

    In 1997, like its predecessor, this updated convention for nuclear abolition was circulated within the United Nations, this time at the request of Costa Rica and Malaysia. In addition, it was presented at a number of international conclaves, including a March 2008 meeting of non-nuclear governments in Dublin, sponsored by the Middle Powers Initiative and by the government of Ireland.

    Although the Western nuclear weapons states and Russia have opposed a nuclear abolition treaty, the idea has begun to gain traction. The Wall Street Journal op-eds by George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn have once again placed nuclear abolition on the political agenda. Speaking in February 2008, the U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Sergio Duarte, condemned the great powers’ “refusal to negotiate or discuss even the outlines of a nuclear-weapons convention” as “contrary to the cause of disarmament.” Opinion surveys have reported widespread popular support for nuclear abolition in numerous nations—including the United States, where about 70 percent of respondents back the signing of an international treaty to reduce and eliminate all nuclear weapons.

    Of course, it’s only fair to ask if there really exists the political will to bring such a treaty to fruition. Although Barack Obama has endorsed the goal of nuclear abolition, neither of his current opponents for the U.S. presidency has followed his example or seems likely to do so. John McCain is a thoroughgoing hawk, while Hillary Clinton—though publicly supporting some degree of nuclear weapons reduction—has recently issued the kind of “massive retaliation” threats unheard of since the days of John Foster Dulles.

    Furthermore, the American public is remarkably ignorant of nuclear realities. Writing in the Foreword to a recent book, Nuclear Disorder or Cooperative Security, published by the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, the Western States Legal Foundation, and the Reaching Critical Will project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (www.wmdreport.org), Zia Mian, a Princeton physicist, points to a number of disturbing facts about contemporary U.S. public opinion. For example, more Americans (55%) mistakenly believe that Iran has nuclear weapons than know that Britain (52%), India (51%), Israel (48%), and France (38%) actually have these weapons.

    Although the United States possesses over 5,700 operationally deployed nuclear warheads, more than half of U.S. respondents to an opinion survey thought that the number was 200 weapons or fewer. Thus, even though most Americans have displayed a healthy distaste for nuclear weapons and nuclear war, their ability to separate fact from fiction might well be questioned when it comes to nuclear issues.

    Fortunately, there are many organizations working to better educate the public on nuclear dangers. In addition to the groups already mentioned, these include Peace Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Federation of American Scientists, Faithful Security, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. And important knowledge can also be gleaned from that venerable source of nuclear expertise, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

    But there remains a considerable distance to go before a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons becomes international law.

    Dr. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book, co-edited with Glen H. Stassen, is Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future (Paradigm Publishers).

  • Why Today’s Peace Activists Should Not Be Discouraged: An Example from 1958

    Originally published on History News Network

    After nearly five years of bloody, costly war in Iraq, with no end in sight, many peace activists feel discouraged. Protest against the war and the rise of antiwar public opinion seem to have had little effect upon government policy.

    But, in fact, it is too early to say. Who really knows what impact peace activism and widespread peace sentiment have had in the past five years or will have in the near future? Certainly not historians, who will spend decades pulling together such information from once secret government records and after-the-fact interviews.

    What historians can do, of course, is assess the impact of popular protest on events in the more distant past. And here the record provides numerous intriguing illustrations of the power of protest.

    One example along these lines occurred fifty years ago, in 1958, when the Soviet and U.S. governments stopped their nuclear explosions and commenced negotiations for a nuclear test ban treaty.

    Ever since the first explosion of an atomic bomb, at Alamogordo, in July 1945, the great powers had been engaged in a deadly race to develop, test, and deploy what they considered the ultimate weapon, the final guarantee of their “national security.” The United States, of course, had the lead, and used this with devastating effect upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, in 1949, the U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons was cracked by the Soviet Union. In 1952, the British also entered the nuclear club. As the nuclear arms race accelerated, all three powers worked on producing a hydrogen bomb–a weapon with a thousand times the destructive power of the bomb that annihilated Hiroshima. Within a short time, all of them were testing H-bombs for their rapidly-growing nuclear arsenals.

    The nuclear tests–which, by late 1958, numbered at least 190 (125 by the United States, 44 by the Soviet Union, and 21 by Britain)–were conducted mostly in the atmosphere and, in these cases, were often quite dramatic. Enormous explosions rent the earth, sending vast mushroom clouds aloft that scattered radioactive debris (fallout) around the globe. The H-bomb test of March 1, 1954, for example–which the U.S. government conducted at Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, a U.N. trust territory in the Pacific—was so powerful that it overran the danger zone of 50,000 square miles (an area roughly the size of New England). Generating vast quantities of radioactive fallout that landed on inhabited islands and fishermen outside this zone, it forced the evacuation of U.S. weather station personnel and Marshall Islanders (many of whom subsequently suffered a heavy incidence of radiation-linked illnesses, including cancer and leukemia). In addition, the Bikini test overtook a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, which received a heavy dose of radioactive ash that sickened the crew and, eventually, killed one of its members.

    Recognizing that these nuclear tests were not only paving the way for mass destruction in the future, but were already beginning to generate sickness and death, large numbers of people around the world began to resist. Prominent intellectuals, such Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling, issued public appeals to halt nuclear testing. Pacifists sailed protest vessels into nuclear test zones in an attempt to disrupt planned weapons explosions. Citizens’ antinuclear organizations sprang up, including the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (better known as SANE) in the United States, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Great Britain, and dozens of others in assorted nations. In the United States, the 1956 Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, made a halt to nuclear testing a key part of his campaign. Antinuclear pressures even developed within Communist dictatorships. In the Soviet Union, top scientists, led by Andrei Sakharov, appealed to Soviet leaders to halt nuclear tests.

    Polls during 1957 and 1958 in nations around the globe reported strong public opposition to nuclear testing. In the United States, 63 percent of respondents favored a nuclear test ban; in Japan, 89 percent supported a worldwide ban on the testing and manufacture of nuclear weapons; in Britain, 76 percent backed an agreement to end nuclear tests; and in India (with the survey sample limited to New Delhi), 90 percent thought the United States should unilaterally halt its nuclear tests. In late 1957, pollsters reported that the proportion of the population viewing H-bomb testing as harmful to future generations stood at 64 percent in West Germany, 76 percent in Norway, 65 percent in Sweden, 59 percent in the Netherlands, 60 percent in Belgium, 73 percent in France, 67 percent in Austria, and 55 percent in Brazil.

    Within the ranks of the U.S. government, this public aversion to nuclear testing was regarded as bad news, indeed. The Eisenhower administration was firmly committed to nuclear weapons as the central component of its national security strategy. Thus, halting nuclear testing was viewed as disastrous. In early 1956, Lewis Strauss–the chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the top figure in setting the administration’s nuclear weapons policy–insisted: “This nonsense about ceasing tests (that is tantamount to saying ceasing the development) of our nuclear weapons plays into the hands of the Soviets.” The United States, he told Eisenhower, should hold nuclear tests “whenever an idea has been developed which is ready for test.”

    And yet, other administration officials felt hard-pressed by the force of public opinion. In a memo written in June 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles noted that, although the United States needed a nuclear arsenal, “the frightful destructiveness of modern weapons creates an instinctive abhorrence to them.” Indeed, there existed “a popular and diplomatic pressure for limitation of armament that cannot be resisted by the United States without our forfeiting the good will of our allies and the support of a large part of our own people.” Consequently, “we must . . . propose or support some plan for the limitation of armaments.”

    But Dulles equivocated over specific plans, and the administration increasingly felt the heat. In September 1956, with Stevenson’s call for an end to nuclear testing now part of the presidential election campaign, Eisenhower ordered an administrative study of a test ban, citing “the rising concern of people everywhere over the effect of radiation from tests, their reaction each time a test was reported, and their extreme nervousness over the prospective consequences of nuclear war.” Given opposition from other officials, this study, too, went nowhere. Even so, Eisenhower remained gravely concerned about the unpopularity of nuclear testing. In a meeting with Edward Teller and other nuclear weapons enthusiasts in June 1957, the president told them that “we are . . . up against an extremely difficult world opinion situation,” and “the United States could [not] permit itself to be ‘crucified on a cross of atoms.’ ” There was not only “the question of world opinion . . . but an actual division of American opinion . . . as to the harmful effects of testing.”

    By early 1958, the outside pressures were becoming so powerful that Dulles began a campaign to halt U.S. nuclear tests unilaterally. Having learned, through the CIA, that the Soviet government was about to announce a unilateral suspension of its tests, he called together top administration officials on March 23 and 24 and proposed that Eisenhower issue a statement saying that, after the U.S. government completed its nuclear test series that year, there would be no further U.S. nuclear testing. “It would make a great diplomatic and propaganda sensation to the advantage of the United States,” Dulles explained, and “I feel desperately the need for some important gesture in order to gain an effect on world opinion.” But Strauss and Defense Department officials fought back ferociously, while Eisenhower, typically, remained indecisive. Testing was “not evil,” the president opined, “but the fact is that people have been brought to believe that it is.” What should be done in these circumstances? Nothing, it seemed. Eisenhower remained unwilling to challenge the nuclear hawks in his administration.

    However, after March 31, 1958, when the Soviet government announced its unilateral testing moratorium, the U.S. hard line could no longer be sustained. With the Soviet halt to nuclear testing, recalled one U.S. arms control official, “the Russians boxed us in.” On April 30, Dulles reported that an advisory committee on nuclear testing that he had convened had concluded that, if U.S. nuclear testing continued, “the slight military gains” would “be outweighed by the political losses, which may well culminate in the moral isolation of the United States.” The following morning, Eisenhower telephoned Dulles and expressed his agreement.

    Thereafter, the president held steady. Meeting on August 12 with Teller and other officials, he reacted skeptically to their enthusiastic reports about recent weapons tests. “The new thermonuclear weapons are tremendously powerful,” he observed, but “they are not . . . as powerful as is world opinion today in obliging the United States to follow certain lines of policy. Ten days later, after a showdown with the Defense Department and the AEC, Eisenhower publicly announced that, as of October 31, the United States would suspend nuclear testing and begin negotiations for a test ban treaty.

    As a result, U.S., Soviet, and British nuclear explosions came to a halt in the fall of 1958. Although the French government conducted its first nuclear tests in early 1960 and the three earlier nuclear powers resumed nuclear testing in late 1961, these actions proved to be the last gasps of the nuclear hawks before the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963–a measure resulting from years of public protest against nuclear testing. Against this backdrop, the 1958 victory for the peace movement and public opinion should be regarded as an important break in the nuclear arms race and in the Cold War.

    Thus, if peace activists feel discouraged today by the continuation of the war in Iraq, they might well take heart at the example of their predecessors, who recognized that making changes in powerful institutions requires great perseverance. They might also consider the consequences of doing nothing. As the great abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass, put it in 1857: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

    Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany.

  • Toward a Nuclear-Free World

    The accelerating spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear know-how and nuclear material has brought us to a nuclear tipping point. We face a very real possibility that the deadliest weapons ever invented could fall into dangerous hands.

    The steps we are taking now to address these threats are not adequate to the danger. With nuclear weapons more widely available, deterrence is decreasingly effective and increasingly hazardous.

    One year ago, in an essay in this paper, we called for a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, to prevent their spread into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately to end them as a threat to the world. The interest, momentum and growing political space that has been created to address these issues over the past year has been extraordinary, with strong positive responses from people all over the world.

    Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in January 2007 that, as someone who signed the first treaties on real reductions in nuclear weapons, he thought it his duty to support our call for urgent action: “It is becoming clearer that nuclear weapons are no longer a means of achieving security; in fact, with every passing year they make our security more precarious.”

    In June, the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, signaled her government’s support, stating: “What we need is both a 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, but at the moment too weak.”

    We have also been encouraged by additional indications of general support for this project from other former U.S. officials with extensive experience as secretaries of state and defense and national security advisors. These include: Madeleine Albright, Richard V. Allen, James A. Baker III, Samuel R. Berger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, Warren Christopher, William Cohen, Lawrence Eagleburger, Melvin Laird, Anthony Lake, Robert McFarlane, Robert McNamara and Colin Powell.

    Inspired by this reaction, in October 2007, we convened veterans of the past six administrations, along with a number of other experts on nuclear issues, for a conference at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. There was general agreement about the importance of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons as a guide to our thinking about nuclear policies, and about the importance of a series of steps that will pull us back from the nuclear precipice.

    The U.S. and Russia, which possess close to 95% of the world’s nuclear warheads, have a special responsibility, obligation and experience to demonstrate leadership, but other nations must join.

    Some steps are already in progress, such as the ongoing reductions in the number of nuclear warheads deployed on long-range, or strategic, bombers and missiles. Other near-term steps that the U.S. and Russia could take, beginning in 2008, can in and of themselves dramatically reduce nuclear dangers. They include:

    • Extend key provisions of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991. Much has been learned about the vital task of verification from the application of these provisions. The treaty is scheduled to expire on Dec. 5, 2009. The key provisions of this treaty, including their essential monitoring and verification requirements, should be extended, and the further reductions agreed upon in the 2002 Moscow Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions should be completed as soon as possible.

    • Take steps to increase the warning and decision times for the launch of all nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, thereby reducing risks of accidental or unauthorized attacks. Reliance on launch procedures that deny command authorities sufficient time to make careful and prudent decisions is unnecessary and dangerous in today’s environment. Furthermore, developments in cyber-warfare pose new threats that could have disastrous consequences if the command-and-control systems of any nuclear-weapons state were compromised by mischievous or hostile hackers. Further steps could be implemented in time, as trust grows in the U.S.-Russian relationship, by introducing mutually agreed and verified physical barriers in the command-and-control sequence.

    • Discard any existing operational plans for massive attacks that still remain from the Cold War days. Interpreting deterrence as requiring mutual assured destruction (MAD) is an obsolete policy in today’s world, with the U.S. and Russia formally having declared that they are allied against terrorism and no longer perceive each other as enemies.

    • Undertake negotiations toward developing cooperative multilateral ballistic-missile defense and early warning systems, as proposed by Presidents Bush and Putin at their 2002 Moscow summit meeting. This should include agreement on plans for countering missile threats to Europe, Russia and the U.S. from the Middle East, along with completion of work to establish the Joint Data Exchange Center in Moscow. Reducing tensions over missile defense will enhance the possibility of progress on the broader range of nuclear issues so essential to our security. Failure to do so will make broader nuclear cooperation much more difficult.

    • Dramatically accelerate work to provide the highest possible standards of security for nuclear weapons, as well as for nuclear materials everywhere in the world, to prevent terrorists from acquiring a nuclear bomb. There are nuclear weapons materials in more than 40 countries around the world, and there are recent reports of alleged attempts to smuggle nuclear material in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. The U.S., Russia and other nations that have worked with the Nunn-Lugar programs, in cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), should play a key role in helping to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 relating to improving nuclear security — by offering teams to assist jointly any nation in meeting its obligations under this resolution to provide for appropriate, effective security of these materials.

    As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger put it in his address at our October conference, “Mistakes are made in every other human endeavor. Why should nuclear weapons be exempt?” To underline the governor’s point, on Aug. 29-30, 2007, six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads were loaded on a U.S. Air Force plane, flown across the country and unloaded. For 36 hours, no one knew where the warheads were, or even that they were missing.

    • Start a dialogue, including within NATO and with Russia, on consolidating the nuclear weapons designed for forward deployment to enhance their security, and as a first step toward careful accounting for them and their eventual elimination. These smaller and more portable nuclear weapons are, given their characteristics, inviting acquisition targets for terrorist groups.

    • Strengthen the means of monitoring compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a counter to the global spread of advanced technologies. More progress in this direction is urgent, and could be achieved through requiring the application of monitoring provisions (Additional Protocols) designed by the IAEA to all signatories of the NPT.

    • Adopt a process for bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) into effect, which would strengthen the NPT and aid international monitoring of nuclear activities. This calls for a bipartisan review, first, to examine improvements over the past decade of the international monitoring system to identify and locate explosive underground nuclear tests in violation of the CTBT; and, second, to assess the technical progress made over the past decade in maintaining high confidence in the reliability, safety and effectiveness of the nation’s nuclear arsenal under a test ban. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization is putting in place new monitoring stations to detect nuclear tests — an effort the U.S should urgently support even prior to ratification.

    In parallel with these steps by the U.S. and Russia, the dialogue must broaden on an international scale, including non-nuclear as well as nuclear nations.

    Key subjects include turning the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a practical enterprise among nations, by applying the necessary political will to build an international consensus on priorities. The government of Norway will sponsor a conference in February that will contribute to this process.

    Another subject: Developing an international system to manage the risks of the nuclear fuel cycle. With the growing global interest in developing nuclear energy and the potential proliferation of nuclear enrichment capabilities, an international program should be created by advanced nuclear countries and a strengthened IAEA. The purpose should be to provide for reliable supplies of nuclear fuel, reserves of enriched uranium, infrastructure assistance, financing, and spent fuel management — to ensure that the means to make nuclear weapons materials isn’t spread around the globe.

    There should also be an agreement to undertake further substantial reductions in U.S. and Russian nuclear forces beyond those recorded in the U.S.-Russia Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. As the reductions proceed, other nuclear nations would become involved.

    President Reagan’s maxim of “trust but verify” should be reaffirmed. Completing a verifiable treaty to prevent nations from producing nuclear materials for weapons would contribute to a more rigorous system of accounting and security for nuclear materials.

    We should also build an international consensus on ways to deter or, when required, to respond to, secret attempts by countries to break out of agreements.

    Progress must be facilitated by a clear statement of our ultimate goal. Indeed, this is the only way to build the kind of international trustandbroad cooperation that will be required to effectively address today’s threats. Without the vision of moving toward zero, we will not find the essential cooperation required to stop our downward spiral.

    In some respects, the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is like the top of a very tall mountain. From the vantage point of our troubled world today, we can’t even see the top of the mountain, and it is tempting and easy to say we can’t get there from here. But the risks from continuing to go down the mountain or standing pat are too real to ignore. We must chart a course to higher ground where the mountaintop becomes more visible.

    The following participants in the Hoover-NTI conference also endorse the view in this statement: General John Abizaid, Graham Allison, Brooke Anderson, Martin Anderson, Steve Andreasen, Mike Armacost, Bruce Blair, Matt Bunn, Ashton Carter, Sidney Drell, General Vladimir Dvorkin, Bob Einhorn, Mark Fitzpatrick, James Goodby, Rose Gottemoeller, Tom Graham, David Hamburg, Siegfried Hecker, Tom Henriksen, David Holloway, Raymond Jeanloz, Ray Juzaitis, Max Kampelman, Jack Matlock, Michael McFaul, John McLaughlin, Don Oberdorfer, Pavel Podvig, William Potter, Richard Rhodes, Joan Rohlfing, Harry Rowen, Scott Sagan, Roald Sagdeev, Abe Sofaer, Richard Solomon, and Philip Zelikow.

    Originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal on January 15, 2008

    Click here to read the authors’ 2007 article

    Mr. Shultz was secretary of state from 1982 to 1989. Mr. Perry was secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997. Mr. Kissinger was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. Mr. Nunn is former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

  • 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).

  • Nuclear Dangers and Challenges to a New Nuclear Policy

    Nuclear Dangers and Challenges to a New Nuclear Policy

    It is worthwhile asking the question: What are nuclear weapons? In some respects the answer to this question may seem obvious, but this is not necessarily the case. To some, nuclear weapons are a scientific achievement that bestows prestige. This is the view that has been taken by each of the nuclear weapons states, with the exception of Israel. Most recently, this perspective was on display when India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998.

    To others, nuclear weapons are a deterrent that protects a weaker state from a more powerful one. This is likely the view of North Korea and perhaps Iran, after having been designated by the US president as part of the “Axis of Evil” and observing the United States attack Iraq, the third designated country in this axis. To still others, such as Israel, nuclear weapons represent a final response to an existential threat. To North Korea, nuclear weapons may represent a response to an existential threat and also a “bargaining chip” for security guarantees and development aid.

    To others, nuclear weapons demonstrate a state’s power in the international system. This likely reflects the view of the five original nuclear weapons states, the ones that also hold permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council – the US, UK, Russia, China and France – and quite possibly the rest of the nuclear weapons states as well.

    Thus far, I have only given the probable views of states that possess nuclear weapons or may wish to do so. Let me now offer another view of nuclear weapons. They are weapons that kill massively and indiscriminately. As such, they are long-distance instruments of annihilation. Weapons that kill indiscriminately are illegal under international law. In this respect, any threat or use of nuclear weapons that failed to discriminate between civilians and combatants would be illegal. It is hard to imagine any threat or use of these weapons that would or even could discriminate.

    The International Court of Justice has found that any threat or use of nuclear weapons would be generally illegal, allowing for the possible but uncertain exception under current international law of a circumstance in which the very existence of a state is at stake. But even then, for such use to be legal it would have to meet the standards of international humanitarian law. In other words, it would have to discriminate between soldiers and civilians, be proportionate, and not cause unnecessary suffering.

    Nuclear weapons are also cowardly and anti-democratic. More accurately, the weapons themselves may not be cowardly, but those who would threaten or use these long-distance killing machines are cowardly. Nearly all of the leading military figures of World War II recognized this and commented upon it. Admiral William Leahy, referring to the use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said, “[I]n being the first to use it, we…adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

    Nuclear weapons are anti-democratic because they concentrate power in the hands of single individuals or a small cabal. They take away the most basic right of people everywhere – the right to survive. There will never be a democratic vote to use nuclear weapons. These weapons place in the hands of leaders the capacity to destroy cities, countries and civilization, with the high likelihood that any use of nuclear weapons would lead to the destruction of the country that initiated a nuclear attack.

    No Defense against Nuclear Attack

    It is not possible to defend against a nuclear attack. Deterrence, which has been the main line of prevention, cannot provide physical defense against a nuclear attack. It is simply the threat of retaliation. This threat must be effectively communicated and believed by a potential attacker. It is, of course, not a meaningful threat against a non-state extremist organization, which cannot be located. Deterrence theory is rooted in rationality. It posits leaders acting rationally to assure their survival, even in times of severe crisis. Basing protection against nuclear attack on rationality, unfortunately, is irrational.

    This is what the former commander-in-chief of the United States Strategic Command, General George Lee Butler, had to say about deterrence: “Deterrence serves the ends of evil as well as those of noble intent. It holds guilty the innocent as well as the culpable. It is a gamble no mortal should pretend to make. It invokes death on a scale rivaling the power of the Creator.”

    Early in 2007, four former high-level US officials – George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn – published an article, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” in the Wall Street Journal. They addressed the issue of deterrence, arguing: “The end of the Cold War made the doctrine of mutual Soviet-American deterrence obsolete. Deterrence continues to be a relevant consideration for many states with regard to threats from other states. But reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.”

    If deterrence is becoming more dangerous and less effective, what remains? US leaders have put significant emphasis on missile defenses, but few knowledgeable scientists, other than those working on government contracts, believe that missile defenses would actually work under real-world conditions. There is a widespread understanding that missile defenses, in addition to being unreliable, can be easily overcome by offensive forces and the use of decoys. The US push to deploy missile defenses has frayed relations between the US and Russia and China, and led these countries to improve their offensive nuclear capabilities.

    If neither deterrence nor missile defenses provide security against nuclear attack, what is left? Nothing is viable but diplomacy to eliminate nuclear arsenals. There is no reliable defense against nuclear attack. Major countries might consider returning to the “duck and cover” drills of the 1950s, although they might update the drills so that they took place in legislatures rather than in schools. These drills, of course, offer no protection to those who do them, but they might help awaken them to the dilemma and the need to take action to eliminate the threat by eliminating the weapons.

    Nuclear Dangers

    Since nuclear weapons continue to exist, nuclear dangers have not gone away, despite the ending of the Cold War and the break up of the Soviet Union. What has largely ended is public concern for the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. The end of the Cold War has created a false sense of security, largely attributable to inertia and poor leadership. It is worthwhile reviewing current nuclear dangers.

    1. The proliferation of nuclear weapons to other state actors. The more states in possession of nuclear weapons, the more likely they are to proliferate further and to be used. The spread of nuclear weapons dramatically increases problems of control, as was demonstrated by the case of Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan.
    2. The proliferation of nuclear weapons to extremist organizations. This is a danger that cannot be ruled out. Nuclear weapons in the hands of an extremist organization, such as al Qaeda, pose substantial danger to all countries, including the major nuclear weapons states.
    3. The use of a nuclear weapon by an extremist organization against a state. The actual use of a nuclear weapon by an extremist organization against a state could result in destruction comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with added widespread security and economic implications. Questions would arise about the viability of the world economy, human rights and democratic processes in the face of such attack.
    4. The use of a nuclear weapon by a nuclear weapons state against another state. Such use would be devastating and could trigger a nuclear war. It would end the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons that has existed since 1945.
    5. An all-out nuclear war, initiated either intentionally or accidentally. The danger of an all-out nuclear war is always with us. It would be insane, but it could happen. Just as states stumbled into World War I, they could stumble again, by accident or miscalculation, into an all-out nuclear war.

    These dangers are obviously not trivial, nor are they dangers with which anyone should feel comfortable. They are dangers that place civilization and even the human species at risk of annihilation.

    Current nuclear dangers are fueled by the continued reliance of the nuclear weapons states on their nuclear arsenals for their security. Whereas these states once lived in a world of Mutually Assured Destruction, they now live in a world of Mutually Assured Delusions. Their greatest delusion is that they can continue to rely upon nuclear weapons for their own security and that of their friends, while preventing these weapons from spreading to others or being used again.

    There have been repeated warnings over a long period of time that nuclear double standards cannot hold. In 1955, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto warned: “We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?”

    In 1996, the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons warned, “The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or by decision – defines credibility. The only complete defense is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.”

    This warning was repeated in 2006 by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, chaired by Hans Blix. Their report, entitled Weapons of Terror, Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms, stated: “So long as any state has such weapons – especially nuclear arms – others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain in any state’s arsenal, there is a high risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. Any such use would be catastrophic.”

    A New Nuclear Policy

    There have been many proposals for a new nuclear policy. The essence of such a policy is rooted in the following:

    1. The obligation for good faith negotiations to achieve nuclear disarmament in Article VI of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty;
    2. The 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, which stated, “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”
    3. The pledge in the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to unanimously at the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference: “An unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon States to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament to which all States parties are committed under Article VI.

    US leadership will be necessary in order to move forward in implementing such a policy. Without US leadership there will be little incentive for the other nuclear weapons states to act, and we are likely to remain frozen in the nuclear double standards of the status quo.

    While US leadership for a new nuclear policy has not been forthcoming, some hope exists in that the group of former US officials – Shultz, Perry, Kissinger and Nunn – called for it in their January 2007 Wall Street Journal article. They endorsed “the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal….” The four former officials argued, “Reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and practical measures toward achieving that goal would be, and would be perceived as, a bold initiative consistent with America’s moral heritage. The effort could have a profoundly positive impact on the security of future generations.”

    Once the political will for the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons exists, it will be possible to take the necessary actions to move from where we are to the goal. There have been many proposals for how to achieve the goal. A group of leading civil society organizations has drafted a plan for a Nuclear Weapons Convention that would lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons in a series of stages. This draft Convention has been introduced to the United Nations by the Republic of Costa Rica. The 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to at the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference sets forth another series of steps. The four former Cold Warriors set forth their own series of steps. What is most important in achieving the elimination of nuclear weapons, once there is sufficient political will, is that the disarmament be phased, transparent, verifiable, irreversible, and subject to strict and effective international control.

    Challenges to a New Nuclear Policy

    There are many challenges to a new nuclear policy, but the greatest challenges lie in the orientation of the current leadership of the US. In July 2007, the US Secretaries of State, Defense and Energy issued a joint statement, “National Security and Nuclear Weapons: Maintaining Deterrence in the 21st Century.” This statement, contrary to the position taken by the four former US officials, began by extolling “the essential role that nuclear weapons play in maintaining deterrence.” It ended up by calling for replacing every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal with a new type of thermonuclear weapon, the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). They argued that “RRW is key to sustaining our security commitment to allies, and is fully consistent with U.S. obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty – including Article VI.” They also threatened that delays on RRW “raise the prospect of having to return to underground nuclear testing to certify existing weapons.”

    The Bush administration is clearly not seeking to achieve a new nuclear policy, but a retrenchment of the status quo, one in which the United States remains the dominant nuclear weapons state. They seem unaware of the risks they are running, particularly the dangers that their nuclear policies create for the US itself.

    Further challenges to a new nuclear policy come from those states that want to defy the nuclear status quo of privileged nuclear “haves” maintaining their superiority over nuclear “have-nots.” Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea were not content living in that two-tiered nuclear world, and pursued nuclear programs that led to the development of nuclear arsenals. South Africa had followed this path in earlier years, developed a small nuclear arsenal, and then reconsidered and dismantled its weapons. Without more concerted action to achieve nuclear disarmament, we can anticipate that more states will move toward a nuclear option in the future. Even today, some countries, like Japan, hold open the nuclear option as virtual nuclear weapons states, having both the technology and nuclear materials to develop nuclear arsenals in a very short time.

    A general challenge to a new nuclear policy is the belief that a firewall can be drawn between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. No such firewall is possible, and nuclear reactors, for power or research, have fueled the nuclear programs of Israel, India and Pakistan. The designation of peaceful nuclear power as an “inalienable right” in the Non-Proliferation Treaty is a contradiction that must be addressed if nuclear proliferation is to be controlled.

    A Way Forward

    In the end, the most important consideration may be that suggested by the hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in their statement, “Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist.” This is patently true. The two are now placed in an uneasy juxtaposition. One represents the technology of annihilation. The other represents the sum total of human achievement – past, present and potential future. It should not be a difficult choice, but many of us on the planet seem to be voting against ourselves by our ignorance, apathy and denial. An awakened populace may prove to be a potent force to achieve a nuclear weapons free world.

    Our challenge, as leaders in civil society, is to educate and advocate for a new nuclear policy that will move the world away from the nuclear precipice. In doing so, we may find many important partners, including the mayors of cities throughout the world who have joined Mayors for Peace led by Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba of Hiroshima; the network of parliamentarians in the Parliamentary Network for Nuclear Disarmament; and the governments of non-nuclear weapons states, such as those in the New Agenda Coalition, which have worked closely with the Middle Powers Initiative.

    What has been accomplished thus far is not nearly enough. The world remains in peril. In Einstein’s words, “we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Our challenge is to reverse that drift, to move back from the nuclear precipice, to prevent the catastrophe Einstein foresaw. To achieve a new and human-centric nuclear policy will require major national efforts within nuclear weapons states, and a major global campaign to bring pressure to bear upon these states from without. Already the southern hemisphere of the planet has organized itself into a series of Nuclear Weapon Free Zones.

    Europe could play an important role in the effort to achieve a nuclear weapons free world by demanding that US nuclear weapons be removed from Europe, by refusing to participate in missile defense programs, by stepping out from under the US nuclear umbrella, and by convening a forum for the good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament called for in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Now is the time to begin planning for a saner, more reasonable and law abiding US administration that will replace the current one in early 2009.

    Nuclear weapons currently divide humanity, but the recognition of their danger could be a force for uniting humanity for their elimination. This would be a great achievement not only for its expression of common human purpose, but also for the resources it would free for meeting basic human needs for food, health care, housing, education, the alleviation of poverty and the protection of the environment. A new nuclear policy aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons should be the top priority on the global agenda.

     

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

  • 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)

  • 2007 Sadako Peace Day

    2007 Sadako Peace Day

    Welcome to Sadako Peace Day, which this year is also on Nagasaki Day – the day 62 years ago that Nagasaki was destroyed by a single nuclear weapon.

    Please join me in a moment of silence for the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for Mayor Iccho Itoh of Nagasaki, who was cut down during this past year by an assassin’s bullet.

    Three days ago, Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba of Hiroshima delivered the 2007 Hiroshima Peace Declaration. It began with this description:

    “That fateful summer, 8:15. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast – silence – hell on Earth.” I will spare you the gory details he goes on to recount.

    Now, 62 years later, we would be remiss not to ask: What lessons have we learned from the use of nuclear weapons? Judging from the fact that there are still 27,000 nuclear weapons in the world and 3,500 of these are on hair-trigger alert, it seems we have clearly not learned enough.

    The overriding facts about nuclear weapons are that they kill massively and indiscriminately – soldiers and civilians; men, women and children; the aged and the newly born.

    Weapons that kill indiscriminately are illegal under international law. Therefore, nuclear weapons are illegal under international law.

    They are also immoral, cowardly and anti-democratic. In a world in which states rely upon nuclear weapons for security, children are not safe.

    Nuclear weapons destroy cities, and are capable of destroying civilization and possibly the human species.

    And there is no physical protection against nuclear weapons. Not duck and cover. Not deterrence. And certainly not missile defenses.

    It should be obvious that if we want to create a world that is safe for our children, we must rid the world of nuclear weapons, and use the financial resources heretofore devoted to nuclear weapons – some $40 billion annually – for food, education, health care and housing.

    It isn’t complicated. The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had it right when they said, “Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist.” Which side are you on – that of steel-hearted nuclear weapons or that of humanity? We each choose by our actions.

    We should not elect anyone to high office who believes that “all options are on the table.” That is code for “If state X does Y (Y being something we don’t like), we hold open the option of responding with nuclear weapons.” That is further code for “Do what we want, or we are willing to destroy you and to risk destroying the world.” That is not the kind of leader that we need – not if we want security and the assurance of a human future.

    We need courageous leaders who will stop promoting nuclear double standards, meet their obligations under international law for nuclear disarmament, and lead us back from the nuclear precipice. We need leaders who have a vision of a nuclear weapons free world, and who are willing to act upon that vision – not leaders who try to outdo each other with their macho, nuclear or otherwise. We will not have such visionary and courageous leaders without an informed and active citizenry who make known and persist in pursuing an uncompromising demand for a nuclear weapons-free future.

    I will end with a poem.

    PARALLEL UNIVERSES

    “If only I had known, I would have become a watch maker.” — Albert Einstein

    In a parallel universe, Einstein sits at his workbench making watches. Light still curves around bodies of mass, but the watch maker knows nothing of it. He only makes watches, simple and precise. In this universe, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have no special meaning. David Krieger

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