Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear free world

  • Steps Toward a Nuclear Free World

    This article was originally published by The Japan Times.

    In recent years there has been a growing chorus of calls for a world free from nuclear weapons. The Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference scheduled for this May will be a crucial test of the international community’s ability to unite toward this goal.

    Two keys to realizing a breakthrough will be creating institutional frameworks for pledges of nonuse of nuclear weapons and establishing clear norms for their prohibition.

    We should work, based on the existing NPT system, to expand the frameworks defining a legal obligation not to use nuclear weapons, in this way laying the institutional foundations for reducing their role in national security, while establishing international norms for their eventual prohibition. This can challenge the thinking that justifies nuclear weapons — the willingness to eliminate others for the sake of one’s own objectives — clearing the way for their abolition.

    U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has stated that nuclear weapons are immoral and should not be accorded any military value. As this indicates, nuclear weapons are not only an absolute evil, entirely impermissible from a humanitarian perspective; they epitomize the military spending that continues to absorb vast amounts of the world’s limited human and economic resources — resources that are needed to respond to the common challenges facing humankind, such as poverty and environmental destruction. Their continued existence represents a fundamental threat to humanity.

    Today, the thought of the possession, much less the use, of chemical or biological weapons inspires widespread revulsion in the international community. We need to give concrete form to a similar recognition regarding nuclear weapons, which are undoubtedly the most inhumane of all.

    As a concrete step toward this, I urge that the Statute of the International Criminal Court be amended to define the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons as a war crime. The objective here is obviously not to punish the actual use of nuclear weapons but to establish a clear norm that such use is always and under any circumstance unacceptable. This could in turn open the way to the eventual adoption of a convention comprehensively banning nuclear weapons.

    An indispensable aspect of this effort must be a redefinition of security policies. The nuclear-weapon states must develop a shared vision of a world without nuclear weapons and break free from the spell of deterrence — the illusory belief that security can somehow be realized through threats of mutual destruction and a balance of terror. A new kind of thinking is needed, one based on working together to reduce threats and creating ever-expanding circles of physical and psychological security until these embrace the entire world.

    In this context I urge the nuclear- weapon states to undertake the following three commitments at this May’s NPT Review Conference and to work to fully implement them by 2015:

    1. To reach a legally binding agreement to extend negative security assurances — the undertaking not to use nuclear weapons against any of the nonnuclear-weapon states fulfilling their NPT obligations.

    2. To initiate negotiation on a treaty codifying the promise not to use nuclear weapons against each other.

    3. Where nuclear-weapon-free zones have yet to be established, as a bridging measure, to declare these as nuclear nonuse regions.

    Declaring nuclear nonuse regions would encourage progress toward global denuclearization. It could be part of a comprehensive system to prevent the proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction and forestall the dire possibility of nuclear terrorism. The key aim would be to encourage shared efforts to reduce threats, which would in turn reduce motivations for countries to develop or acquire nuclear weapons.

    If progress can be made toward these goals, it will make even more obvious the benefits of participating in existing frameworks, as opposed to the further deepening of isolation on the outside. Overlapping assurances of physical and psychological security can encompass not only countries relying on the nuclear umbrellas of nuclear-weapon states, but also North Korea and Iran as well as countries such as India, Pakistan and Israel that are currently not part of the NPT framework.

    None of this will be easy. But no matter how great the divide between our ideals and reality, there is no need to give up hope or accept this with resignation. Instead, the ordinary citizens of the world should come together to create a new reality. The prohibitions on land mines and cluster weapons that have been realized in recent years are the fruit of such solidarity.

    To quote U.S. President John F. Kennedy: “There is no single, simple key to this peace — no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts.”

    We must remember that there is always a way, a path to the peak of even the most towering and forbidding mountain. Even when a sheer rock face looms before us, we should refuse to be disheartened, and instead continue the patient search for a way forward.

    What is most strongly required is the imagination that can appreciate the present crises as an opportunity to fundamentally transform the direction of history. Mustering the force of inner will and determination, we can convert challenges into the fuel for positive change.

  • For a Nuclear Weapon Free World

    This article was originally published in Italian by Corriere della Serra

    Dear Editor, an article published in the Wall Street Journal entitled “A
    world without nuclear weapons”, signed by George Schultz and Henry
    Kissinger, former Secretaries of State under Republican Presidents
    Reagan and Nixon, and by Bill Perry and Sam Nunn, the former Defence
    Secretary under President Clinton and the Democratic chairman of the
    Senate Defence Committee, in January 2007 opened up an extremely
    important debate for the future of humanity. In that article, the four
    American statesmen proposed the total elimination of nuclear weapons.
    Their argument, taken up again in a second article in January 2008, is
    that, unless the nuclear-weapon States – and there are now 8 of them –
    and especially the two main ones, United States and Russia, take the
    lead   in launching a process aimed at their total elimination, it will
    become increasingly difficult to prevent other countries from acquiring
    them, with the risk that sooner or later these weapons may be used, and
    that would have catastrophic consequences for the world.

    The importance of their article lies in the fact that, for the first
    time, the issue of the complete elimination of nuclear weapons was being
    addressed, in the United States, by politicians who represent the
    mainstream of American stategic policy, from both parties, stressing the
    fact that this is an objective to be pursued in the interests of both
    the nation and the world. Several very important statements followed
    their Op-ed. The two US presidential candidates have substantially
    agreed with this aim, as have the majority of those who, in the past,
    held positions of major responsibility in the USA in this field. In
    Russia, there was a positive reaction by Gorbachev and a more cautious,
    but not negative, reaction by the Government. In Britain, Gordon Brown
    spoke out favourably; the Defence Minister proposed hosting experts from
    United States, Russia, England, France and China in the English nuclear
    labs, in order to establish the methodologies of verification for the
    elimination of nuclear weapons; recently, the Times carried an article
    by another bipartisan quartet, including three former Foreign Ministers
    and a former Secretary General of Nato, expressing agreement.  In
    France, the Defence White Paper indicates that the objective to be
    pursued is the elimination of nuclear weapons. In Australia, the
    Government has established a new international Commission of Experts,
    whose task is to chart the road towards the elimination of all nuclear
    weapons. There have been innumerable positive reactions among
    non-governmental groups.

    We think it is important that Italy, too, should give indications that
    go in that same direction. Our joint signatures, like those on the
    Op-eds in other countries, are evidence of the fact that in both main
    political camps, and in the scientific community, there is a shared
    common opinion on the importance of this issue and this aim. We wish to
    suggest the main steps along this road. The first is the entry into
    force of the Treaty banning all forms of nuclear testing, including
    underground tests, thus enshrining into a treaty the current moratorium.
    The second is to set in motion the stalled negotiations, within the
    Disarmament Conference in Geneva, on the FMCT, which prohibits the
    production of highly enriched uranium and of plutonium with the isotope
    composition necessary for the production of nuclear weapons. Here, too,
    there is a de facto moratorium, but without any formal agreement and
    without verification measures. The entry into force of these two
    Treaties would be appreciated by non-nuclear-weapon States and would
    prepare a more favourable ground for the periodical Conference of the
    Non-Proliferation Treaty planned for 2010, strengthening the world’s
    non-proliferation regime, including the monitoring of the actual
    observance of the commitments – in both letter and spirit – envisaged by
    the NPT.

    We are fully aware that the road that will lead us to the elimination of
    nuclear weapons is long. It will call for certain political conditions.
    The first is an actual improvement in the relations between the nuclear
    superpowers, United States and Russia, who still maintain – despite
    recent reductions – over nine tenths of all nuclear weapons in the
    world. This would help the other nuclear weapon States recognized by the
    NPT – Britain, France and China – to do their part. It is also
    necessary to reduce the tensions in those parts of the world where the
    risk of nuclear weapons actually being used is highest, perhaps even by
    terrorist groups. We refer here to South-east Asia (India and Pakistan)
    and to the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab problem in the Middle East. In both
    these contexts, moves by the nuclear weapons States indicating that they
    are progressing towards a nuclear weapons free world would undoubtedly
    have a positive effect. Italy and Europe can and must do what they can
    to promote the path towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons. It
    is clear that this final result will be achieved only with the
    commitment of the major protagonists, United States and Russia, and of
    the other nuclear weapon States. But the spread of a new way of thinking
    – of a new “shared wisdom” – is a fundamental step along this path, and
    Italy too must contribute. It is necessary that on these fundamental
    issues for the very survival of humanity, despite our legitimate –
    indeed necessary – political differences, we join together in
    recognizing a superior, common interest.

  • Towards a Nuclear Free World

    If someone holds a classroom full of children hostage with a machine gun, threatening to kill them unless his demands are met, we consider him a dangerous, crazy terrorist. But if a head of state holds millions of civilians hostage with nuclear weapons, many consider this as perfectly normal. We must end that double standard and recognize nuclear weapons for what they are: instruments of terror.

    On July 8, 1996, the World Court declared the threat or use of nuclear weapons contrary to international law and unanimously called on all states to conduct negotiations leading to complete nuclear disarmament.

    Treaties have been concluded to ban biological and chemical weapons. Why has an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons eluded us for so long? If Hitler had used nuclear weapons and lost the war, they would have been outlawed as cruel and inhuman long ago.

    But because they were first used by the victorious side in a war considered just, they have enjoyed an undeserved aura of legitimacy. Over the last fifty years, many flawed arguments have been put forward intended to justify the policy of nuclear deterrence.

    It has been asserted, for example, that nuclear weapons have helped prevent war. Yet the five declared nuclear powers have been involved in eight times as many wars on average since 1945 as the non-nuclear countries. Some credit nuclear weapons with having prevented nuclear war, which is preposterous: without nuclear weapons, there could not possibly be any nuclear war. At the peak, the US and Soviet nuclear arsenals had a destructive power nearly 10,000 times all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or, as President Carter said in his farewell address, one World War II every second for a slow afternoon.

    It is conceivable that the threat of nuclear retaliation may help deter a deliberate attack, but not every war begins that way.

    When tensions are high, events may escalate out of a small incident, and it is sometimes hard to say who did what first.

    Relying on the threat of mutual destruction to deter war is as if we sought to prevent traffic accidents by packing our car with dynamite, putting a trip wire around it and telling everyone, “Don’t hit my car, or it will explode and kill you!” (and me too, of course). This should deter others from hitting me intentionally, but the slightest accidental collision would be fatal.

    On numerous occasions, we came close to a nuclear catastrophe, due to misinformation, misunderstandings, or computer errors.

    During the Cuban missile crisis, the United States was ready to retaliate against the Soviet Union if Castro had shot down American observation planes, convinced that he did so on Soviet orders. That could easily have escalated out of control. In fact, Khrushchev had ordered Castro to stop shooting at American planes, but Castro ignored his orders. Fortunately, no plane was hit.

    As long as the nuclear powers insist on the right to keep their arsenals, some other countries will be tempted to acquire nuclear weapons, too. Once terrorists get hold of nuclear weapons, they may not shrink from using them. Unless we eliminate nuclear weapons, it is only a question of time until they are used, whether deliberately or by accident. We are playing Russian roulette with our future.

    Despite decades of government propaganda, US and British polls have found repeatedly that up to 85 percent of voters are in favor of eliminating all nuclear weapons. We must tell the leaders of the nuclear nations that we reject our role as involuntary nuclear hostages. The abolition of nuclear weapons requires a popular movement, in the same way as the abolition of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid came about only after sustained public pressure.

    Some grant we might be better off if nuclear weapons had never been invented, but argue that now that we know how to make them, we cannot disinvent them, and therefore have to live with them as long as civilization exists. It is true that we cannot disinvent nuclear weapons, but nobody has disinvented cannibalism either, we simply abhor it. Can’t we learn to abhor equally the thought of incinerating entire cities with nuclear weapons

     

    Dietrich Fischer is Academic Director of the European University Center for Peace Studies in Stadtschlaining, Austria (www.epu.ac.at) and Co-Director of TRANSCEND (www.transcend.org), a peace and development network.