Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear age

  • The Magna Carta For The Nuclear Age: A Universal Declaration of Individual Accountability Prepared by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

    Preamble

    Affirming that all people of the World are entitled to life, liberty and other basic human rights;

    Believing that all individuals, states and international organizations share in the responsibility to ensure peace, protect human rights and sustain the common heritage of the planet;

    Acknowledging the significant efforts of the United Nations and other international organizationstoward these ends;

    Committed to the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Nuremberg Principles;

    Convinced that nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have no place in a civilized World order;

    Further convinced that survival in the nuclear age requires adherence to principles of justice and the World rule of law;

    Determined to establish a just, peaceful and civilized World order in the twenty-first century,

    We proclaim this Magna Carta for the Nuclear Age.

    Article I

    All individuals, including Heads of State, Ministers of Government, industrial, scientific and military leaders, shall be held personally accountable under international law for planning, preparing, initiating or committing the following acts:

    • Crimes against peace, including waging a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties.
    • War crimes, including deliberate attacks against civilian populations, the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, and other grave breaches of humanitarian law.
    • Crimes against humanity, including genocide, torture, and other serious mass violations of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.
    • Crimes against the environment, including intentional spoliation of living habitats.
    • Economic crimes against a people or nation, including slavery in all forms.
    • Terrorism, piracy, kidnapping, hostage taking, and the training, support or sheltering of persons engaged in such crimes.
    • Illicit trafficking in arms or narcotics, and all acts in furtherance of such crimes.
    • Covert acts to overthrow or destabilize a legitimate foreign government, including assassination.
    • Deliberate persecution or denial of civil rights on grounds of race, color, gender, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status.

    Article II

    The World Community shall ensure the further codification of these provisions through the continuing activities of the United Nations and other international organizations, and shall ensure compliance with them by establishing and maintaining the following institutions:

    • An International Commission of Inquiry to engage in fact finding and certification of cases for trial;
    • An International Criminal Court, composed of distinguished jurists, to try cases certified by the International Commission of Inquiry;
    • International Police Forces to enforce the orders of the International Criminal Court;
    • An International Criminal Penitentiary for confinement of convicted offenders; and
    • A Center for the Advancement of International Criminal Law and Justice, independent of governments, to assist in codification of international criminal law and monitoring the implementation of this Charter.
    • An International Commission of Inquiry to engage in fact finding and certification of cases for trial;
    • An International Criminal Court, composed of distinguished jurists, to try cases certified by the International Commission of Inquiry;
    • International Police Forces to enforce the orders of the International Criminal Court;
    • An International Criminal Penitentiary for confinement of convicted offenders; and
    • A Center for the Advancement of International Criminal Law and Justice, independent of governments, to assist in codification of international criminal law and monitoring the implementation of this Charter.

    Article III

    These provisions, upon adoption, may be added to, abridged or altered by the common consent of the World Community of nations and peoples, but without amendment they shall be binding in perpetuity.

  • A Nuclear Age Peace Corps

    https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/articles/wagingpeaceseries/kelly.pdf

  • Seize This Moment for a Nuclear-Free World

    The welcome news that US intelligence agencies have disavowed earlier reports that Iran was hell-bent on making nuclear weapons has given the world a breather. Rational people can now fortify the case against the Bush Administration’s plans to unilaterally and pre-emptively attack Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities. It would be sheer folly to start yet another unauthorized war. Nevertheless, technology used to produce “peaceful” nuclear energy, an “inalienable right” guaranteed by the Non-Proliferation Treaty to its members, also gives countries the technology they need to manufacture nuclear bombs, as we’ve seen with North Korea, Pakistan, India, Israel, as well as other nations who started down that path but gave it up like South Africa, Argentina, and Libya

    During this blessed respite from war against a potential nuclear state, let’s not squander our opportunity for greater security. All nations should be brought to the table to negotiate a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons. Let us follow the lead of Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Sam Nunn, and William Perry, former cold warriors, who called this year for such a commitment, understanding that the longer we delay, the more dangerous it will be as other countries emulate our nuclear prowess. The US must honor its own agreement under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), put a halt to the development of new nuclear weapons, and take up Putin’s offer of several years ago to cut our mutual nuclear arsenals of about 10,000 weapons to 1,000. Once the US and Russia get down to reasonable numbers approaching the arsenals of the other nuclear weapons states – China, UK, France and Israel, who have stockpiles in the hundreds, and India, Pakistan, and North Korea who have less than one hundred bombs in their arsenals – then we can take up China’s offer to negotiate a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons and call all the nuclear weapons states to the table.
    Civil society has already produced a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention introduced into the UN General Assembly by Costa Rica as a discussion document. It lays out all the steps for dismantlement, verification, guarding, and monitoring the disassembled arsenals to insure that we will all be secure from break-out. We must also take up Russia and China’s proposal, offered every year for the past four years in the UN, to ban all weapons in space. That is a pre-condition for Russia and China’s agreement to abolish nuclear weapons as they do not want to be dominated from space by the US. And we’ll also have to include a Missile Ban Treaty and forego provocative US actions of planting missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic, rattling our sabers at Russia, or in the Asian-Pacific region, starting an arms race with China..

    Finally, we must supersede the NPT’s guarantee to so-called “peaceful” nuclear technology, upon which Iran is now lawfully relying, by establishing an International Sustainable Energy Agency as we phase out nuclear power. To think we can control the nuclear fuel cycle, saying Brazil and Japan can enrich nuclear fuel, but not Iran, would create a new system of nuclear apartheid, doomed to fail. Ending the nuclear age would take off the table any plans to go to war against countries with nuclear facilities with which we disagree. It’s totally naive to think that anything less than the total elimination of nuclear weapons, and their evil twins – nuclear reactors – would actually work. Let us not condemn our planet to a state of perpetual war – with unimaginable catastrophes. Giving peace a chance by negotiating an end to the nuclear age is the only practical way out of our terrifying dilemma. Let us seize the opportunity of this brief pause on the path to war and move with hope into a nuclear-free 21st Century.

    Alice Slater is the New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).