Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear peace

  • Still Loving the Bomb After All These Years

    Still Loving the Bomb After All These Years

    Jonathan Tepperman’s article in the September 7, 2009 issue of Newsweek, “Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb,” provides a novel but frivolous argument that nuclear weapons “may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous….” Rather, in Tepperman’s world, “The bomb may actually make us safer.” Tepperman shares this world with Kenneth Waltz, a University of California professor emeritus of political science, who Tepperman describes as “the leading ‘nuclear optimist.’”

    Waltz expresses his optimism in this way: “We’ve now had 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It’s striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states.” Actually, there were a number of proxy wars between nuclear weapons states, such as those in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, and some near disasters, the most notable being the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Waltz’s logic is akin to observing a man falling from a high rise building, and noting that he had already fallen for 64 floors without anything bad happening to him, and concluding that so far it looked so good that others should try it. Dangerous logic!

    Tepperman builds upon Waltz’s logic, and concludes “that all states are rational,” even though their leaders may have a lot of bad qualities, including being “stupid, petty, venal, even evil….” He asks us to trust that rationality will always prevail when there is a risk of nuclear retaliation, because these weapons make “the costs of war obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable.” Actually, he is asking us to do more than trust in the rationality of leaders; he is asking us to gamble the future on this proposition. “The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction is so compelling,” Tepperman argues, “it’s led to what’s known as the nuclear peace….” But if this is a peace worthy of the name, which it isn’t, it certainly is not one on which to risk the future of civilization. One irrational leader with control over a nuclear arsenal could start a nuclear conflagration, resulting in a global Hiroshima.

    Tepperman celebrates “the iron logic of deterrence,” but deterrence is a theory that is far from rooted in “iron logic.” It is a theory based upon threats that must be effectively communicated and believed. Leaders of Country A with nuclear weapons must communicate to other countries (B, C, etc.) the conditions under which A will retaliate with nuclear weapons. The leaders of the other countries must understand and believe the threat from Country A will, in fact, be carried out. The longer that nuclear weapons are not used, the more other countries may come to believe that they can challenge Country A with impunity from nuclear retaliation. The more that Country A bullies other countries, the greater the incentive for these countries to develop their own nuclear arsenals. Deterrence is unstable and therefore precarious.

    Most of the countries in the world reject the argument, made most prominently by Kenneth Waltz, that the spread of nuclear weapons makes the world safer. These countries joined together in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but they never agreed to maintain indefinitely a system of nuclear apartheid in which some states possess nuclear weapons and others are prohibited from doing so. The principal bargain of the NPT requires the five NPT nuclear weapons states (US, Russia, UK, France and China) to engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament, and the International Court of Justice interpreted this to mean complete nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.

    Tepperman seems to be arguing that seeking to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons is bad policy, and that nuclear weapons, because of their threat, make efforts at non-proliferation unnecessary and even unwise. If some additional states, including Iran, developed nuclear arsenals, he concludes that wouldn’t be so bad “given the way that bombs tend to mellow behavior.” Those who oppose Tepperman’s favorable disposition toward the bomb, he refers to as “nuclear pessimists.” These would be the people, and I would certainly be one of them, who see nuclear weapons as presenting an urgent danger to our security, our species and our future.

    Tepperman finds that when viewed from his “nuclear optimist” perspective, “nuclear weapons start to seem a lot less frightening.” “Nuclear peace,” he tells us, “rests on a scary bargain: you accept a small chance that something extremely bad will happen in exchange for a much bigger chance that something very bad – conventional war – won’t happen.” But the “extremely bad” thing he asks us to accept is the end of the human species. Yes, that would be serious. He also doesn’t make the case that in a world without nuclear weapons, the prospects of conventional war would increase dramatically. After all, it is only an unproven supposition that nuclear weapons have prevented wars, or would do so in the future. We have certainly come far too close to the precipice of catastrophic nuclear war.

    As an ultimate celebration of the faulty logic of deterrence, Tepperman calls for providing any nuclear weapons state with a “survivable second strike option.” Thus, he not only favors nuclear weapons, but finds the security of these weapons to trump human security. Presumably he would have President Obama providing new and secure nuclear weapons to North Korea, Pakistan and any other nuclear weapons states that come along so that they will feel secure enough not to use their weapons in a first-strike attack. Do we really want to bet the human future that Kim Jong-Il and his successors are more rational than Mr. Tepperman?

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and a Councilor on the World Future Council. To read the Hiroshima Peace Declaration, click here.

  • A Brief Salute to a Great Man

    The “most trusted voice in America” is silenced now, but his message will live as an example of what news should be.
    Mr. Walter Cronkite lived through and witnessed many of the most important events of the 20th Century, reporting and commenting with his authoritative and calm voice.
    His now prescient pronouncement of the futility of the war in Vietnam was pivotal in bringing it to an end. He also voiced his opposition to the Iraq war. Until the end of his life, he was a strong defender of justice and peace.
    We, at Nuclear Age Peace Foundation were very fortunate and honored to have benefited from his wisdom and experience in our Advisory Council. We will miss him and we will continue the mission of his ardent wish for a nuclear weapons free World.
    And that’s the way it will continue to be, Uncle Walter.

    Rubén Arvizu is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Director for Latin America.
  • Ambassadors of the Nuclear Age

    Ambassadors of the Nuclear Age

    At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we have recently been host to two hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombings. Both of these hibakusha are women, and both are survivors of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Junko Kayashige, the younger of the two women, was 6 years old when the bomb fell on her city. Miyako Yano was 14 years old when the bomb fell.

    The two hibakusha who visited us, and all atomic bomb survivors, are ambassadors of the Nuclear Age. Their goals are to rid the world of nuclear weapons and help humanity to move past its age-old penchant for solving conflicts by resorting to war, understanding from personal experience that war in the Nuclear Age is a catalyst for nuclear annihilation.

    The women traveled from Hiroshima to the United States to tell their stories. They did so in the hope that their past will not become our future. They wish that no one else will suffer the fate of the victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Junko Kayashige stated, “There is not much time left for us hibakusha. We must find ways to not create even one more hibakusha.” Thus, they speak out and share their sad and painful recollections.

    The two women spoke to students at a local college and to assemblies at two high schools. The students paid rapt attention to the personal stories of these witnesses to history. Throughout their lives both women carried the fear that they would be stricken with cancer, leukemia or other radiation related diseases, the fate of so many victims of the atomic bombings. They also worried that radiation disease would effect their children or grandchildren.

    Miyako Yano, the older of the two women, was a second year student in a girl’s high school when the bomb was dropped. Her class had been assigned the task of helping to clean up the rubble in the city, near to what would become the epicenter of the bombing. On the day of the bombing she was ill and stayed home. By this chance occurrence, her life was saved. If the bombing had occurred the day before, she would have met certain death while working just 500 meters from the epicenter, as was the fate of her classmates the next day. Living four kilometers from the epicenter of the detonation, her family helped take care of the injured, many of whom died of radiation poisoning. As a 14-year-old girl, Miyako was given the task of incinerating the dead.

    Junko Kayashige shared a photograph of her family taken just before the bombing. It was a somber picture of a family gathered in wartime. Her older brother was about to go off to war, and the family thought it was the last photograph that would be taken of them all together. It was, in fact, the last photograph of them all together, but for a different reason. Hiroshima suffered the atomic bombings and two of her sisters were victims. Her father was able to find one of his daughters whose back was badly burned, with maggots crawling in the raw wounds. The family tried to help her, but she died ten days later, most likely from radiation poisoning. The other sister, who had gone out on an errand, was not found. The family never knew how she perished.

    Most Americans have an uncomplicated but at best incomplete understanding of the atomic bombings, based on a perspective of the bombings from above; that is, from the perspective of the bombers, rather than from the perspective of the victims. The absence of the victims in the perspective of the victors leaves a large hole that can be filled by the accounts of the survivors of bombed cities. This is important not only for a fuller understanding of the past, but for creating a more secure future.

    If the world continues upon the path it is on, with a small number of countries relying upon nuclear weapons for their “security,” eventually these weapons will be used again, by accident or design. Yesterday’s victors may become tomorrow’s victims. The United States, the country with the greatest military power the world has ever witnessed, could be brought to its knees by a terrorist group in possession of nuclear weapons.

    There is only one way to end this threat, and that is to abolish these weapons. The hibakusha are clear that nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist. The world is not large enough for both. Either nuclear weapons must be eliminated or human beings face the threat of extinction by weapons of their own creation.

    The hibakusha continue to warn us of the perils nuclear weapons pose to the human future. They have long ago forgiven their attackers and speak only from hearts of kindness. Miyako Yano stated, “I believe the A-bombs were dropped not on Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone, but on the entire humanity. We have no choice but to abolish nuclear weapons.”

    The aging hibakusha challenge each of us to act upon their warnings. Their voices are soft but clear. They summon us to achieve the political will to rid the world of this overriding threat.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and a councilor of the World Future Council.
  • It’s Time For a Plan to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

    It’s Time For a Plan to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

    In early January 2007, a surprising commentary appeared in the Wall Street Journal pleading for US leadership to move toward a world free of nuclear weapons. The surprise emanated from the identity of the writers: four prominent former high-level US foreign and defense policy officials, a bipartisan group with impeccable hawkish credentials – George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn.

    In their welcome if belated statement of concern about nuclear dangers, they harkened back to the 1986 summit at Reykjavik, where Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev came close to an agreement to rid the world of nuclear weapons. “Reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons,” they wrote, “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.”

    The four men who signed this commentary might have harkened back even further. In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy likened nuclear weapons to a nuclear sword of Damocles, “hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.” Kennedy concluded, as have the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who experienced the devastatingly destructive nuclear attacks at the end of World War II, that nuclear weapons “must be abolished before they abolish us.”

    It should be of deep concern to all Americans that more than a decade and a half after the end of the Cold War, the danger of the spread and use of nuclear weapons has not substantially diminished and has quite possibly increased. Moreover, it has become increasingly apparent that nuclear weapons may give far more leverage to relatively weak actors, such as terrorist groups, than they do to even the most powerful nations.

    In one of his last speeches at the conclusion of his ten-year tenure as Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan pointedly directed his remarks to the extreme dangers humanity faces due to the failure to eliminate nuclear weapons. He argued, “The one area where there is a total lack of any common strategy is the one that may well present the greatest danger of all: the area of nuclear weapons,” and he cited many reasons necessitating a concerted effort to both prevent proliferation and achieve nuclear disarmament.

    The lynchpin of Annan’s proposal, however, was the specific need for the nuclear weapons states to take action on their nuclear disarmament commitments. “I call on all the States with nuclear weapons,” he said, “to develop concrete plans -– with specific timetables -– for implementing their disarmament commitments. And I urge them to make a joint declaration of intent to achieve the progressive elimination of all nuclear weapons, under strict and effective international control.”

    There can be no doubt that a plan to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons is critically needed and should animate a national, indeed a global, dialogue. Nuclear weapons endanger our nation and the world. These weapons are capable of destroying cities and countries, including our own, and could put an end to civilization. They are tools of our own making that place a dark cloud over the human future. The continued reliance upon these weapons by the United States and other nuclear weapons states is a provocation to other countries to do the same and could lead to a breakdown of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and other efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.

    Terrorists cannot be deterred by nuclear weapons because they cannot be located, and if terrorists gain possession of nuclear weapons they cannot be prevented from using them by threat of retaliation. The security of even a military superpower such as the United States could be dramatically undercut by a single terrorist group with just one nuclear weapon. Such is the leverage of nuclear weapons: they favor the weak over the strong.

    A consensus is finally building behind the conviction that the abolition of nuclear weapons is necessary and that US leadership is urgently needed to achieve this goal. Now we need increased momentum to achieve an action plan so that over the next decade nuclear weapons can be eliminated globally in a process that is transparent, verifiable and irreversible. To succeed in reaching this goal will require a new way of thinking that involves increased reliance on international cooperation and diplomacy to achieve security, and adherence by all nations, even the most powerful, to a strengthened body of international law.

    We are facing a challenge that will determine our common future. As Kofi Annan pleaded to the young people at Princeton who he was addressing in his speech, “Help us to seize control of the rogue aircraft on which humanity has embarked, and bring it to a safe landing before it is too late.”

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort for a world free of nuclear weapons.