Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear threat

  • Nuclear Weapons Abolition: Signs of Hope

    Nuclear Weapons Abolition: Signs of Hope

    Introduction Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan came close to achieving agreement on abolishing nuclear weapons at the Reykjavik summit in 1986. The stumbling block was Reagan’s dream of “Star Wars,” which Gorbachev could not accept. Who could have predicted that within a decade of the founding of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, the Berlin Wall would fall and the Soviet Union would cease to exist? Who could have predicted that, despite the end of the Cold War, nuclear dangers would continue to grow? The end of the Cold War helped to disarm public concern about nuclear dangers, but these dangers have not ended.

    Throughout this past quarter century, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has been a steady and persistent voice of reason in its calls for abolishing nuclear weapons. We believe, along with the hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is an evil that must not be repeated. I am proud that we stand with the hibakusha, who have shown such compassion and strength of character in their forgiveness and their persistence. I have supported their nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, and I continue to do so.

    I want to speak about where we stand on the road to nuclear weapons abolition. I consider this goal – a world free of nuclear weapons – to be the greatest challenge of our time. Humans created nuclear weapons – weapons that could end civilization and the human species. Humans have used nuclear weapons in warfare. We know the results of that use. We know the danger that continues to exist with 26,000 nuclear weapons still in the world. Our cities are threatened, as is our common future. I will try to answer the following questions.

    1. What are nuclear weapons?
    1. Why oppose these weapons?
    1. Why do some countries possess these weapons?
    1. Why do other countries support these weapons?
    1. Do nuclear weapons make a country more secure?
    1. What is the current nuclear policy of the United States?
    1. Whose interests do nuclear weapons serve?
    1. What is the road to nuclear weapons abolition?
    1. Are there signs of hope?

    I will end with signs of hope. I believe that there is a way out of the nuclear dilemma for humanity, and that we must not allow complacency and despair to conquer hope.

    What Are Nuclear Weapons?

    Nuclear weapons derive their power from the energy contained within the atom. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima used enriched uranium (Uranium 235) to create an explosive force equivalent to 12.5 thousand tons of TNT. The bomb that destroyed Nagasaki used Plutonium 239 to create an explosive force equivalent to 20 thousand tons of TNT. Thermonuclear weapons, which use the power of fusion, are capable of yields thousands of times greater than those used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The great majority of nuclear weapons today are thermonuclear weapons.

    Nuclear weapons are not instruments of war in any traditional sense. They destroy everything within miles of their detonation. Their radioactive effects linger long after the damage of blast and fire has run its course. The effects of nuclear weapons cannot be contained in time or space. They go on killing and destroying even into new generations of survivors. They cannot be conceived of as simply “weapons.” They are instruments of annihilation, putting the future of humanity itself at risk. Beneath their veneer of scientific achievement, nuclear weapons are the tools of bullies, thugs and madmen. Why Oppose These Weapons?

    Some people support policies that rely upon nuclear weapons and justify the weapons as “instruments of peace.” This a strange way to conceptualize weapons that could destroy most life on the planet in a matter of hours.

    Here are ten reasons to oppose nuclear weapons. They are ten reasons that I oppose nuclear weapons, and I commend them as ten reasons that you, too, should oppose these weapons.

    1. They are long-distance killing machines incapable of discriminating between soldiers and civilians, the aged and the newly born, or between men, women and children.
    2. They threaten the destruction of cities, countries and civilization; of all that is sacred, of all that is human, of all that exists.
    3. They threaten to foreclose the future.
    4. They are cowardly weapons, and in their use there can be no honor.
    5. They are a false god, dividing nations into nuclear “haves” and “have-nots,” bestowing unwarranted prestige and privilege on those that possess them.
    6. They are a distortion of science and technology, twisting our knowledge of nature to destructive purposes.
    7. They mock international law, displacing it with an allegiance to raw power.
    8. They waste our resources on the development of unusable instruments of annihilation.
    9. They concentrate power in the hands of the few and undermine democracy.
    10. They corrupt our humanity.

    Why Do Some Countries Possess These Weapons?

    There are currently nine countries that possess nuclear weapons: US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. More than 95 percent of the 26,000 nuclear weapons in the world are in the arsenals of the US and Russia.

    The principal justification for nuclear weapons has always been deterrence – the threat of nuclear retaliation to prevent a nuclear attack. The reason that the United States first developed nuclear weapons was the fear that the Germans might also develop them, and the United States would need to have the weapons to deter the Germans from using their weapons. The Soviet Union developed its nuclear arsenal for deterrence – to keep the United States from threatening or using its nuclear arsenal against them. Every country that has developed nuclear weapons has had the intention of deterring another country. Even the most recent addition to the nuclear weapons club, North Korea, wanted to have a nuclear deterrent capability to assure survival of its regime from potential attack by the United States.

    In addition to deterrence, a second reason that some states have pursued nuclear weapons is prestige. Since the five permanent members of the Security Council were the original five members of the nuclear weapons club, other nations recognized that the possession of these weapons offered a high level of prestige in the international system. When India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998, there was buoyant celebrating in the streets of the major cities of these countries. The people in these countries, despite their poverty, took pride in the achievement of their nation’s nuclear weapons capability – ironically, a capability that could lead to their demise.

    Why Do Other Countries Support These Weapons?

    The principal reason that some countries support nuclear weapons, without possessing them, is that they are tied by military compact with a nuclear weapons state. This is sometimes referred to as being under a “nuclear umbrella.” Many countries are under the US nuclear umbrella. These include Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in the Far East; Australia in the Pacific; and the countries belonging to NATO in Europe. These countries tend to give support to US nuclear policy in the belief that they are being protected by the deterrent value of the US nuclear arsenal.

    Some poorer and dependent countries give support to US nuclear weapons policy because their governments are pressured by US economic incentives and disincentives. But there are not too many of these countries, and most countries in the world express support for United Nations General Assembly resolutions aimed at achieving a nuclear weapons free world. To give one example, the Disarmament Committee in the United Nations General Assembly recently voted on a resolution for “Renewed determination towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons,” a resolution spearheaded by Japan. The resolution was passed by a vote of 165 states in favor, 3 states opposed, and 10 states abstaining. The three states voting against the resolution were India, North Korea and the United States.

    Do Nuclear Weapons Make a Country More Secure?

    Security is a concept with both psychological and physical dimensions. Psychologically, one may feel secure, but not be secure in reality. The opposite is also true. One may not feel secure, but actually be quite safe. Nuclear weapons operate at the psychological level. The security they offer is of the psychological variety. These weapons cannot provide actual physical security. Deterrence, for example, is a psychological theory. It cannot provide actual physical protection against a nuclear attack.

    It is worth examining deterrence theory to see how much security it actually provides. For deterrence to work, there must be clear communications, the threat of retaliation must be believed, the decision makers must act rationally, and the targets of deterrence must be locatable. In other words, one cannot deter someone who does not understand you, someone who does not believe you, someone who acts irrationally, or someone who cannot be located. Given all these ways in which deterrence can fail, it seems highly irrational to base the future of one’s country or the planet on the belief that deterrence will work under all circumstances.

    The best evidence that deterrence is not to be relied upon is missile defenses. If leaders thought that deterrence was foolproof, they wouldn’t need to have missile defenses for protection. Instead, many countries are developing missile defenses to provide actual physical protection against a nuclear attack. The problem with missile defenses is that they, too, are unlikely to work under real world conditions. Most of the successful tests with missile defense systems have employed a homing device that guides the “defensive” missile to the “offensive” one, a condition not likely to be present in the real world. Further, many experts have given clear testimony that missile defenses can be defeated by the use of offensive missile decoys. Russia has responded to US missile defenses by developing offensive missiles with greater maneuverability. Missile defenses are also making the prospects for nuclear disarmament increasingly distant.

    In the end, nuclear weapons make a country less secure, since a country that possesses nuclear weapons is almost certainly targeted by nuclear weapons. While nuclear weapons may add little to the security of an already powerful country, they may act for weaker countries as a perceived deterrent to offensive actions by more powerful countries. Thus, North Korea was able to sustain negotiations with the United States to achieve development and security goals by having a small nuclear arsenal, whereas Iraq, which did not have nuclear weapons, was attacked by the United States and its regime overthrown. This is a dangerous strategy for North Korea, but it points out that aggressive policies by powerful states can act as a stimulant to nuclear proliferation.

    Ronald Reagan, when he was President of the United States, recognized that the only viable purpose of nuclear weapons for the US and Soviet Union was to deter the other side from attacking. That being the case, Reagan noted, “…would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” Reagan was right. True security will be found not in possessing nuclear weapons, but in eliminating them.

    What Is the Current Nuclear Policy of the United States?

    In recent years, the United States has not played a constructive role on issues of nuclear disarmament. Rather, it has demonstrated by its policies its intention to rely upon nuclear weapons for the indefinite future. I would characterize US nuclear policy unstable, unreliable and, ultimately, as reckless, provocative and dangerous for itself and humanity. I will discuss below some of the principal elements of US nuclear policy.

    Double Standards. The US has upheld one standard for its friends and allies, and another standard for its perceived enemies. Thus, the US seeks to promote nuclear trade with India, despite the fact that India never joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and developed and tested nuclear weapons. The US has been willing to bend its own laws and pressure the international Nuclear Suppliers Group to support its agreement with India. In the same vein, the US has not complained about Israeli nuclear weapons and has continued to annually give billions of dollars of military support to Israel. At the same time, the US attacked Iraq for supposedly having a nuclear weapons program and is threatening Iran with attack for the same unsubstantiated reasons (Iran claims to be enriching uranium only for its legal nuclear energy program). The Bush administration is currently seeking to replace every weapon in its nuclear arsenal with a new thermonuclear warhead, the so-called Reliable Replacement Warhead. Such double standards are not sustainable, and are widely recognized as such in the international community.

    Extended Deterrence. The United States seeks not only to deter a nuclear attack against its own territory, but also an attack against its allies. Thus, the US provides nuclear assurances to its NATO allies as well as to its allies in East Asia, including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. These countries are considered to reside under the US nuclear umbrella. One of the goals of US nuclear policy is to provide assurance to its allies. In the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, it states, “US nuclear forces will continue to provide assurance to security partners, particularly in the presence of known or suspected threats of nuclear, biological, or chemical attacks or in the event of surprising military developments.”

    Ambiguous Messages. The US has not given clear messages about when it may use nuclear weapons. As indicated above, even “surprising military developments” can be viewed as a provocation for the threat or use of US nuclear forces. The 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, for example, also states, “Nuclear weapons could be employed against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack….”

    Threat of Preventive Use. In a 2005 draft document, Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations, the US expressed a willingness to use nuclear weapons against an enemy “intending to use WMD” against the US or allied military forces, or in the case of an “imminent attack from adversary biological weapons….”

    High Alert Status. The US and Russia continue to keep some 3,500 nuclear weapons on high alert status, ready to be fired within moments of an order to do so. This creates a dangerous situation in which these weapons could be launched by accident.

    Preventing Proliferation by force. The US demonstrated its willingness to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons by force when it attacked Iraq in 2003. It has threatened to use force to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons to Iran.

    Launch on Warning. The US continues to employ a policy of launching its nuclear weapons on warning of attack. This increases the chances of launching to a false warning, and thus initiating a nuclear attack.

    Alliance Sharing. US nuclear weapons are currently shared with six US allies in Europe – Belgium, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Turkey and the UK. Some 350 US nuclear weapons are currently thought to be deployed in Europe in cooperative agreements with these countries that would leave the weapons in the hands of the European countries in the event of hostilities. The US is the only country in the world to deploy nuclear weapons on foreign soil.

    Negative Leadership. There are two main directions in which leadership can be applied on nuclear weapons issues. One direction is toward ending reliance on nuclear weapons and eliminating them; the other direction is toward sustaining these weapons for the indefinite future. The United States has chosen the latter course. It has blocked progress toward nuclear disarmament in the United Nations General Assembly, the Commission on Disarmament, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conferences, despite its obligation under the NPT to engage in “good faith” negotiations for nuclear disarmament. In the area of nuclear policy, the US has shown negative leadership. It has been an obstacle rather than a beacon in moving toward achieving a nuclear weapons free world.

    When looked at in overview, and when taking the first letters of each of the elements of US nuclear policy described above, they spell Death Plan. While I don’t think that US nuclear policy is consciously meant to be a Death Plan, I do think that it is currently charting a course that will result in nuclear proliferation, potential nuclear terrorism, increased nuclear threats and the eventual use of these weapons.

    Above all countries, the United States should be leading the way toward a world free of nuclear weapons. Not only does it have special responsibilities as the country that first created nuclear weapons and first used them, but it is also the country that would benefit most in terms of security from abolishing these weapons.

    Whose Interests Do Nuclear Weapons Serve?

    Nuclear weapons seemingly serve the interests of countries that are threatened by another nation’s nuclear weapons. The US was originally threatened by the potential of German nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union was threatened by US Nuclear Weapons, the UK and France were threatened by the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, and so on. It is clear, however, that deterrence can fail, defeating reliance upon nuclear weapons for security.

    Beyond the questionable interests of countries in nuclear weapons for deterrence, the most obvious interests are those of the scientists and engineers employed to create and improve these weapons. The engineers and scientists employed by the nuclear weapons laboratories – such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US – have a continuing interest in their job security and prestige. In the US, the University of California has a financial interest in the resources it receives from the government for providing management and oversight to the Nuclear Weapons Laboratories, as does its partner in management, Bechtel Corporation ,and other defense contractors.

    One class of people whose interests are not served by nuclear weapons is the citizens of a country that possesses these weapons. They are the targets and potential victims of nuclear attack by other nuclear-armed states. It is ordinary citizens, the inhabitants of Earth, including the nuclear weapons states, who have the most to lose in a nuclear exchange.

    What Is the Road to Nuclear Weapons Abolition?

    The road to nuclear weapons abolition is a road not much traveled, but one that calls out to humanity. The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki recognized that nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist. We must choose: humanity or nuclear devastation. The choice should not be difficult. We must end the nuclear weapons era before these weapons end the human era.

    The road to nuclear weapons abolition can be conceived of as a series of steps to lessen nuclear dangers, while engaging in good faith negotiations on an international treaty for the phased, verifiable, irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons. It is a road to a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC). A Draft NWC has been created by some international civil society organizations, including the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA), the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation (INESAP). The Draft Convention was first introduced to the United Nations General Assembly by the Republic of Costa Rica in 1997, and was revised and reintroduced to the UN by Costa Rica in 2007.

    The Draft Nuclear Weapons Convention sets forth a plan for the phased, verifiable, irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons. It is only one such guide, but it demonstrates that a feasible plan can be created. It should be an incentive to nuclear weapons states to begin the process of good faith negotiations that they are obligated to fulfill by their membership in the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    Among the steps that can be taken in conjunction with negotiations for a Nuclear Weapons Convention are the following:

    1. De-alerting nuclear arsenals;
    2. Legally binding commitments to No First Use of nuclear weapons;
    3. Placing all weapons-grade nuclear materials, as well as uranium enrichment, plutonium separation and other key elements of the nuclear fuel cycle, under strict and effective international control;
    4. Ratification and entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty;
    5. Reestablishing an Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
    6. Banning weapons of mass destruction in outer space.

    Are There Signs of Hope?

    There are some signs of hope that our human spirits can prevail over the cold technology of nuclear annihilation.

    1. The vast majority of states in the world support a world free of nuclear weapons. There are currently 188 countries that are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The nuclear weapons states party to this treaty agree that they will pursue “good faith” negotiations to achieve nuclear disarmament. Unfortunately, these states (US, Russia, UK, France and China) have not acted to fulfill their disarmament obligations. Only three countries have not signed the treaty (Israel, India and Pakistan), and one country has withdrawn (North Korea). At the United Nations Disarmament Committee in October 2007, states voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution calling for “Renewed determination towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons.” The vote was 165 in favor, three opposed and ten abstentions. The three opposed were India, North Korea and the US.
    1. The vast majority of US and Russian citizens support a world free of nuclear weapons. A 2007 poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org found that the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons was supported by 73 percent of Americans and 63 percent of Russians. In both countries, even larger majorities want their governments to do more to pursue this objective. Sixty-four percent of Americans and 59 percent of Russians favor taking all nuclear weapons off high-alert status. Most Americans (88%) and Russians (65%) endorse the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), but would like to speed up the timetable of the treaty and have reductions far greater than the 2,200 by 2012 that are called for in the treaty. A majority in both countries would support cutbacks to 400 nuclear weapons each, making their arsenals roughly comparable to those of other nuclear weapons states. A large majority of Americans (92%) and Russians (65%) believe that an international organization, such as the United Nations, would need to monitor and verify compliance with such deep reductions.
    1. Cities are standing up for nuclear disarmament. The Mayors for Peace “2020 Vision” Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons has grown to nearly 2000 Mayors in 124 countries. The United Cities and Local Governments organization, the world’s largest and most widely recognized mayoral association, voted in October 2007 to support the Mayors campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons. The Declaration of the United Cities and Local Government organization stated, “We call on all nation states and armed groups to cease considering cities as military objectives – ‘cities are not targets’.”
    2. More than half the world is covered by Nuclear Weapons Free Zones. Virtually the entire southern hemisphere is covered by Nuclear Weapons Free Zones, including Latin America and the Caribbean, the South Pacific, Africa, and Southeast Asia. In addition, central Asia has set up a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone.
    1. Former Cold War officials are now coming out in favor of a world free of nuclear weapons and US leadership to achieve such a world. In a January 4, 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn argued, “Nuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also an historic opportunity. U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage — to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.” At a follow up conference in late 2007 on the 21st anniversary of the Reykjavic Summit of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Nancy Reagan told the conference, “Ronnie had many hopes for the future and none were more important to America and to mankind than the effort to create a world free of nuclear weapons. As Ronnie said, these are ‘totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing and possibly destructive of all life on earth.’ I agree and applaud your effort to create a safer world.”
    2. Norway’s Government Pension Fund has divested from companies providing components for nuclear weapons. The Norwegian Government Pension Fund – Global, based upon a recommendation from the Ethics Council for the fund, has divested from companies that develop and/or produce central components for nuclear weapons. According to their ethical guidelines, the fund may not invest in companies that produce weapons that through normal use may violate fundamental international humanitarian principles, a category that includes nuclear weapons. The following companies were excluded from the fund on this basis: BAE Systems Plc, Boeing Co., Finmeccanica Sp.A., Honeywell International Inc., Northrop Grumman Corp., Safran SA and United Technologies Corp. The Ethics Council pointed out that this is not an exhaustive list.
    1. Legal measures are being taken to challenge the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament obligations. There is a plan by the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) to encourage the United Nations General Assembly to ask the International Court of Justice whether or not the nuclear weapons states are acting in “good faith” on their obligations for nuclear disarmament in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In Italy, there is a legal case for the removal of US nuclear weapons from Italian soil.
    1. University students are showing increased concern for university involvement in nuclear weapons research and development. At the University of California at Santa Barbara, the students have established a Student Oversight Committee to oversee the US Nuclear Weapons Laboratories for which the University provides management and oversight. They intend to conduct inspections of the laboratories and report to their fellow students on whether the laboratories are fulfilling their obligations under international law.

    Conclusions

    Nuclear weapons are instruments of annihilation. Rather than provide security, the undermine it. US leadership toward nuclear disarmament is needed, but unfortunately the US has been setting up obstacles to nuclear disarmament. This must change.

    There are some signs of hope. The vast majority of countries and people support the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. Large majorities of American and Russian citizens want to move faster in this direction. Some 2000 of the world’s cities are supporting the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2020, and are speaking out against the targeting of cities. More than half of the world is covered by Nuclear Weapons Free Zones. Even former American officials during the Cold War are now pressing for US leadership for the elimination of nuclear weapons. These are all good and hopeful signs of intention. But more is needed – in addition to intention, there must also be momentum and raising the issue to a higher priority on national and global agendas.

    Norway has found a way of applying economic pressure to the corporations involved in developing or producing components for nuclear weapons. This is a powerful action that should be adopted by other major funds throughout the world. There should be a global call for divestment from these companies. Legal channels present another powerful avenue for bringing pressure to bear upon the nuclear status quo. One can imagine a global campaign to remove nuclear weapons from the oceans, the common heritage of humankind, and to prevent their introduction into the common province of humankind in outer space.

    Finally, young people are beginning to awaken to this issue, as exemplified by the student activities in opposition to the University of California’s management and oversight of the US Nuclear Weapons Laboratories. Young people must be educated to understand that it is their future that is most endangered by nuclear weapons. They cannot wait to become the leaders of tomorrow; in their own interest, they must step up and become the leaders of today on this critical issue.

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

  • Empire and Nuclear Weapons

    Over the past six decades, the United States has used its nuclear arsenal in five often inter-related ways. The first was, obviously, battlefield use, with the “battlefield” writ large to include the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The long -held consensus among scholars has been that these first atomic bombings were not necessary to end the war against Japan, and that they were designed to serve a second function of the U.S. nuclear arsenal: dictating the parameters of the global (dis)order by implicitly terrorizing U.S. enemies and allies (”vassal states” in the words of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.) The third function, first practiced by Harry Truman during the 1946 crisis over Azerbaijan in northern Iran and relied on repeatedly in U.S. wars in Asia and the Middle East, as well as during crises over Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis, has been to threaten opponents with first strike nuclear attacks in order to terrorize them into negotiating on terms acceptable to the United States or, as in the Bush wars against Iraq, to ensure that desperate governments do not defend themselves with chemical or biological weapons. Once the Soviet Union joined the nuclear club, the U.S. arsenal began to play a fourth role, making U.S. conventional forces, in the words of former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, “meaningful instruments of military and political power.” As Noam Chomsky explains, Brown was saying that implicit and explicit U.S. nuclear threats were repeatedly used to intimidate those who might consider intervening militarily to assist those we are determined to attack.

    The final role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is deterrence, which came into play only when the Soviet Union began to achieve parity with the United States in the last years of the Vietnam War. This is popularly understood to mean preventing a surprise first strike attack against the United States by guaranteeing “mutual assured destruction.” In other words, any nation foolish enough to attack the United States with nuclear weapons will be annihilated. However, Pentagon leaders have testified that deterrence has never been U.S. policy, and they have defined deterrence as preventing other nations from taking “courses of action” that are inimical to U.S. interests. This could include decisions related to allocation of scarce resources like oil and water, defending access to markets, or preventing non-nuclear attacks against U.S. allies and clients, i.e. role #2, using genocidal nuclear weapons to define and enforce the parameters and rules of the U.S. dominated global (dis)order.

    My argument is not that U.S. use and threatened use of nuclear weapons have always succeeded. Instead, successive U.S. presidents, their most senior advisers, and many in the Pentagon have believed that U.S. use of nuclear weapons has achieved U.S. goals in the past. Furthermore, these presidents have repeatedly replicated this ostensibly successful model. In fact, even the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki achieved only one of their two purposes. These first bombs of the Cold War did communicate a terrorizing message to Stalin and the Soviet elite about the capabilities of these new weapons and about the U.S. will to use them. But, within weeks of the A-bombings, Washington was sharing influence in Korea with Moscow. Four years later northern China and Manchuria, which U.S. leaders thought they had won with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, fell into what was seen as the Soviet sphere. In 1954 France declined the offer of two U.S. A-bombs to break the Vietnamese siege at Dienbienphu, and in 1969 North Vietnam refused to be intimidated by Nixon’s “November ultimatum.”

    The U.S. commitment to nuclear dominance and its practice of threatening nuclear attacks have, in fact, been counterproductive, increasing the dangers of nuclear war in yet another way: spurring nuclear weapons proliferation. No nation will long tolerate what it experiences as an unjust imbalance of power. It was primarily for this reason that the Soviet Union (now Russia) and China, North Korea, and quite probably Iran opted for nuclear weapons.

    The Romance of Ruthlessness The Bush administration has again put nuclear weapons – and their various uses – at the center of U.S. military and foreign policy. The message of the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) in December 2001 was unmistakable. As The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists editorialized, “Not since the resurgence of the Cold War in Ronald Reagan’s first term has U.S. defense strategy placed such an emphasis on nuclear weapons.” The NPR reiterated the U.S. commitment to first-strike nuclear war fighting. For the first time, seven nations were specifically named as primary nuclear targets: Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea. Consistent with calls by senior administration figures who spoke of their “bias in favor of things that might be usable,” the NPR urged funding for development of new and more usable nuclear weapons. This included a new “bunker buster.” Seventy times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb, the bunker buster was designed to destroy enemy command bunkers and WMD (weapons of mass destruction) installations buried hundreds of feet beneath the surface.

    To ensure that the “bunker buster” and other new nuclear weapons could inflict their holocausts, the NPR called for accelerating preparations for the resumption of nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site. It also pressed for the nuclear weapons laboratories to continue modernizing the nuclear arsenal and to train a new generation of nuclear weapons scientists. Among their first projects would be the design of a “Reliable Replacement Warhead” to serve as the military’s primary strategic weapon for the first half of the 21st century. With a massive infusion of new funds to consolidate and revitalize nuclear research, development and production facilities, National Nuclear Security Administration Deputy Administrator Tom D’Agostino testified it would “restore us to a level of capability comparable to what we had during the Cold War.”

    Later, the Rumsfeld Pentagon published and then ostensibly “rescinded” a non-classified version of its Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations. The Doctrine was revealing and profoundly disturbing. In the tradition of the Clinton administration’s Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, the Doctrine communicated that the United States could all too easily “become irrational and vindictive.”

    Most striking was the Doctrine’s extended discussion of deterrence. Rather than define deterrence as the prevention of nuclear attacks by other nuclear powers, the Doctrine stated that “The focus of US deterrence efforts is… to influence potential adversaries to withhold actions intended to harm US’ national interests…based on the adversary’s perception of the…likelihood and magnitude of the costs or consequences corresponding to these courses of actions.” Diplomatically, the Doctrine continued, “the central focus of deterrence is for one nation to exert such influence over a potential adversary’s decision process that the potential adversary makes a deliberate choice to refrain from a COA [course of action.]” In addition to putting Chinese diplomatic efforts to marginalize U.S. power in Asia on notice or deterring unlikely Russian or French nuclear attacks, the central role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal was global dominance. China, Russia, France and Germany were reminded of their proper places, and Iran and Venezuela received ample warning not to adopt oil and energy policies that might constitute- courses of action that would “harm U.S. national interests.”

    Placing the world on further notice, the Doctrine threatened that “The US does not make positive statements defining the circumstances under which it would use nuclear weapons.” Maintaining ambiguity about when the United States would use nuclear weapons helped to “create doubt in the minds of potential adversaries.” The Doctrine also refused to rule out nuclear attacks against non-nuclear weapons states.

    The Doctrine also baldly instructed the U.S. military that “no customary or conventional international law prohibits nations from employing nuclear weapons in armed conflict,” thus subordinating international law to U.S. military strategy. It also argued that nuclear wars could be won. The Doctrine gave increased authority to field commanders to propose targets for nuclear attacks and described the circumstances when field commanders could request approval to launch first-strike nuclear attacks. “Training,” it further stated, “can help prepare friendly forces to survive the effects of nuclear weapons and improve the effectiveness of surviving forces.” The Doctrine went on to reconfirm the bankruptcy of the nuclear reduction negotiations between the United States and Russia. The Doctrine was clear that U.S. nuclear forces would not actually be reduced because “US strategic nuclear weapons remain in storage and serve as an augmentation capability should US strategic nuclear force requirements rise above the levels of the Moscow Treaty.”

    Toward Abolition Since the end of the Cold War, the media and national political discourse in the United States have focused on the dangers of “horizontal proliferation.” These dangers include “rogue” states with nuclear weapons, the possibility of nations with nuclear power plants becoming nuclear weapons states, and leakage from nuclear stockpiles finding its way to “rogue” states or to non-state terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. One nightmare scenario has envisioned the overthrow of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of radical Islamists.

    It doesn’t take a genius to understand the importance of under-funded initiatives like the congressional Nunn-Lugar Nuclear Threat Initiative, which was designed to secure the world’s nuclear weapons, fissile materials, and nuclear wastes. However, these efforts can be no more than stop-gap measures as long as the United States threatens other nations with nuclear attacks and insists on maintaining the terrorizing imbalance of power.

    Since the 1995 Nuclear Nonproliferation Review Conference, popular, elite, and governmental demands have been growing for the United States and other nuclear powers to fulfill their Article VI treaty commitment to negotiate the complete elimination of their nuclear arsenals. In 1996, in the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on the use and threatened use of nuclear weapons ruled that both are violations of international law, and the Court directed the nuclear powers to implement their Article VI commitments. While NGOs and popular movements from across the world came together to form Abolition 2000, at the elite level former head of the U.S. Strategic Command Gen. Lee Butler – supported by many of the world’s generals and admirals – called for abolition. And, in January 2007, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz joined former secretary of defense William Perry and former senator Sam Nunn in saying that U.S. double standards were driving nuclear weapons proliferation, and that the time had come for the United States to meet its NPT obligations.

    Since then, pressed by voters and community based activists, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson have each stated that if elected, they will be the president who negotiates the complete elimination of the world’s nuclear weapons. They need to be held to these commitments, and other presidential and congressional candidates need to be pressed to join their commitment. (Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel have made similar commitments.)

    The political and technical steps needed to eliminate nuclear weapons have long been known. First, the United States must renounce its “first strike” nuclear wear fighting doctrines. Next it must refuse to fund the development and deployment of new nuclear weapons. The other essential steps include verified and irreversible dismantling of nuclear weapons and their installations; halting production of weapons-grade fissile material and securely containing existing stockpiles; verification, including societal verification, and intrusive inspection systems; and investing power in a supranational authority, probably the UN Security Council, to isolate, contain, or remove threats to the nuclear-free order.

    Like cannibalism and slavery, nuclear weapons can be abolished. The question is whether we humans have the will and courage to choose life.

    Like cannibalism and slavery, nuclear weapons can be abolished. The question is whether we humans have the will and courage to choose life.

    Table 1: Partial Listing of Incidents of Nuclear Blackmail

    (From Empire and the Bomb: How the United States Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World by Joseph Gerson)

     
    1946 Truman threatens Soviets regarding Northern Iran.
    1946 Truman sends SAC bombers to intimidate Yugoslavia following the downing of U.S. aircraft over Yugoslavia.
    1948 Truman threatens Soviets in response to Berlin blockade.
    1950 Truman threatens Chinese when U.S. Marines were surrounded at Chosin Reservoir in Korea.
    1951 Truman approves military request to attack Manchuria with nuclear weapons if significant numbers of new Chinese forces join the war.
    1953 Eisenhower threatens China to force an end to Korean War on terms acceptable to the United States.
    1954 Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Dulles offers French three tactical nuclear weapons to break the siege at Dienbienphu, Vietnam. Supported by Nixon’s public trial balloons.
    1954 Eisenhower used nuclear armed SAC bombers to reinforce CIA-backed coup in Guatemala.
    1956 Bulganin threatens London and Paris with nuclear attacks, demanding withdrawal following their invasion of Egypt.
    1956 Eisenhower counters by threatening the U.S.S.R. while also demanding British and French retreat from Egypt.
    1958 Eisenhower orders Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare to use nuclear weapons against Iraq, if necessary to prevent extension of revolution into Kuwait.
    1958 Eisenhower orders Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare to use nuclear weapons against China if they invade the island of Quemoy.
    1961 Kennedy threatens Soviets during Berlin Crisis.
    1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
    1967 Johnson threatens Soviets during Middle East War.
    1967 Johnson’s public threats against Vietnam are linked to possible use of nuclear weapons to break siege at Khe Shan.
    1969 Brezhnev threatens China during border war.
    1969 Nixon’s “November Ultimatum” against Vietnam.
    1970 Nixon signals U.S. preparations to fight nuclear war during Black September War in Jordan.
    1973 Israeli Government threatens use of nuclear weapons during the “October War.”
    1973 Kissinger threatens Soviet Union during the last hours of the “October War” in the Middle East.
    1973 Nixon pledges to South Vietnamese President Thieu that he will respond with nuclear attacks or the bombing of North Vietnam’s dikes if it violated the provisions of the Paris Peace Accords.
    1975 Sec. of Defense Schlesinger threatens North Korea with nuclear retaliation should it attack South Korea in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.
    1980 Carter Doctrine announced.
    1981 Reagan reaffirms the Carter Doctrine.
    1982 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher threatens to eliminate Buenos Aires during the Falklands War.
    1990 Pakistan threatens India during confrontation over Kashmir.
    1990-91 Bush threatens Iraq during the “Gulf War.”
    1993 Clinton threatens North Korea.
    1994 Clinton’s confrontation with North Korea.
    1996 China threatens “Los Angeles” during confrontation over Taiwan. Clinton responds by sending two nuclear-capable aircraft carrier fleets through the Taiwan Straight.
    1996 Clinton threatens Libya with nuclear attack to prevent completion of underground chemical weapons production complex.
    1998 Clinton threatens Iraq with nuclear attack.
    1999 India and Pakistan threaten and prepare nuclear threats during the Kargil War.
    2001 U.S. forces placed on a DEFCON alert in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
    2001 Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refuses to rule out using tactical nuclear weapons against Afghan caves possibly sheltering Osama Bin Laden.
    2002 Bush communicates an implied threat to counter any Iraqi use of chemical weapons to defend Iraqi troops with chemical or biological weapons with a U.S. nuclear attack.
    2006 French Prime Minister Chirac threatens first strike nuclear attacks against nations that practice terrorism against France.
    2006 & 07 “All options are on the table”: U.S. threats to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure made by President Bush and presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton.

    This article is adapted from Joseph Gerson, Empire and the Bomb (University of Michigan Press, 2007).

    Joseph Gerson is the director of programs of the American Friends Service Committee in New England and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. His previous books include The Sun Never Sets and With Hiroshima Eyes.

  • An Explanation of Nuclear Weapons Terminology

    Discussions of nuclear weapons and the policies which guide them often utilize terminology which lacks standardized definition. Much of the nuclear jargon consists of words or phrases which are essentially descriptive terms whose meaning is generally agreed upon, but in fact do not have precise technical definitions in any military or civilian dictionaries. Such imprecision in language has created confusion among those trying to comprehend nuclear issues and has even hindered the process of negotiation among nations.

    This problem of imprecision exists for a variety of reasons. Some terms may not be listed in the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) online Dictionary of Military Terms (see http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/) because they refer to policies, such as “launch-on-warning”, which the U.S. government does not wish to acknowledge or discuss. Other terms, such as “high-alert status”, “hair-trigger alert” and “de-alerting”, may be regarded as useless by military officers who would wish to regard their forces as always “alert”.

    Although civilians and the military may approach the use of such terminology from different perspectives, it is important that they at least be able to understand each other when conversing. A lack of precise terminology will continue to plague discussions of nuclear policy until adequate definitions are finally agreed upon by all parties.

    The U.S. recently employed imprecision in terminology as a tactic during the 2007 General Conference on Disarmament at the United Nations, when it announced, “The fact is that U.S. nuclear weapons are not and have never been on “hair-trigger alert”. By repeatedly using the term “hair-trigger” (which lacks technical meaning but is commonly used to describe fire-arms and bad tempers), the U.S. deliberately muddied the semantic waters in an attempt to avoid serious discussion about the true status of its nuclear arsenal[1].

    The U.S. apparently chose this strategy because the governments of New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Nigeria and Chile had put forward a Resolution to the General Assembly which called for the removal of all nuclear weapons from “high-alert status”[2]. This left many of the delegates at the U.N. scrambling for a means to decipher exactly what was being debated.

    Because I had been asked to speak in support of the New Zealand Resolution[3], I decided to present the delegates with definitions for commonly used nuclear terms. I found, however, that very few published definitions are available for such terms, and so I instead developed a list of what I believe are valid explanations for commonly used nuclear jargon (copied below). It is my hope that eventually all these words and phrases can be assigned standardized definitions usable by both civilians and military authorities.

    “Operational”, “Active” and “Deployed” nuclear weapons

    • Fully functional nuclear weapons which are either mated to delivery systems or available for immediate combat use.
    • There are about 11,800 operational/active/deployed nuclear weapons in the global nuclear arsenal (mostly U.S. and Russian).

    Note: The DOD has a rather confusing definition for “Deployed Nuclear Weapons” available at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/data/d/01632.html “Reserve” or “Inactive/Responsive” nuclear weapons

    • Nuclear weapons not immediately available for combat. They are kept in long-term storage as spares, as a source of parts for remanufacture or the manufacture of other weapons, or held in reserve as a responsive force that may augment deployed forces. These weapons can lack some component which renders them inoperable unless that component is replaced.
    • There are 13,500 reserve nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. Should they choose to do so, the U.S. and Russia could use these reserves to essentially double the number of operational nuclear weapons in their arsenals within a relatively short period of time.

    Note: The great irony of “arms control” negotiations is that the reductions which have occurred through the SALT, START and SORT treaties have focused only upon the destruction of missile silos and submarine launch tubes – not on eliminating nuclear warheads or even missiles, but only upon reducing the total number of operational delivery systems. Consequently, as the delivery systems were eliminated, many of the warheads were taken out of active service and placed in the “reserve” arsenals of the U.S. and Russia.

    “Low-yield” nuclear weapons

    • Generally refers to simple fission weapons, first described as “atomic bombs”, which have a nominal explosive power of about 15 kilotons, roughly the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are the type of weapons which would be made by emerging nuclear weapon states such as India and Pakistan or by terrorists (using Highly Enriched Uranium).

    “Tactical” nuclear weapons

    • This is an older term which is no longer useful in describing the explosive size of nuclear weapons (many modern versions of these weapons can have large yields). “Tactical” now infers that the weapon is used for limited, or “theater” military operations, but not long-range intercontinental missions. Thus, the term “non-strategic weapon” is more appropriate.

    “Strategic” nuclear weapons

    • Often referred to as “high-yield” or “thermonuclear” nuclear weapons. The first generations of these weapons were called “hydrogen bombs” because they used (and still use) atomic bombs as triggers to generate enough heat to cause the nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms (fusion is the same process which powers the Sun). Most modern thermonuclear weapons are 20 to 50 times more powerful than the Hiroshima-size bombs, although weapons more than 1000 times as powerful still exist in the global nuclear arsenal.
    • Strategic nuclear weapons generally have an explosive power of at least 100 kilotons yield, i.e. 100,000 tons of TNT.
    • There are 7200 strategic nuclear weapons in the global nuclear arsenal.
    • For a detailed explanation of nuclear weapon design, look it up at Wikipedia, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design

    Note: The DOD actually has a definition for thermonuclear weapons, see http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/data/t/05511.html

    ”High-alert status” or “Launch-ready alert”

    • Commonly refers to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) or submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) armed with strategic nuclear warheads, able to be launched in a matter of 15 minutes or less. Can include any missile or weapon system capable of delivering a nuclear warhead in this time frame.
    • Maximum flight time of 30 minutes or less for U.S. and Russian ICBMs and SLBMs to reach their targets.
    • Total time required to launch high-alert ballistic missiles and have their nuclear warheads reach their targets = 45 minutes or less. With high-alert nuclear forces a nuclear war can be ordered, launched and completed in less than one hour.

    Note: A definition of high-alert requires no specific explosive power of the weapon on the missile, but in general, most high-alert missiles are armed with strategic nuclear weapons with yields equal to or greater than 100 kilotons. The U.S. and Russia have for decades possessed solid fuel ICBMs and SLBMs capable of being launched in 2 or 3 minutes. The U.S. “Minuteman” ICBM earned its name for its quick-launch capability.

    Nuclear forces now at “High-alert status”

    A large fraction of the following forces, including at least 2600 to 3500 strategic nuclear warheads:

    • U.S. land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles = 1050 strategic nuclear warheads
    • 4 U.S. Trident submarines kept at “hard alert”, carrying a total of 600 high-yield warheads
    • Russian land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles = 1843 strategic nuclear warheads
    • Russian nuclear subs in port (virtually all year) carrying a total of 624 high-yield warheads

    Note: for published references on 2007 U.S. and Russian nuclear forces see the NRDC Nuclear Notebook at the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The URL for the U.S. arsenal is http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/91n36687821608un/fulltext.pdf; for Russia see http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/d41x498467712117/fulltext.pdf. And also stay tuned for my new website, www.globalnucleararsenal.com .

    “De-alerting” nuclear weapons

    • De-alerting prevents the rapid use of nuclear weapons by introducing physical changes to nuclear weapon systems which lengthen the time required to use the nuclear weapons in combat. Such changes are made in order to allow more time for rational decision-making processes to occur and hopefully avoid nuclear conflict.
    • De-alerting is a reversible process which can be used to rapidly implement existing arms control agreements ahead of schedule. In other words, arms control agreements create a timetable to introduce irreversible reductions of weapon systems, but these changes generally occur incrementally over the course of a number of years. De-alerting can be utilized to rapidly implement the entire range of negotiated reductions in a reversible fashion (which over time are then made irreversible), thereby bringing the benefits of the negotiated reductions into being much more rapidly.
    • Examples of de-alerting: (1) Placing large, visible barriers on top of missile silo lids which would be difficult to rapidly remove, (2) Removing or altering firing switches of missiles to prevent rapid launch, (3) Removing warheads from missiles and storing them in a separate, monitored location.
    • De-alerting may require negotiations and verification procedures in order to accomplish symmetrical force reductions on both sides. However, de-alerting can occur rapidly if sufficient political will exists, e.g., the 1991 Bush and Gorbachev Presidential Nuclear Initiatives.
    • De-alerting nuclear forces would prevent a false warning from triggering a retaliatory nuclear strike (accidental nuclear war) via launch-on-warning policy (see next definition).

    Note: It would be worthwhile to define separate stages of de-alerting which would refer to specific increments of time required to return a weapon system to high-alert status. For example, Stage 1 de-alerting would require 24 hours to bring the weapon system back to high-alert status; Stage 2 de-alerting would require a week; Stage 3 de-alerting would require a month or more to reconstitute the weapon system.

    Launch-on-Warning (LoW) policy

    • The Cold War policy of launching a retaliatory nuclear strike to a perceived nuclear attack only on the basis of electronic Early Warning System data before the reality of the perceived attack is confirmed by nuclear detonations from the incoming warheads.
    • Under LoW policy, a false warning misinterpreted as a true attack could trigger a retaliatory nuclear strike, and thus cause an accidental nuclear war.
    • Under LoW policy, the 30 minute (or less) flight time of ballistic missiles dictates that only a few minutes are available to evaluate Early Warning System data and act upon it before the arrival of incoming nuclear warheads. If the attack warning is accepted as accurate, top U.S. or Russian military commanders would contact their President to advise him, and the president would then be allowed only a few minutes to decide whether or not to launch a nuclear retaliatory strike – before the perceived attack arrives.
    • Launch-on-Warning capability can be eliminated by introducing physical changes to nuclear weapon systems which prevent their rapid use (de-alerting). In other words, Launch-on-Warning requires high-alert forces that can be launched in 15 minutes or less. If you remove nuclear forces from high-alert, you CANNOT Launch-on-Warning.
    • Launch-on-Warning policy can be ended overnight by Presidential decree.
    • By replacing LoW policy with a policy of Retaliatory Launch Only After Detonation (RLOAD), a false warning misinterpreted as a true attack could no longer cause an accidental nuclear war.

    For a more detailed analysis on LoW and its alternatives, see “Replace Launch on Warning Policy” by Phillips and Starr at www.RLOAD.org

    Note: The U.S. presently maintains that it does not operate under the policy of Launch-on-Warning (LoW). Although the U.S. DOD Dictionary of Military Terms lacks a definition for LoW, it does define Launch Under Attack (LUA, see http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/data/l/03079.html) – with a definition exactly the equivalent to the commonly used definition of LoW! Perhaps we should ask the U.S. if it operates under LUA? Furthermore, Russian military experts (writing in English) use LUA to mean something significantly different than the U.S. DOD definition. Russian usage of LUA refers to the delivery of a retaliatory nuclear strike “in response to an actually delivered strike”, i.e. after nuclear detonations have been confirmed (see Valery Yarynich, C3: Nuclear Command, Control, Cooperation, Washington, D.C.: Center for Defense Information, 2003, pp. 28 -30.)

    Launch-on-Warning (LoW) capability

    • Early Warning Systems (EWS), high-alert nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, and nuclear command and control systems, all working together, provide the U.S. and Russia the capability to Launch-on-Warning.

    Launch-on-Warning (LoW) status

    • The combination of Launch-on-Warning capability with Launch-on-Warning policy has created what is commonly referred to as Launch-on-Warning status.
    • LoW capability + LoW policy = LoW status

    Note: This is my own opinion and definition. I felt obligated to come up with the explanation for “LoW status” because the term has often been used by non-governmental observers to describe the strategic nuclear forces of the U.S. and Russia.

    “Hair-trigger alert”

    • “Hair-trigger alert” is a figurative term sometimes used to describe strategic nuclear weapons at Launch-on-Warning status and in particular the condition of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals, see “A Rebuttal of the U.S. Statement on the Alert Status of U.S. Nuclear Forces” by Bruce Blair at http://www.lcnp.org/disarmament/opstatus-blair.htm
    • “Hair-trigger alert” has been used to confuse the debate about the status of nuclear arsenals. For purposes of diplomacy, it may be wise to use non-figurative and more technical terms to describe nuclear policy and nuclear weapon systems.

    Footnotes

    [1] The text of the Oct. 9, 2007, U.S. statement at the U.N. can be viewed at http://reachingcriticalwill.org/political/1com/1com07/statements/9octusa.pdf Two authoritative rebuttals to the U.S. Statement are posted on the internet at the website of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, see: http://www.lcnp.org/ These include, “A Rebuttal of the U.S. Statement on Nuclear Weapons Alert, Dismantlements and Reductions”, by Dr. Hans M. Kristensen, the Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, see http://www.lcnp.org/disarmament/kristensen-rebuttal_oct07.pdf and, “A Rebuttal of the U.S. Statement on the Alert Status of U.S. Nuclear Forces”, by Dr. Bruce Blair, President of the World Security Institute, see http://www.lcnp.org/disarmament/opstatus-blair.htm
    [2] The Resolution passed by the vote of 124 to 3, with only the U.S., the U.K. and France voting against it. The U.S. voted against the Resolution because it said the Resolution was “meaningless” (see http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/political/1com/FCM07/week4.html#opstatus ) 

    [3] Our Oct. 16th panel, which discussed the Operational Status of Nuclear Weapons, also included speeches by the Ambassadors of New Zealand and Sweden, and a presentation by John Hallam of Australia, with Ms. Rhianna Tyson of the Global Security Institute as moderator.

    Steven Starr is an independent writer who has been published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies. He recently retired from the medical profession to work as an educator and consultant on nuclear weapons issues.

  • Nuclear Disarmament Remarks

    Note: Governor Schwarzenegger was scheduled to deliver this speech at the Hoover Institution on Oct. 24, 2007 but was forced to cancel due to the wildfires in Southern California. Former Secretary of State George Shultz read the remarks in his place.

    Thank you, I’m delighted to be in such distinguished company. On behalf of the people of California, I welcome you to our Golden State.

    George Shultz is one of the people I admire most in the world, someone for whom I feel great affection. So when George asked me to speak tonight, I was eager to say yes. But since my expertise is in weights, not throwweights . . . I didn’t know what I could possibly say to an audience of such experts. Knowing that I like big issues, George slyly suggested that I just give some thought to the big issue of nuclear weapons. This has caused me to realize some things. So let me start at the beginning.

    As some of you may know, I grew up in Austria. As a boy, the Red Army loomed over us from its bases in central Europe. Even as children, we all knew about the threat of nuclear war. We knew the blinding power of its flash. We knew the shape of its cloud. Like here, we had nuclear drills in our schools. When I was 18, I went into the Austrian Army for my required service. I really, really wanted to be a tank driver. This was before I had a Hummer. Although you were supposed to be 21, I talked them into letting me drive a tank. I have to say I wasn’t much of a deterrent to a Soviet attack. During lunch one day on maneuvers, I forgot to put on the brakes and my tank rolled into the river. I can’t tell you what a sinking feeling I had as I watched that tank heading backward down the bank and then splashing into the water.

    A true, amusing story . . . but the reality of the times, of course, was quite serious. In 1956, the Soviets crushed the Hungarians. Then later, the Czechoslovakians.

    We Austrians had three basic fears. One, that Soviet tanks might roll into Vienna the way they did into Budapest. Two, a Soviet invasion of Austria or nearby countries might bring a U.S./Soviet confrontation—with Austria getting caught in the nuclear crossfire. And three, we feared mistakes. Mistakes are made in every other human endeavor. Why should nuclear weapons be exempt? I still remember the tensions of those times. I think Austrians, wedged between the West and the Soviet empire, may have felt the Cold War more intensely than Americans. I think I actually felt less tension here in America.
    After I became an American citizen, the thing that stands out so clearly in my mind is the Reagan/Gorbachev summit at Rejkjavik. The leaders of the two most powerful nations on earth were actually discussing the elimination of nuclear weapons. Such a breathtaking possibility. I still remember the thrill of it. I’ll never forget the photos of a grim President Reagan as he left the summit after the negotiations broke down. Even though the negotiations failed, I think the very talks themselves reassured the world. The world saw that both nations desired to be free of the nuclear curse. Then history began moving rapidly. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union collapsed. Russia began attending G-8 meetings. We even heard talk of it joining NATO. In spite of the nuclear differences between President Putin and President Bush, few today would believe that either nation seeks to attack the other. So, over the years, the intense, glaring threat of nuclear war faded. What also faded was the public’s awareness and concern. I include myself in that public. Today . . . the nuclear threat has returned with a vengeance, the vengeance of a terrorist. The Soviets had nuclear weapons and did not use them. Today, is there any doubt whether terrorists would use them?

    Even when Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the table at the UN, I don’t believe people felt the Soviet Union—no matter how ruthless—was devoid of reason. Today, the enemy is both ruthless and seemingly without reason. I don’t know whether it is ironic or frightening . . . but have we reached the point where we look back to Nikita Khrushchev and the Cold War as the good old days? Have the current dangers made us romantics, longing for the concepts of deterrence and mutually assured destruction? During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union also had the time and inclination to develop a living arrangement with their nuclear arsenals.

    As George and others have pointed out, the new nuclear states don’t have these safeguards of the Cold War, which increases the possibility of accidents and misjudgments. Furthermore, today those who would seek them can find the makings of nuclear weapons in hundreds of building spread over 40 countries. As we meet, terrorists are jiggling the door knobs of these buildings trying to get in, trying to get their hands on these materials. In your discussions, I would be interested whether you would rather live under the massive nuclear threat of the Cold War . . . or under the varied, erratic nuclear threat we face in the post 9-11 age? Senator Nunn has very insightfully raised the question—after a nuclear device explodes on our soil, what will we wish we had done to prevent it? And Secretary Perry has raised the question, what will we do when it does happen? Few people are addressing those questions with the immediacy of this distinguished gathering. After all, the consequences of a nuclear detonation are so horrific that it’s more comforting to put them out of mind. But I have realized some things as a result of thinking about what I should say tonight.
    For example, I have advocated—and continue to advocate—action against global warming. I genuinely believe we must take steps to stop the destruction of the planet’s environment. Looking at this logically, however—although we must address global warming now—its most dangerous consequences come decades down the road. The most dangerous consequences of nuclear weapons, however, are here and now. They are of this hour and time. A nuclear disaster will not hit at the speed of a glacier melting. It will hit with a blast. It will not hit with the speed of the atmosphere warming but of a city burning. Clearly, the attention focused on nuclear weapons should be as prominent as that of global climate change. After he left office, former Vice President Gore made a movie about the dangers of global warming. I have a movie idea for Vice President Cheney after he leaves—a movie about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. If you Google “global warming,” you will find 6,690,000 entries. If you Google “Britney Spears,” you will find 2,490,000. If you Google “nuclear disarmament,” you will get 116,000 entries. And if you Google “nuclear annihilation,” you will get 17,400. Something is wrong with that picture.

    The words that this audience knows so well, the words that President Kennedy spoke during the Cold War, have regained their urgency: “The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.” Here in California we still have levees that were built a hundred years ago. These levees are an imminent threat to the well-being of this state and its people. It would be only a matter of time before disaster strikes. But we’re not waiting until such a disaster.

    We in California have taken action to protect our people and our economy from the devastation. Neither can this nation nor the world wait to act until there is a nuclear disaster. I am so thankful for the work of George, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, Max Kampelman, Sid Drell and so many of you at this conference. You have a big vision, a vision as big as humanity–to free the world of nuclear weapons.

    Ladies and gentlemen, I have come this evening to say that I want to help. Let me know how I can use my power and influence as governor to further your vision. Because my heart is with you. My support is firm. My door is open.

    On behalf of the people of California, thank you again for the work you are doing to lift the nuclear nightmare from our nation’s future.

     

    Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Governor of California.

  • The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons

    The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons

    There are many serious problems confronting humanity, including climate change, infectious diseases, poverty and pollution, but none poses a more pervasive and urgent threat than the continuing dangers of nuclear weapons. There are still some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Twelve thousand of these are deployed, and some 3,500 are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired in moments. Nuclear weapons are a delicately balanced “Sword of Damocles” hanging over our human future.

    We have seemingly failed to learn the lessons made evident by the atomic destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nine nuclear weapons states remain poised to inflict such mind-numbing devastation again, but on a far greater scale. The current nuclear weapons states show no signs of giving up their reliance on nuclear weapons and, as a result, other states may seek to join the nuclear club. The spread of nuclear weapons to additional states will only increase the risks of nuclear catastrophe.

    We are now in the seventh decade since nuclear weapons were created and used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the outset of the Nuclear Age, the world has witnessed an insane nuclear arms race, which has threatened the human species with annihilation. Despite the end of the Cold War more than 15 years ago, this threat has not gone away. The future of civilization and even the human species hangs in the balance, and yet, among the world’s major problems, very little attention is being paid to ending this threat. We are challenged, individually and collectively, to address and end this ultimate danger to humanity. This is surely one of the greatest challenges of our time, and we share a common responsibility to meet this challenge and pass the world on intact to the next generation.

    Warnings

    Nuclear weapons unleash the power within the atom. The creation of these weapons demonstrated significant scientific achievement, but left humankind threatened as never before and faced with the challenge of what to do with them. Albert Einstein, whose theoretical understanding of the relationship of energy and mass paved the way for nuclear weapons, was deeply troubled by the creation of these weapons. “The unleashed power of the atom,” he stated, “has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Einstein, who died in 1955, lived long enough to see the onset of the nuclear arms race and the development and testing of thermonuclear weapons.

    By 1955, ten years after the first use of nuclear weapons, both the US and USSR had developed thermonuclear weapons, potentially thousands of times more powerful than the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the nuclear arms race had begun. The US and USSR had begun testing nuclear weapons on the lands and in the surrounding waters of indigenous and island peoples, demonstrating little concern for the health and well being of the native peoples affected. Along with philosopher Bertrand Russell, Einstein issued an appeal to humanity called the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which was additionally signed also by nine other prominent scientists. The Manifesto stated: “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.” It was a stark warning.

    Other warnings from highly credible sources throughout the Nuclear Age sought to put the world on notice of the peril nuclear weapons pose to humanity. Warnings came from soldiers and scientists, politicians and literary figures. A notable warning was issued by a high-level group of eminent personalities in 1996 in the Report of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. The Report stated:

    “The Canberra Commission is persuaded that immediate and determined efforts need to be made to rid the world of nuclear weapons and the threat they pose to it. The destructiveness of nuclear weapons is immense. Any use would be catastrophic.

    “The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility. The only complete defense is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.”

    One of the members of the Canberra Commission was General George Lee Butler, who had served as the commander-in-chief of the United States Strategic Command. In this capacity General Butler had been in charge of all US strategic nuclear weapons. After retiring from the US Air Force, General Butler devoted himself to the abolition of nuclear weapons. He argued, “What is at stake here is our capacity to move ever higher the bar of civilized behavior. As long as we sanctify nuclear weapons as the ultimate arbiter of conflict, we will have forever capped our capacity to live on this planet according to a set of ideals that value human life and eschew a solution that continues to hold acceptable the shearing away of entire societies. This simply is wrong. It is morally wrong, and it ultimately will be the death of humanity.”

    In 2006, another expert commission, the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, also known as the Blix Commission after its chairman, former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix, issued a report, echoing the Canberra Commission Report. Referring to weapons of mass destruction, the Blix Commission Report 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.” The Blix Commission Report continued:

    “The accumulated threat posed by the estimated 27,000 nuclear weapons, in Russia, the United States and the other NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty] nuclear-weapon states, merits worldwide concern. However, especially in these five states the view is common that nuclear weapons from the first wave of proliferation somehow are tolerable, while such weapons in the hands of additional states are viewed as dangerous….

    “The Commission rejects the suggestion that nuclear weapons in the hands of some pose no threat, while in the hands of others they place the world in mortal jeopardy. Governments possessing nuclear weapons can act responsibly or recklessly. Governments can also change over time. Twenty-seven thousand nuclear weapons are not an abstract theory. They exist in today’s world.”

    In May 2007, the Founding Congress of the World Future Council issued “The Hamburg Call to Action.” In this document they warned: “Nuclear weapons remain humanity’s most immediate catastrophic threat. These weapons would destroy cities, countries, civilization and possibly humanity itself. The danger posed by nuclear weapons in any hands must be confronted directly and urgently through a new initiative for the elimination of these instruments of annihilation.”

    With the serious dangers that nuclear weapons pose to the human future, it is curious that so many warnings, over so long a period of time, have gone unheeded. Some 97 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons are in the arsenals of the United States and Russia. These must be the countries that lead the way, working with the seven other countries that also have nuclear weapons: the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. They must also work with the more than 35 nuclear capable countries that could choose to develop nuclear arsenals – countries that possess the technological capability of developing nuclear weapons. Some countries, such as Japan, are virtual nuclear powers, possessing the technology and nuclear materials to develop nuclear arsenals in weeks or months.

    Awakening Humanity

    What will it take to awaken humanity, and change its course? Many people think that this will not happen until there is another catastrophic use of nuclear weapons. This would, of course, be an immense tragedy and a great failure of imagination. If we can imagine that another nuclear catastrophe is possible, shouldn’t we act now to prevent it?

    Throughout the Cold War, humanity lived with the danger of Mutually Assured Destruction, which has the appropriate acronym of MAD. Today MAD has an additional meaning, Mutually Assured Delusions. It is delusional to think that nuclear weapons protect us. Despite the official justifications that nuclear weapons provide security, it should be clear to those who think about it that nuclear weapons themselves cannot provide protection in the sense of physical security. At best, they can provide psychological security if one believes that they provide a deterrent against attack. But belief in and of itself does not make a person or a society safe, certainly not from nuclear dangers. The belief itself is a well-promoted delusion.

    The United States is currently spending tens of billions of dollars to develop a missile defense system, which its proponents argue is capable of defending against nuclear attacks by rogue states. The only reasonable interpretation of this expenditure is that US defense planners understand that deterrence is not foolproof and that it can fail. Of course, missile defenses themselves are far from foolproof, and many experts believe that they will not work as promised in real-world conditions. In fact, most scientists not being paid by the missile defense program and the industry benefiting from it believe that missile defenses will not be reliable. Like the French Maginot Line, they are a defensive barrier that is unlikely to provide security. Missile defenses may be thought of as a “Maginot Line in the sky,” a highly touted and expensive defensive system with a very low probability of actually providing defense.

    The Shortcomings of Deterrence

    The United States government bases its need for nuclear weapons in the 21st century on deterrence. The US Secretaries of Defense, Energy, and State released a joint statement in July 2007, “National Security and Nuclear Weapons: Maintaining Deterrence in the 21st Century.” The statement begins, “A principal national security goal of the United States is to deter aggression against ourselves, our allies, and friends. Every American administration since President Truman’s day has formulated US national security policy in much the same terms, making clear to adversaries and allies alike the essential role that nuclear weapons play in maintaining deterrence.” What the statement fails to state is who is being deterred, why nuclear weapons are critical to deterrence, and whether the US wouldn’t make its citizens and the world safer by negotiating the elimination of nuclear weapons.

    Reliance on deterrence is dangerous. Deterrence is a theory about human behavior and it has many shortcomings. For it to be effective, a threat of retaliation must be accurately communicated and it must be believed. Such a threat is likely to increase an opponent’s military might rather than to reduce conflict. In addition, deterrence won’t work when an opponent is suicidal or not locatable. This is surely the case against non-state extremist actors, groups such as al Qaeda.

    Should Nuclear Weapons Confer Prestige?

    If nuclear weapons cannot provide protection for a population, and almost certainly guarantee that a state possessing them will become a target of other states’ nuclear weapons, what other advantages do they offer? One possible answer to this question is prestige. Since the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council all developed nuclear weapons, it may seem to other states that nuclear weapons would contribute to their prestige in the world. This idea was given credence by the large-scale celebrations in the streets of India and Pakistan when these two countries tested nuclear devices in 1998.

    Even the capacity to make nuclear weapons by enriching uranium or separating plutonium appears to attract attention and is perceived to bestow prestige. Although there is no clear evidence that Iran seeks to develop nuclear arms, its uranium enrichment program has brought it under intense international scrutiny. This is reflective of current nuclear double standards, in which some countries, such as Iran, are highly criticized for developing nuclear technology, while others, such as India, seem to increase their status in the international community for having developed and tested nuclear weapons.

    Reflecting the positive view of his country’s nuclear capacity, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil stated in July 2007, “Brazil could rank among those few nations in the world with a command of uranium enrichment technology, and I think we will be more highly valued as a nation – as the power we wish to be.”

    Whatever prestige nuclear weapons or the technology to produce them may confer, it comes with a heavy price. Nuclear weapons are costly and possessing them will almost certainly make a country the target of nuclear weapons.

    Weapons of the Weak

    Nuclear weapons serve the interests of the weak more than they do the powerful. In the hands of a relatively weak nation, nuclear weapons can serve as an equalizer. One has only to look at the difference in the way the US has treated the three countries that Mr. Bush incorrectly labeled as being part of an axis of evil: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The US invaded Iraq on the false charge of having a nuclear weapons program, is threatening Iran for enriching uranium, but has negotiated with North Korea, which has tested long-range missiles and is believed to have a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.

    From the perspective of a powerful state, even one heavily armed with nuclear weapons, the worst nightmare would be for nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of a non-state extremist organization, whose members were both suicidal and not locatable. This could create the ideal conditions for these weapons to be used against a major nuclear power or another state. The US, for example, would be relatively helpless against a nuclear-armed al Qaeda. The US would not be able to deter al Qaeda. It could only hope to be able to prevent al Qaeda from obtaining a nuclear weapon or the materials to create one, or locate and destroy the weapon before it was detonated.

    Why Abolish Nuclear Weapons?

    Nuclear weapons undermine security. Under current circumstances, with so many nuclear weapons in the world and such an abundance of fissile materials for constructing nuclear weapons, there is a reasonable likelihood that nuclear weapons will eventually end up in the hands of non-state extremist organizations. This would be a disastrous scenario for the world’s most powerful counties, opening the door to possible nuclear 9/11s.

    In addition, nuclear weapons are anti-democratic. They concentrate power in the hands of single individuals or small cabals. The president of the United States, for example, could send the world spiraling into nuclear holocaust with an order to unleash the US nuclear arsenal. The undemocratic nature of nuclear weapons should be of great concern to those who value democracy and the participation of citizens in decisions that affect their lives.

    Nuclear weapons and their delivery system are also extremely expensive. The US alone has spent over $6 trillion since the onset of the Nuclear Age. The Soviet Union bankrupted itself and broke apart after engaging in a nuclear arms race with the United States for over 40 years. The funds currently expended for nuclear arsenals could be used far more constructively.

    Nuclear weapons should also be viewed in terms of their consequences. They are long-range weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. They destroy equally civilians and combatants; infants and the aged; the healthy and the infirm; men, women and children. Viewed from this perspective, these weapons must be seen as among the most cowardly ever created. By their possession, with the implicit threat of use that possession implies, nuclear weapons also destroy the souls of those who rely upon them.

    They are a coward’s weapon and their possession, threat and use is dishonorable. This was the conclusion of virtually all of the top military leaders of World War II, most of whom were morally distraught that the US used these weapons against Japan. Truman’s Chief of Staff, Admiral William Leahy, for example, wrote this about the use of atomic weapons on Japan: “My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had 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.”

    Humanity Has a Choice

    Humanity still has a choice; in fact, it is the same choice posed in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. We can choose to eliminate nuclear weapons or risk the elimination of the human species. A continuation of the status quo, of reliance by some states on nuclear arsenals, is likely to result in the proliferation of nuclear weapons to others states and to extremist organizations. Ultimately, it will lead to their use. Richard Garwin, a leading US atomic scientist who helped develop thermonuclear weapons, believes that there is a 20 percent per year probability of nuclear weapons being used on a US or European city. This is a dangerous probability. The alternative is to pursue the path of eliminating nuclear weapons.

    What would it take to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons? On the one hand, the answer to this question is “very little.” On the other hand, because of the resistance, complacency and myopia of the leaders of the nuclear weapons states, the answer may be “a great amount.”

    To move forward with the elimination of nuclear weapons would require compliance with existing international law. The International Court of Justice concluded in 1996: “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.” In the decade since the Court announced its opinion, there has been scant evidence of “good faith” negotiations by the nuclear weapons states moving toward any reasonable conclusion.

    The negotiations that the Court describes as an obligation of the nuclear weapons states would need to move toward the creation of a Nuclear Weapons Convention, a treaty setting forth a program for the phased and irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons with appropriate means of verification. With the political will to pursue these required negotiations, a treaty would not be a difficult task to achieve. What is lacking is the requisite political will on the part of the leaders of nuclear weapons states. To achieve the requisite political will, the citizens of the nuclear weapons states, and particularly of the United States, must make their voices heard.

    A Special Responsibility, A Tragic Failure

    The United States, as the world’s most powerful country and the only country to have used nuclear weapons in warfare, has a special responsibility to lead in fulfilling its obligations under international law. In fact, without US leadership, it is unlikely that progress will be possible toward nuclear disarmament. But rather than lead in this direction, the United States under the Bush administration has been the major obstacle to nuclear disarmament. It has failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to pursue missile defenses, space weaponization and increased military dominance; opposed a verifiable Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty; and in general has acted as an obstacle to progress on all matters of nuclear disarmament.

    The US has also pursued a double standard with regard to nuclear weapons. It has been silent on Israeli nuclear weapons, and now seeks to change its own non-proliferation laws to enable it to provide nuclear technology and materials to India, a country that has not joined the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has developed a nuclear arsenal. At the same time, in its 2001 Nuclear Posture Review the US called for contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against seven countries, five of which were at the time thought to be non-nuclear weapons states.

    It is tragic that the American people don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of their government’s failure. They are lacking in education that would lead to an understanding of the situation. Their attention has been diverted to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and they fail to see what is closest to home: the failure of their own government to lead in a constructive and lawful manner to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons. “And thus,” in Einstein’s words, “we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

    To bring about real change in nuclear policy, people must begin with a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, and then they must speak out as if their lives and the lives of their children depended on their actions. It is unlikely that governments will give up powerful weapons on their own accord. They must be pushed by their citizenry – citizens unwilling to continue to run the risk of nuclear holocaust or to accept the logic of Mutually Assured Delusions.

    A New Story

    We need a new story for considering nuclear dangers, a story that begins with the long struggle of humans over some three million years to arrive at our present state of civilization. That state is far from perfect, but few would suggest that it should be sacrificed on the altar of weapons of mass annihilation capable of reducing our major cities to rubble.

    The first humans lived short and brutal lives. They were both predators and preyed upon. They survived by their nimbleness, more of body than mind, doing well if they lived into their twenties. Enough early humans were able to protect and nurture their infants in their hazardous environments that some of the children of each generation could survive to an age when they could themselves reproduce and repeat the cycle.

    Without these clever and capable early ancestors, and those that followed who met the distinct challenges of their times and environments for many hundreds of thousands of generations, we would not be here. Our human ancestors needed to survive the perils of birth, infancy, childhood and at least early maturity in order for each of us to have made it into the world.

    On the basis of the pure physical capacity to survive, we owe a debt to our ancestors, but with this debt comes something more. We each have a responsibility for helping to assure the chain of human survival that passes the world on intact to the next generation. In addition to this, we share an obligation to preserve the accumulated wisdom and beauty created by those who have walked the earth before us – the ideas of the great storytellers and philosophers, the great music, literature and art, the artifacts of humankind’s collective genius in its varied forms. Our responsibility extends not only to each other and to the future, but to preserve and protect the rich legacy we have received from the past – from Socrates to Shakespeare; from Homer to Hemingway; from Beethoven to the Beatles; from Michelangelo to Monet.

    All of the manifestations of human genius and triumph are placed in jeopardy by nuclear weapons and the threat of their use. Why do we tolerate this threat? Why are we docile in the face of policies that could end not only humanity, but life itself?

    Those of us alive today are the gatekeepers to the future, but the management of power by the nuclear-armed states has left us vulnerable to the continuing threat of nuclear annihilation. The only way to be free of this threat is to be free of nuclear weapons. This is the greatest challenge of our time. It will require education so that people can learn to think about nuclear weapons and war in a new way. We will need organizational modes of collective action to bring pressure to bear on governments to achieve nuclear disarmament. Ordinary people must lead from below; citizens must lead their political leaders.

    The Role of Citizens

    Organizations working for nuclear disarmament – such as the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Abolition 2000, the Middle Powers Initiative and the Mayors for Peace – can help give shape to efforts to put pressure on governments. But the change that is needed cannot be the sole responsibility of interest groups. Without the intervention of large numbers of people, we will go on with business as usual, a course that seems likely to lead to nuclear proliferation and further catastrophic uses of nuclear weapons. This is not a distant problem, nor one that can be shunted aside and left to governments.

    We who have entered the 21st century are not exempt from responsibility for assuring a human future. Fifty years ago, Japanese Buddhist leader Josei Toda called for young people to take the lead in pursuing nuclear disarmament. His proposal has great merit given the fact that it is their future and the future of their children that is imperiled by these weapons. But we must ask: How do we educate young people to care and to believe that they can make a difference in what must seem an often indifferent and terribly dangerous world? How do we empower young people to live with integrity as citizens of the world and press for the changes that are needed to assure their future?

    Change occurs one person at a time. Each of us must take responsibility for creating a world free of nuclear threat. Noted anthropologist Margaret Mead offered this hopeful advice: “Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

    In the end, the necessary changes to eliminate nuclear dangers cannot be left to governments alone. For the most part, governments have failed to come to grips with the nuclear dangers that threaten humanity. Most governments have not even tried. They have lived with double standards, engaged in insane nuclear arms races, lived under “nuclear umbrellas,” and continued to rely upon nuclear weapons against the security interests of their own people.

    It is up to each of us to play a role. What can we do? There is no panacea, no magic wand. Change requires recognizing that this is not someone else’s problem, but a shared problem of humanity. It requires rolling up our sleeves and becoming active.

    I have five suggestions for those who would like to contribute to ending the nuclear threat to humanity. First, become better informed. You can do this by visiting the website of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at www.wagingpeace.org as well as many other informative websites focused on nuclear disarmament. Second, speak out, wherever you are. You can raise these issues with your family, friends, and other people around you. Third, join an organization working to abolish nuclear weapons, and help it to become more successful. By becoming active in an organization working for nuclear disarmament you can help the outreach and effectiveness of the effort. Fourth, use your unique talents. Each of us has special talents that can help make a difference. Use them. Fifth, be persistent. This is a tough job requiring strength and persistence. Even if desired results don’t come about quickly, we must remain committed and not give up.

    By working for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons, you can be a force for saving the world. Being a nuclear weapons abolitionist will require all the courage and commitment of those who worked in the 19th century for the abolition of slavery. Abolishing slavery was the challenge of that time; abolishing nuclear weapons is the even more consequential challenge of our time.

    [Please note this related upcoming event: “The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons” Conference, San Francisco, September 8-9.]

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

  • Lecture at Princeton University

    Let me begin by saying how delighted I am to have been invited to give this address by a School named after Woodrow Wilson, the great pioneer of multilateralism and advocate of world peace, who argued, among other things, for agreed international limits on deadly weapons.

    Princeton is indissolubly linked with the memory of Albert Einstein and many other great scientists who played a role in making this country the first nuclear power. That makes it an especially appropriate setting for my address this evening, because my main theme is the danger of nuclear weapons, and the urgent need to confront that danger by preventing proliferation and promoting disarmament, both at once. I shall argue that these two objectives — disarmament and non-proliferation — are inextricably linked, and that to achieve progress on either front we must also advance on the other.

    Almost everyone in today’s world feels insecure, but not everyone feels insecure about the same thing. Different threats seem more urgent to people in different parts of the world.

    Probably the largest number would give priority to economic and social threats, including poverty, environmental degradation and infectious disease.

    Others might stress inter-State conflict; yet others internal conflict, including civil war. Many people – especially but not only in the developed world — would now put terrorism at the top of their list.

    In truth, all these threats are interconnected, and all cut across national frontiers. We need common global strategies to deal with all of them — and indeed, Governments are coming together to work out and implement such strategies, in the UN and elsewhere. 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.

    Why do I consider it the greatest danger? For three reasons:

    First, nuclear weapons present a unique existential threat to all humanity.

    Secondly, the nuclear non-proliferation regime now faces a major crisis of confidence. North Korea has withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), while India, Israel, and Pakistan have never joined it. There are, at least, serious questions about the nature of Iran’s nuclear programme. And this, in turn, raises questions about the legitimacy, and credibility, of the case-by-case approach to non-proliferation that the existing nuclear powers have adopted.

    Thirdly, the rise of terrorism, with the danger that nuclear weapons might be acquired by terrorists, greatly increases the danger that they will be used.

    Yet, despite the grave, all-encompassing nature of this threat, the Governments of the world are addressing it selectively, not comprehensively.

    In one way, that’s understandable. The very idea of global self-annihilation is unbearable to think about. But, that is no excuse. We must try to imagine the human and environmental consequences of a nuclear bomb exploding in one, or even in several, major world cities — or indeed of an all-out confrontation between two nuclear-armed States.

    In focusing on nuclear weapons, I am not seeking to minimize the problem of chemical and biological ones, which are also weapons of mass destruction, and are banned under international treaties. Indeed, perhaps the most important, under-addressed threat relating to terrorism — one which acutely requires new thinking — is the threat of terrorists using a biological weapon.

    But, nuclear weapons are the most dangerous. Even a single bomb can destroy an entire city, as we know from the terrible example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and today, there are bombs many times as powerful as those. These weapons pose a unique threat to humanity as a whole.

    Forty years ago, understanding that this danger must be avoided at all costs, nearly all States in the world came together and forged a grand bargain, embodied in the NPT.

    In essence, that treaty was a contract between the recognized nuclear-weapon States at that time and the rest of the international community. The nuclear-weapon States undertook to negotiate in good faith on nuclear disarmament, to prevent proliferation, and to facilitate the peaceful use of nuclear energy, while separately declaring that they would refrain from threatening non-nuclear-weapon States with nuclear weapons. In return, the rest committed themselves not to acquire or manufacture nuclear weapons, and to place all their nuclear activities under the verification of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Thus, the treaty was designed both to prevent proliferation and to advance disarmament, while assuring the right of all States, under specified conditions, to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

    From 1970 — when it entered into force — until quite recently, the NPT was widely seen as a cornerstone of global security. It had confounded the dire predictions of its critics. Nuclear weapons did not — and still have not — spread to dozens of States, as John F. Kennedy and others predicted in the 1960s. In fact, more States have given up their ambitions for nuclear weapons than have acquired them.

    And yet, in recent years, the NPT has come under withering criticism — because the international community has been unable to agree how to apply it to specific crises in South Asia, the Korean peninsula and the Middle East; and because a few States parties to the treaty are allegedly pursuing their own nuclear-weapons capabilities.

    Twice in 2005, Governments had a chance to strengthen the Treaty’s foundations — first at the Review conference in May, then at the World Summit in September. Both times they fai— essentially because they couldn’t agree whether non-proliferation or disarmament should come first.

    The advocates of “non-proliferation first” — mainly nuclear-weapon States and their supporters — believe the main danger arises not from nuclear weapons as such, but from the character of those who possess them, and therefore, from the spread of nuclear weapons to new States and to non-state actors (so called “horizontal proliferation”). The nuclear-weapon States say they have carried out significant disarmament since the end of the cold war, but that their responsibility for international peace and security requires them to maintain a nuclear deterrent.

    “Disarmament first” advocates, on the other hand, say that the world is most imperilled by existing nuclear arsenals and their continual improvement (so called “vertical proliferation”). Many non-nuclear-weapon States accuse the nuclear-weapon States of retreating from commitments they made in 1995 (when the NPT was extended indefinitely) and reiterated as recently as the year 2000. For these countries, the NPT “grand bargain” has become a swindle. They note that the UN Security Council has often described the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as a threat to international peace and security, but has never declared that nuclear weapons in and of themselves are such a threat. They see no serious movement towards nuclear disarmament, and claim that the lack of such movement presages a permanent “apartheid” between nuclear “haves” and “have-nots”.

    Both sides in this debate feel that the existence of four additional States with nuclear weapons, outside the NPT, serves only to sharpen their argument.

    The debate echoes a much older argument: are weapons a cause or a symptom of conflict? I believe both debates are sterile, counterproductive, and based on false dichotomies.

    Arms build-ups can give rise to threats leading to conflict; and political conflicts can motivate the acquisition of arms. Efforts are needed both to reduce arms and to reduce conflict. Likewise, efforts are needed to achieve both disarmament and non-proliferation.

    Yet, each side waits for the other to move. The result is that “mutually assured destruction” has been replaced by mutually assured paralysis. This sends a terrible signal of disunity and waning respect for the Treaty’s authority. It creates a vacuum that can be exploited.

    I said earlier this year that we are “sleepwalking towards disaster”. In truth, it is worse than that — we are asleep at the controls of a fast-moving aircraft. Unless we wake up and take control, the outcome is all too predictable.

    An aircraft, of course, can remain airborne only if both wings are in working order. We cannot choose between non-proliferation and disarmament. We must tackle both tasks with the urgency they demand.

    Allow me to offer my thoughts to each side in turn.

    To those who insist on disarmament first, I say this:

    — Proliferation is not a threat only, or even mainly, to those who already have nuclear weapons. The more fingers there are on nuclear triggers, and the more those fingers belong to leaders of unstable States — or, even worse, non-State actors — the greater the threat to all humankind.

    — Lack of progress on disarmament is no excuse for not addressing the dangers of proliferation. No State should imagine that, by pushing ahead with a nuclear-weapon programme, it can pose as a defender of the NPT; still less that it will persuade others to disarm.

    — I know some influential States, which themselves have scrupulously respected the Treaty, feel strongly that the nuclear-weapon States have not lived up to their disarmament obligations. But, they must be careful not to let their resentment put them on the side of the proliferators. They should state clearly that acquiring prohibited weapons never serves the cause of their elimination. Proliferation only makes disarmament even harder to achieve.

    — I urge all States to give credit where it is due. Acknowledge disarmament whenever it does occur. Applaud the moves which nuclear-weapon States have made, whether unilaterally or through negotiation, to reduce nuclear arsenals or prevent their expansion. Recognize that the nuclear-weapon States have virtually stopped producing new fissile material for weapons, and are maintaining moratoria on nuclear tests.

    — Likewise, support even small steps to contain proliferation, such as efforts to improve export controls on goods needed to make weapons of mass destruction, as mandated by Security Council resolution 1540.

    — And please support the efforts of the Director-General of the IAEA and others to find ways of guaranteeing that all States have access to fuel and services for their civilian nuclear programmes without spreading sensitive technology. Countries must be able to meet their growing energy needs through such programmes, but we cannot afford a world where more and more countries develop the most sensitive phases of the nuclear fuel cycle themselves.

    — Finally, do not encourage, or allow, any State to make its compliance with initiatives to eliminate nuclear weapons, or halt their proliferation, conditional on concessions from other States on other issues. The preservation of human life on this planet is too important to be used as a hostage.

    To those who insist on non-proliferation first, I say this:

    —True, there has been some progress on nuclear disarmament since the end of the cold war. Some States have removed many nuclear weapons from deployment, and eliminated whole classes of nuclear delivery systems. The US and Russia have agreed to limit the number of strategic nuclear weapons they deploy, and have removed non-strategic ones from ships and submarines; the US Congress refused to fund the so called “bunker-buster” bomb; most nuclear test sites have been closed; and there are national moratoria on nuclear tests, while three nuclear-weapon States — France, Russia and the UK — have ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

    — Yet, stockpiles remain alarmingly high: 27,000 nuclear weapons reportedly remain in service, of which about 12,000 are actively deployed.

    — Some States seem to believe they need fewer weapons, but smaller and more useable ones — and even to have embraced the notion of using such weapons in conflict. All of the NPT nuclear-weapon States are modernizing their nuclear arsenals or their delivery systems. They should not imagine that this will be accepted as compatible with the NPT. Everyone will see it for what it is: a euphemism for nuclear re-armament.

    — Nor is it clear how these States propose to deal with the four nuclear-weapon-capable States outside the NPT. They warn against a nuclear domino effect, if this or that country is allowed to acquire a nuclear capability, but they do not seem to know how to prevent it, or how to respond to it once it has happened. Surely they should at least consider attempting a “reverse domino effect”, in which systematic and sustained reductions in nuclear arsenals would devalue the currency of nuclear weapons, and encourage others to follow suit.

    — Instead, by clinging to and modernizing their own arsenals, even when there is no obvious threat to their national security that nuclear weapons could deter, nuclear-weapon States encourage others — particularly those that do face real threats in their own reg— to regard nuclear weapons as essential, both to their security and to their status. It would be much easier to confront proliferators, if the very existence of nuclear weapons were universally acknowledged as dangerous and ultimately illegitimate.

    — Similarly, States that wish to discourage others from undertaking nuclear or missile tests could argue their case much more convincingly if they themselves moved quickly to bring the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty into force, halt their own missile testing, and negotiate a robust multilateral instrument regulating missiles. Such steps would do more than anything else to advance the cause of non-proliferation.

    — Important Powers such as Argentina, Brazil, Germany and Japan have shown, by refusing to develop them, that nuclear weapons are not essential to either security or status. South Africa destroyed its arsenal and joined the NPT. Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan gave up nuclear weapons from the former Soviet nuclear arsenal. And Libya has abandoned its nuclear and chemical weapons programmes. The nuclear weapon States have applauded all these examples. They should follow them.

    — Finally, Governments and civil society in many countries are increasingly questioning the relevance of the cold war doctrine of nuclear deterrence — the rationale used by all States that possess nuclear weap— in an age of growing threats from non-State actors. Do we not need, instead, to develop agreed strategies for preventing proliferation?

    — For all these reasons, I call on all the States with nuclear weapons 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.

    In short, my friends, the only way forward is to make progress on both fronts — non-proliferation and disarmament — at once. And we will not achieve this unless at the same time we deal effectively with the threat of terrorism, as well as the threats, both real and rhetorical, which drive particular States or regimes to seek security, however misguidedly, by developing or acquiring nuclear weapons.

    It is a complex and daunting task, which calls for leadership, for the establishment of trust, for dialogue and negotiation. But first of all, we need a renewed debate, which must be inclusive, must respect the norms of international negotiations, and must reaffirm the multilateral approach — Woodrow Wilson’s approach, firmly grounded in international institutions, treaties, rules, and norms of appropriate behaviour.

    Let me conclude by appealing to young people everywhere, since there are — I am glad to see — so many of them here today.

    My dear young friends, you are already admirably engaged in the struggle for global development, for human rights and to protect the environment. Please bring your energy and imagination to this debate. 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.

     

    Kofi A. Annan is Secretary General of the United Nations.

  • Nuclear Weapons: The Narrowing North-South Divide

    “Nuclear bombs.violate everything that is humane; they alter the meaning of life. Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate the men who use nuclear weapons to blackmail the entire human race?” — Arundhati Roy

    David KriegerNorth and South are approximations, reflecting both a geographic and economic divide. There is no monolithic North, nor South. There is South within North and North within South, inasmuch as in the North there exists much poverty and in the South there is a stratum enjoying great wealth in most societies. In general, though, the North tends toward industrialization, wealth, dominance and exploitation, while the South, which has a long history of domination by the North in colonial and post-colonial times, tends toward poverty, including extreme and sometimes devastating poverty. Within both South and North powerful subcultures of militarism and extremist violence have emerged that, when linked to nuclear weapons, threaten cities, countries, civilization and the future of life.

    Nuclear weapons have been primarily developed and brandished by the North, and used to threaten other countries, North and South. The South, which for the most part has lacked the technology to develop nuclear weapons, has begun to cross this technological threshold and join the North in obtaining these weapons of mass annihilation. The original nuclear weapons states – the US, Soviet Union, UK, France and China – were largely of the dominant North, although the Soviet Union had major areas of poverty and China, although geographically in the North was the exception, reflecting the poverty of the South after having been subjected to humiliating colonial domination and exploitation.

    Israel, an outpost of the North surrounded by oil-rich but underdeveloped countries of the South, surreptitiously developed a nuclear arsenal. India and Pakistan, coming from a background of poverty and colonial domination, developed nuclear arsenals after it became clear that the other nuclear weapons states were intent upon indefinitely maintaining their nuclear arsenals rather than fulfilling their obligations for nuclear disarmament. Both countries were clearly on the Southern side of the economic and colonial divide, as was the final nuclear weapons state, North Korea, which is thought to have developed a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.

    The world is at a critical nuclear crossroads. In one direction lies an increasing number of nuclear weapons states and nuclear-armed terrorist organizations, a world of unfathomable danger. In the other direction, lies a nuclear weapons-free world. It is the responsibility of those of us alive today on our planet to choose in which direction we shall travel. We do not have the option of standing still, with North and South, rich and poor, dominant and exploited frozen in time and inequity. Terrorism is inherent in the possession and implicit threat of use of nuclear weapons by any country. Such state terrorism creates the possibility that extremist non-state actors, who can neither be located nor deterred, will gain possession of these weapons or the materials to make them and threaten or use nuclear weapons against even the most powerful, nuclear-armed countries.

    Hiroshima and Nagasaki as Metaphor

    The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a metaphor for the North-South divide on nuclear weapons. The United States viewed the explosions from above. In fact, the US sent a camera crew in a separate airplane to record from the air the bombing of Hiroshima. In considering the bombings, the United States focused on technological achievement, the efficiency and power of the bomb, and bringing the war to a rapid conclusion. US politicians and opinion leaders wrapped the bomb in ribbons of mythic goodness and Americans today continue, to their own peril, to treat the bomb as a historically favorable outcome of fortune, scientific skill and determination to prevail. US President Harry Truman invoked God in his first public comment on the bomb: “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” In the view of Truman and many Americans, God had delivered to the Americans a war-winning tool of dominance, perhaps absolute dominance. This was and remains the view of the North, the rich, powerful, dominant and aloof.

    The Japanese, despite the closer fit of the country with the North than the South, viewed the bomb from the uncomfortable position of being beneath it and victimized by the full fury of its force. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over 210,000 men, women and children were killed instantly or given short-term death sentences due to the explosive force of the bombs, the fires that were set in motion by the bombs and the deadly radiation released by the bombs. The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked without warning and the vast majority of those who perished in those destroyed cities were civilians. For more than 60 years the survivors of the atomic bombings have fought for the elimination of nuclear weapons. The memorial cenotaph at Hiroshima carries these words: “Never Again! We shall not repeat the evil.” Those who survived the bombings, the hibakusha, reflect the view of the South, the poor, powerless, dominated and exploited.

    The Metaphor of Master and Slave

    Another metaphor that is apt is that of master and slave. If nuclear weapons are instruments of absolute dominance, they create a master-slave relationship. The master doesn’t need to use the bomb to exercise his power. He only needs to make known his willingness to do so. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki etched into the minds of people everywhere the fact that the US was willing to use the bomb, should circumstances dictate. The US had proven its commitment to power by its ruthless destruction of undefended cities. It sent a message regarding its will to dominance of extraordinary clarity, intended primarily to the Soviet Union, but to people everywhere as well.

    Other states, primarily in the North, followed the US and developed their own nuclear arsenals: first, the Soviet Union, then the UK, France and China. These five states, the victors in World War II and the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, became the first five nuclear weapons states. They developed policies of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which they believed held each other’s nuclear arsenals in check. In their dangerous nuclear posturing, they placed at risk not only their own citizens but the future of life on the planet. They called this posturing deterrence, but more objectively it might have been called state-threatened nuclear terrorism.

    In every aspect of pursuing and perfecting nuclear annihilation, the nuclear weapons states have exploited the South, including the pockets of poverty within their own borders. It has been the poor and disempowered, often indigenous peoples, of the South who have paid the heaviest price in health and future habitability of their lands for the mining of uranium, the atmospheric and underground testing of nuclear weapons, and the dumping of the radioactive wastes in their backyards.

    But by the mid-1960s the nuclear weapons states, which continued to increase the size and power of their own arsenals, became worried that the world would become far more dangerous if nuclear arms spread to other countries, and particularly to countries of the South. They believed that the further proliferation of nuclear weapons would disrupt the patterns of dominance in the post-colonial relationship between the North and South that was developing with the collapse of overt colonialism.

    The Two-Tier Structure of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

    Thus, it was the US, UK and USSR that proposed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in the mid-1960s. By 1968, the treaty was ready for signatures and the three initiating nuclear weapons states were eager to sign. The treaty required the non-nuclear weapons states to agree not to acquire nuclear weapons, and the nuclear weapons states to agree not to provide nuclear weapons or the materials to make them to the non-nuclear weapons states. But it went further. To sweeten the deal for the non-nuclear weapons states, the nuclear weapons states agreed in Article IV to assist them with the “peaceful” uses of nuclear technology; and also agreed in Article VI to “good faith” negotiations to achieve nuclear disarmament.

    When the Non-Proliferation Treaty entered into force in 1970, the non-nuclear weapons states had every reason to believe that the treaty would lead to nuclear disarmament on the part of the nuclear weapons states, thus leveling the playing field, rather than creating a permanent two-tier structure of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots,” a structure that would assure the dominance of the North. As it turned out, the nuclear weapons states did not fulfill their nuclear disarmament obligations under the treaty, and continued to build up their nuclear arsenals for two more decades before making any serious attempts to reduce them in the aftermath of the Cold War.

    Many leaders in the South recognized the spiritual bankruptcy and extreme dangers of nuclear weapons, as well as the threats to humanity posed by the Cold War nuclear arms race. States of the South, for the most part, were content to forego nuclear weapons in the interests of other forms of security. Nearly all states of the South became parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and most of the states in the Southern hemisphere entered into agreements to create regional Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones in Latin America and the Caribbean; the South Pacific; Southeast Asia; and Africa. Nearly the whole of the Southern hemisphere is now part of the series of Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones that are committed to keeping nuclear weapons out of their regions. While this was going on, the nuclear weapons states turned a blind eye or, in some cases worse, assisted Israel in developing a nuclear arsenal.

    By the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a review conference of the parties took place at five year intervals and a Review and Extension Conference was scheduled for 25 years after the treaty’s entry into force. The Review and Extension Conference took place in 1995 at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The nuclear weapons states, led by the United States, pushed for an indefinite extension of the treaty to make it permanent. A few courageous states of the South and many civil society organizations took issue with this position on the grounds that the nuclear weapons states had not fulfilled their obligations for good faith negotiations to achieve nuclear disarmament. Under such circumstances, they argued, an indefinite extension would be akin to giving these states a blank check to continue with business as usual. The opponents of an indefinite extension pressed for extensions for periods of years, in which the nuclear weapons states would be required to make progress toward achieving the goal of nuclear disarmament.

    The Indefinite Extension of the Treaty

    At the end of the 1995 Review and Extension Conference, the nuclear weapons states prevailed and the treaty was extended indefinitely. The nuclear weapons states reaffirmed their Article VI commitment “to pursue good faith negotiations of effective measures relating to nuclear disarmament.” They also promised “determined pursuit.of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goals of eliminating those weapons.” But their pursuit of these goals has been far less than “determined.”

    What the opponents of the indefinite extension feared would happen, has indeed transpired. In the light of little tangible progress on nuclear disarmament or sincerity on the part of the nuclear weapons states, India and Pakistan both tested nuclear weapons in 1998, announcing that they would not live in a world of “nuclear apartheid.” India, a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, had tested what it called a “peaceful” nuclear device in 1974. In 1998, India clearly crossed the line into the status of nuclear weapons state. There was cheering in the streets of India, and this would be matched by the wild excitement demonstrated in the streets of Pakistan following their nuclear tests. A very dangerous region of repeated crises and violence over the disputed territory of Kashmir had now taken on a nuclear dimension, one with the possibility of taking tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, of innocent lives.

    In the year 2000, the parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty met for their sixth five-year review conference and the first since the 1995 Review and Extension Conference. After much jockeying for position, the parties to the treaty agreed unanimously to 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament. These steps included ratification of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, preserving and strengthening the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and negotiations for a treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapons states committed to an “unequivocal undertaking.to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals, leading to nuclear disarmament.” But despite the agreement of the nuclear weapons states to these and other steps for nuclear disarmament, they have accomplished almost nothing to demonstrate that their words were anything more than additional empty promises.

    At the seventh Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in the year 2005, there was virtually no progress. The delegates spent the first ten days of the meetings trying to reach agreement on an agenda, and then could only take note of the failure to make progress on any of the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament. Much of this failure can be attributed to a single incompetent leader in the North, George W. Bush, who has promoted new uses for nuclear weapons use while expressing implacable hostility to international law in all its forms.

    The Tragic Policies of George W. Bush

    The policies of George W. Bush have opened the door to preemptive or preventive uses of nuclear weapons, and have made clear that under his leadership US nuclear policy contemplates the use of nuclear weapons as opposed to a more limited policy of deterrence. Mr. Bush has opposed ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and encouraged funding to reduce the time needed to make the Nevada Test Site ready for testing from three years to about 18 months. Bush also withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, despite protests from both Russia and China. In addition, Bush pushed the Russians into signing the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) in 2002, a treaty which provides for reducing the number of actively deployed strategic nuclear weapons on each side from about 6,000 to between 1,700 and 2,200 by December 31, 2012. Among the many problems with this treaty are that it has no provisions for verification or irreversibility, no timetable other than the end date, and no means to continue the treaty beyond 2012, when both sides could immediately and dramatically expand their nuclear arsenals.

    In his first State of the Union speech, Mr. Bush named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” Despite the fact that the three countries formed no axis, Bush lumped them together and branded them as evil. Once a country has been tarred as evil, it is far easier to commit atrocities against its people, as Mr. Bush has demonstrated in the aggressive war he has pursued against Iraq. North Korea has withdrawn from the Non-Proliferation Treaty in order to pursue a nuclear weapons program. Iran, as yet still a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has been pursuing uranium enrichment, a potential step toward the development of nuclear weapons, but one that has been allowed under Article IV of the treaty and has been exercised by other non-nuclear weapons states parties to the treaty.

    In these early years of the 21st century, the North continues to find uses for nuclear weapons that threaten the countries of the South. What the countries of the North, perhaps particularly the United States, don’t seem to grasp is that nuclear weapons are likely to be their undoing in a time of non-state extremism. While it may be possible to deter another country from using nuclear weapons (this is arguably the principal reason that North Korea and Iran would pursue nuclear arsenals), it is impossible to deter a non-state terrorist organization from using nuclear weapons. Nuclear deterrence has its limits, and one clear limit is that a country cannot threaten or retaliate against organizations that cannot be located or whose members are suicidal. The longer the US and other nuclear weapons powers continue to rely upon nuclear weapons for their security, the greater the likelihood that these weapons will find their way into the hands of terrorist organizations intent on inflicting damage on the nuclear weapons states.

    Need for New Leadership

    Mr. Bush has embarked upon what appears to be a highly unsuccessful “Global War on Terrorism,” a war that seems to be stimulating and breeding terrorism rather than eradicating it. It is a war pitting extremists against extremists, made more dangerous by the possibility of nuclear weapons being used by the North on countries of the South, or by terrorist organizations obtaining nuclear weapons and using them in the form of a nuclear 9/11. The possibility of nuclear weapons again being used in war has perhaps not been greater since their last use at Nagasaki. The clash of fundamentalists has pushed the door to nuclear annihilation open wider than ever. Common sense and reasonable concerns for security suggest that it is time to close that door by eliminating nuclear arsenals. The leadership to do this must come from the North, particularly from the US and Russia, the most dominant of the nuclear weapons states, which together possess over 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.

    Unfortunately, the leaders of the nuclear weapons states don’t appear to recognize the imperative to end the nuclear weapons era, and continue to cling to their nuclear arms as instruments of dominance. Einstein recognized early in the Nuclear Age that these new weapons required a change in thinking. He famously said, “The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” That is the nature of our drift, toward catastrophe, but a catastrophe in which the likelihood of the dominant powers becoming the victims is as great as their further victimization and dominance of the South. Nuclear weapons give more power to the relatively weak than they do to the powerful. With nuclear weapons, the weak can destroy the powerful. The powerful, on the other hand, would certainly destroy their own souls by attacking the weak with nuclear weapons. In the end, nuclear weapons are equalizers and equal opportunity destroyers.

    The question that the North needs to consider seriously is whether it wishes a world with many nuclear powers, including non-state actors, or a world with no nuclear weapons. What exists between these poles, including the current nuclear status quo, is not sustainable. It must tip in one direction or the other. If it tips toward many nuclear weapons powers, the price will be widespread annihilation. If it tips in the direction of eliminating nuclear weapons, humanity may save itself from destruction by its most powerful and cowardly tools of warfare.

    In the Nuclear Age, the South has attempted to pull itself up by its bootstraps, while the North has wasted huge resources on the development of its weaponry in general and on its nuclear weaponry in particular. The United States alone has spent over $6 trillion on its nuclear arsenal and its delivery systems since the beginning of the Nuclear Age. It is worth contemplating how our world might have been different if these resources had been used instead to eradicate poverty and disease and provide education and hope in the far corners of the world. Would the North still be resented, as it is now, by the politically aware poor and dispossessed?

    In analyzing the North-South divide in nuclear weaponry, one realizes that this divide has benefited neither the North nor the South, and is bound to end in disaster for all. But the same is true of the North-South divide absent nuclear weapons. A relationship of domination, enforced by any means – military, economic or political – is not sustainable. This divide is perhaps most dangerous when it could ignite a nuclear conflagration, but it is still dangerous when the divide breeds terrorism in response to structural violence. It is not only the nuclear divide that must be ended by the elimination of nuclear weapons, but the greater divide between the North and South that must be closed. The world cannot continue indefinitely half-slave and half-free, half mired in poverty and half indulged in abundance. Resources are not limitless and modern communications make each half aware of the status of the other half.

    The Narrowing Nuclear Divide

    Nuclear weapons, the ultimate weapon of cowardice, may be seen as a symbol of what separates rather than what unites the world. Nuclear weapons turn the North into cowards and bullies and the South into victims that may most effectively find their heroism and personhood in acts of resistance. Ending the nuclear threat by eliminating nuclear weapons will lead to finding more equitable and decent ways of settling differences between states of the North and South, ways that will in the end benefit both sides of this divide.

    In 1955, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and nine other distinguished scientists issued an appeal, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. This appeal concluded with these thoughts: “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”

    More than fifty years later, the warning in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto rings true. Nuclear weapons confront humankind with the risk of universal death. We are challenged, North and South alike, to end this risk to humanity and to the human future. To effectively end this risk will require that peoples of North and South to join hands and form a bond rooted in their common humanity and their common concern with protecting and passing on the planet and all its natural and man-made treasures in tact to future generations.

    The starting point for this effort, the elimination of nuclear weapons, may seem to some like a sacrifice on the part of the nuclear weapons states, but will, in fact, assure their own security as well and liberate their people from the soul-crushing burden of being complicit in threatening the massive annihilation of innocent people. The greatest challenge of our time, for North and South alike, is to eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate humankind and to redirect the resources being spent to create, maintain and improve these weapons to programs that will uphold human dignity by assuring that basic needs are met and education provided for all of the world’s people.

    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.
  • Troubling Questions About Missile Defense

    Troubling Questions About Missile Defense

    On September 1, 2006, the US held a missile defense test, which has been widely heralded by the government as a “success.” The $80 million test involved a dummy warhead launched from Kodiak Island in Alaska, which was intercepted and destroyed by an interceptor missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

    Lt. General Henry Obering III, the director of the Missile Defense Agency, was rhapsodic in his praise for the test: “I don’t want to ask the North Koreans to launch against us – that would be a realistic end-to-end test. Short of that, this is about as good as it gets.”

    For the defense contractors profiting from the missile defense system, such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, this must be about as good as it gets. But the rest of the American public, who might end up as victims of a nuclear attack and who have already paid over $100 billion for the development of missile defenses, are entitled to a lot more clarity on just how realistic such a test is. While the interceptor missile did destroy the dummy warhead, there are many questions worth asking.

    First, if the system works so well, why did it have to be postponed due to bad weather the previous day? Will the system work only in good weather? Will cloud cover make the system ineffective?

    Second, did the Missile Defense Agency include a homing device in the dummy warhead, as it has frequently done in the past, to help guide the interceptor missile to its target? Homing devices in the target dummy warheads have made the missile defense tests seem a lot more successful than they really are, and it is highly unlikely that a potential enemy would want to help our missile defense system by placing homing devices in their warheads.

    Third, would the system be able to work against a sophisticated attacking missile that was able to take evasive action or against an attack by multiple missiles? There is also the question of whether the system would be able to find the real warheads hidden in a volley of decoys.

    After the recent test, General Obering commented, “I feel a lot safer and sleep a lot better at night.” While the general may feel safer, I doubt that the American people should feel safer until these questions are answered to their satisfaction.

    If the rest of us want to join General Obering in feeling safer and sleeping better at night, perhaps we should encourage our government leaders to try diplomacy aimed at building friendships and partnerships with potential enemies, rather than continuing to base our security and our future on a costly and ineffectual missile defense system that is likely to fail under real world conditions. Another cost effective way of improving our security would be to encourage our top officials to show some actual leadership in achieving the obligations for nuclear disarmament that are set forth in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    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.

  • Hiroshima Day Message

    Hiroshima Day Message

    Dear Friends,

    As I write, wars are raging in Lebanon and in Iraq. Innocent people are being injured and killed. The war machines of powerful nations are demonstrating yet again that both munitions and life are expendable on the altar of war. The leaders, of course, are far from the fronts where the battles are being fought.

    These wars are being waged in the 61st year of the Nuclear Age, an age in which our technologies have become capable of destroying humankind and most forms of life on our planet. We should never lose sight of the fact that nuclear weapons are always available to be used by those who possess them.

    Nuclear weapons are illegal and immoral weapons. They are also anti-democratic, anti-human, anti-life and anti-environment. These weapons reflect a pronounced form of cowardice, being long-distance killing devices that threaten indiscriminate mass murder of civilians and combatants, men and women, infants and the elderly.

    There can be no honor in producing, possessing, testing, threatening or using nuclear weapons. Those who take part in nuclear weapons programs, and gain livelihood from them, are worse than war profiteers, risking the destruction of humanity for personal gain.

    We are challenged as never before in human history. Our responsibility as citizens of Earth in the beginning of the 21st century is to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity and to end war as a social institution. Unfortunately, we are far from those twin goals so critical to the future of life on earth.

    The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the ambassadors and prophets of the Nuclear Age. They have seen atomic destruction at close hand. Their testimonies are sober reflections on the unleashed power of the atom. They speak out so that their past will not become our future.

    But their testimony is not enough. We must act as though the very future of humanity depended upon our success in eliminating nuclear weapons and war. The stakes are very high and the prospects dim, but with courage and persistence we may succeed. And it is that flicker of hope in a dark time that should inspire us to summon the courage to change the world.

     

    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.
  • Global Hiroshima

    Global Hiroshima

    Hiroshima was destroyed by a single atomic weapon, giving rise to the Nuclear Age, an era characterized by humankind living precariously with weapons capable of destroying the human species. Should the incredible dangers of nuclear weapons not have been immediately apparent from the destruction of Hiroshima and, three days later, of Nagasaki, throughout the Nuclear Age there have been repeated warnings of their unprecedented capacity for destruction. These warnings have come from scientists, military leaders, religious leaders and, occasionally, political leaders. Mostly, these warnings have fallen on deaf ears.

    Sixty-one years after the destruction of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and 15 years after the ending of the Cold War, there are still some 27,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Over 95 percent of these are in the arsenals of the US and Russia, with some 4,000 of these kept on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired in moments. In addition, seven other countries now possess nuclear weapons: UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. All of the nuclear weapons states continue to improve and test missile delivery systems for their nuclear warheads.

    Throughout the Nuclear Age there have been accidents, miscalculations and near inadvertent nuclear wars. The closest we may have come to nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, tense days in which decision makers in the US and USSR struggled to find a way through the crisis without an escalation into nuclear exchange. In the 44 years since that crisis, despite other close calls, humankind collectively has relaxed and let down its guard against the dangers these weapons pose to all.

    It has been widely accepted that nuclear weapons are illegal and immoral because they are weapons of mass murder that do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Ten years ago, the International Court of Justice concluded that there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects. Progress toward this goal has not been reassuring. No such negotiations are currently in progress. Most political leaders in the US are more concerned with the reliability of nuclear weapons than with finding a way to eliminate them.

    To safely navigate the shoals of the Nuclear Age, three key elements are needed: leadership, a plan, and political will. Only one country currently has the capacity to provide this leadership and that is the US. A spark of hope that such leadership might exist briefly flared during the Reagan presidency when Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev came close to an agreement on nuclear disarmament at their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. Their good intentions faltered on the divisive issue of missile defenses. Since then, no high-ranking American political leader, including members of the Senate, has spoken out for a world free of nuclear weapons. President Bush’s leadership on the issue of nuclear disarmament has been non-existent and, in fact, has set up obstacles to achieving this goal.

    The years pass with the threat of nuclear Armageddon hanging over us, and we wait, seemingly in vain, for political leaders to emerge who are willing to make the abolition of nuclear weapons a high priority on the political agenda. We continue to wait for political leaders who will challenge the nuclear double standards, which assume that some countries can maintain nuclear weapons in perpetuity while other countries must be forever content to forego these weapons.

    We wait for political leaders who will advance a viable plan for the phased elimination of nuclear weapons. Civil society has been able to devise a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention, a draft treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons, so certainly government leaders should be able to do so as well.

    After 61 years of the Nuclear Age, it seems clear that the political leaders needed to achieve a nuclear weapons-free world are unlikely to emerge from existing political systems and structures. These leaders will emerge only if ordinary people demand such leadership. The leaders will have to be led by the people toward assuring a future free of nuclear threat. Absent a sustained surge of political pressure from below, humanity will continue to drift toward increased nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and, finally, nuclear annihilation. The choice remains ours: a future free of nuclear threat or a global Hiroshima. The stakes could not be higher.

    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.