Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear weapons

  • The Case for a Group Nobel Peace Prize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s Global Survivors

    This article was originally published on the blog of Akio Matsumura.


    The survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki–a group that represents not just Japan but many nations–carry memories invaluable to bridging the gap between violence and peace.  Their stories as the sole witnesses and survivors of nuclear weapons used as an act of war are the most powerful deterrent to future nuclear war.  There is not much time to carry their message forward; the bombings were many decades ago. The group and its message are fading.


    Historically, the Nobel Peace Prize has only been awarded to an institution or an individual, precluding groups from winning the Peace Prize. The Nobel Peace Committee should adjust its policies and bring renewed attention to the atrocities of nuclear weapons by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s global survivors.    


    The Grave Issue of Nuclear Security


    You wouldn’t have to be a betting man to say that nuclear security has been synonymous with international security for the past seven decades.  Today, other pressing concerns have crowded the top of the agenda, but nuclear security holds its weight among them.  The US Congress just passed the New START agreement to reduce nuclear stockpiles.  The international community is concerned with developments of programs and testing in several countries, including Iran and North Korea.  And the threat of proliferation among terrorists, especially in Pakistan, has the United States and other governments in panic.  Much of the world’s violent conflict directly relates to the perception of nuclear instability in South Asia and the Middle East.  While there are many safeguards in place to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation or attack, such an important issue deserves to be viewed from several perspectives.


    I am Japanese, and the two atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—on August 6 and 9, 1945—have played a special role in my life.  I have spent much time investigating the horrific disaster, from watching documentary films of survivor stories and political movements against the atomic bomb to talking with survivors, politicians, and religious figures.


    Piecing the Puzzle Together


    Such a polarizing global event has many facets, and to gain a full perspective one must be able to see them all.  Because I worked at the UN and other international organizations for three decades, I was able to hear another side—the perspectives of those who suffered Japanese military aggression in China, Korea, the Philippines, and Dutch-Indonesians.


    Just as important a perspective came from the Americans who believe that dropping the atom bombs, while tragic, ended the war early and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.


    To be sure, the American use of the atom bomb in 1945 against the Japanese was terrible. Tens of thousands died instantly upon explosion, and many more died from radiation in the ensuing years.  The cities were razed.  But the memory has taken an enormous toll on the survivors, both the victims and the assailants.  How does one rebuild a country and life after such devastation?


    What about those who were in Hiroshima or Nagasaki in early August 1945 and managed to survive the explosions? Surely those who had lived through such carnage were unforgiving and resentful.  Understandably, many are.   But I was convinced that there was a different story.  I asked Mr. Tadayuki Takeda, a Hiroshima native and a friend from university, to help me find a new story: was there a victim who could transform that violent act into a promotion of peace?


    A Fresh Perspective


    In December 2006 I flew to Hiroshima to meet with Mr. Yuuki Yoshida, a victim of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. His story is incredible, but his outlook is more so.  Mr. Yoshida’s duty as a survivor, in his words, is to share his story and instill the great fear that nuclear weapons deserve.  His goal is to make sure the disaster of August 1945, the use of atomic or nuclear weapons, never occurs again. His message, along with those of the other remaining survivors, is invaluable for this purpose.
    Mr. Yoshida, who is 79 years old and has been crippled by Polio since birth, miraculously escaped death when the atomic bomb exploded over the city of Hiroshima.  His younger brother died two weeks later, and his eldest sister narrowly survived after undergoing more than a dozen operations.  She gave birth to a son after fifteen years despite strong worries about radiation.  (Her son, Mr. Kazufumi Yamashita, studied in Berlin under the guidance of the famous conductor Mr. Herbert von Karajan and has become one of the most popular conductors in Japan.)


    Mr. Yoshida and his family are Japanese but have a surprising background.  Mr. Yoshida’s mother was American.  Born in Hawaii, she moved to Hiroshima before World War II and gave birth to her children there.  In 2008 Mr. Yoshida moved to Luzon, Philippines, to honor those who died there at the hands of the Japanese military.


    Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s Global Survivors


    It had always been my impression that the victims of the atomic bombs were Japanese. But, after hearing of Mr. Yoshida’s American mother, I have since learned that the United States didn’t just bomb the Japanese in August 1945, but also citizens of China, Korea, the United States, the Philippines, the Netherlands, and Brazil—perhaps even many other countries.  There were survivors from all of these nations as well.  I had completely missed this perspective.  Survivors from all countries are carrying forth their story to deter future nuclear disasters.  This global memory is a bridge from suffering to peace that we cannot lose.


    When I learned of the survivors from across the world, I thought perhaps there were other nuclear cases I should consider.  Were there other atomic weapons survivors to be included this message? How do victims of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, and other nuclear energy accidents, fit in with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims?  What about the victims of nuclear bomb tests in Nevada, the Pacific Islands, and other countries?


    In 2007 I visited Moscow to attend a conference chaired by my old friend, Dr. Evgeny Velikhov, former vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and oversaw the cleanup of the Chernobyl disaster.


    He made it very clear to me that Chernobyl was caused by human error.  An accident from the use of nuclear energy is tragic, but very different from the malicious and purposeful destruction of two cities.  He also told me that, although there were many victims of the bomb tests—especially many indigenous people in Nevada—they were not killed in an act of war, so their situation is not directly comparable to that of the survivors in Japan.


    Carrying Their Message Forward with the Nobel Peace Prize


    All survivors from so many nations have suffered so much and yet have demonstrated to society that we should provide a peaceful life for our children without hateful attitudes. The survivors are getting old and we could not have learned the valuable lessons they share if they had not continued to live or if they did not make such extraordinary efforts to live longer in order to pass their message on to us. I fear that they have little time left with us to continue sharing their message, and that we should work now to make sure it is known as widely as possible.


    How can we recognize their lofty mission and express our gratitude for their efforts to bridge hatred and create a peace that has its foundation in the non-use of nuclear weapons?


    Time Magazine named “YOU” as 2006’s Person of the Year.  What a powerful message. We each have the power to shape world.   If all of the atomic bomb survivors were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as a group, the impact of their message would reach new heights and the Committee would establish a new precedent in who—a group, not just an individual or institution—could receive the prize. And what better way to honor Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s global survivors’ great push for peace while bringing a powerful but fading message to the forefront of public consciousness?


    A copy of Nobel Peace Prize award and its citation would be presented to each survivor by governors or mayors in countries of Japan, America, China, Korea, Philippines, Netherlands, Brazil and any other countries with survivors. I have no doubt that such an occasion would promote a position that is against nuclear weapons in a non-political manner and do much for reducing violence and the serious nuclear threat we face.


    The epitaph carved into the stone coffin at the Hiroshima City Peace Memorial reads:


            “Let all souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evils.”


    We the world have a moral obligation to pass the torch of positive force on to the next generations so that they may partake in our wisdom, not just our mistakes.  The survivors and victims of the atomic bombs have sacrificed much to pass on this torch.  By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to all of the atomic bombs’ survivors–a group from many nations–the Nobel Peace Committee would honor a generation devoted to creating peace rather than resenting harm, as well as underscore its commitment to stopping these evils from reoccurring.


    Response from Bill Wickersham


    I have recently read your very compelling article “The Powerful and Fading Message of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s Global Survivors:  The Case for a Group Nobel Prize.” As a long time professor of peace studies, and one who has promoted nuclear disarmament for almost 50 years, I think your blog and Nobel Peace Prize campaign are very critical elements for the promotion of a worldwide movement for the abolition of nuclear weapons from Planet Earth.


    Over the years, my sub-specialty in educational psychology and peace studies has been the problem of social and psychological obstacles which hinder personal, group, national and international efforts to mobilize public demand for the elimination of the omnicidal threat.  Unfortunately, those obstacles, including ignorance, denial and apathy, have blocked most such mobilization, with the possible exception of the worldwide ” Nuclear Freeze ” movement of the 1980s, which was aimed more at arms control than truly deep cuts and abolition of nuclear weapons.


    Historically, hundreds of fine non-governmental organizations have provided excellent research, information and program/action recommendations aimed at citizen involvement on behalf of nuclear disarmament.  In so doing, the NGOs have provided essential data for the “head” but, in large measure, have failed to truly reach the “heart”  of their audiences in a way that strongly moves people to action.


    One major exception to this failing was the project initiated by my former boss, noted editor and peace advocate, the late Norman Cousins, who in 1955, brought 25 young female Japanese A-bomb survivors to the United States for plastic surgery, other medical treatment, and meetings with prominent U.S. leaders and other U.S. citizens.  The medical care was donated by New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, and involved 125 operations on the women, rebuilding lips, noses, hands, and eyelids, thus allowing them a promising future. Other expenses were covered by the Quakers and other donors.  This project was important for two reasons.  It was a fine example of human reconciliation, and it also helped many Americans to concretely FEEL and understand the real human price of nuclear war.  The problem was no longer an abstraction for the Americans who met with, and interacted with the young Japanese women.  Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre has noted that the biggest crime of our time is to make that which is concrete into something that is abstract. And, of course, this is a major roadblock of the whole issue of nuclear extinction without representation.  It is the ultimate abstraction for many people.  Norman’s project overcame this obstacle, and for a brief period, his project stimulated several U.S. NGOs to step up their organizing efforts for nuclear disarmament.  It is unfortunate that he did not have a blog such as yours to reach the hearts of people everywhere.


    In the past few years, our Missouri University Nuclear Disarmament Education Team (MUNDET), other elements of our peace studies program and our Mid-Missouri chapter of Veterans for Peace, have used films and photographic exhibits of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to reach the emotional core of our students, civic and faith groups, and other audiences.  We have found this approach to be very effective in terms of attitude change on the part of most participants.  We, like you, have steered clear of the U.S assailant/Japanese victim theme and “blame game” approach, and have instead stressed the incredible danger and insanity of the nuclear deterrence myth.


    Children and adults around the world are frequently taught that we must learn the lessons of history so we will not repeat the repeat the mistakes of the past.  This is precisely the approach you are so skillfully offering with your very attractive website, blog and carefully crafted campaign for the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, including several from countries other than Japan who were residents in those cities at the time of the atomic bombings. Their history and voices of reconciliation are truly the most important messages required by the human species if it is to survive the nuclear madness. Consequently, that history and their voices must not be allowed to fade away.


    It is my sincere hope that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee will accept your proposal for a group prize arrangement for the A-bomb survivors.  I believe such an arrangement could be a triggering mechanism for widespread mobilization of citizens everywhere on behalf of nuclear weapons abolition.  If there is any way that I and our MUNDET team may be of assistance in your campaign,  please let me know.

  • The Ultimate Weapon of Terrorism

    Nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapon of terrorism, whether in the hands of a terrorist organization or those of the leader of a country.  They are weapons of mass annihilation that kill indiscriminately – men, women and children.  Most people fear the possibility of these weapons falling into the hands of terrorist organizations, but never stop to consider that in any hands they are terrorist weapons. 


    Given the terrorist nature of nuclear weapons and their capacity to destroy civilization, what makes them acceptable to so many people?  Or, at a minimum, what makes so many people complacent in the face of nuclear threats?  These are questions I have grappled with for many decades.  


    The acceptability of nuclear weapons is rooted in the theory of nuclear deterrence, which its proponents argue has kept and will keep the peace.  This theory is based upon many assumptions concerning human behavior.  For example, it assumes the rationality of political and military leaders.  It seems quite evident that not all leaders behave rationally at all times and under all circumstances.  The theory requires clear communications and the threat to use nuclear weapons in retaliation must be believed by opposing leaders, but as we know communications are not always clear and misperceptions may inform beliefs.


    There is a “madman” theory of nuclear deterrence.  It posits that to be truly believable, the leader of a nuclear armed state must exhibit behavior that appears sufficiently insane to lead opposing leaders to believe that he would actually use the weapons.  Thus, insanity, or at least the impression of it, is built into the system.  At a systems level, can anyone doubt that the reciprocal threats of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) were truly mad, as in insane?


    Another aspect of deterrence theory is that it requires a territory against which to retaliate.  Thus, the theory is not valid in relation to a non-state terrorist organization.  If a country has no place to retaliate, there can be no nuclear deterrence.  If a terrorist organization acquires a nuclear weapon, it will not be deterred by threat of nuclear retaliation.  This places a fuse on the nuclear threat, and means that there must be zero tolerance for a non-state terrorist organization to acquire a nuclear capability.


    There should also be zero tolerance for states to possess nuclear weapons.  I am not limiting this observation to states that seek to develop nuclear arsenals.  I mean all states and, most importantly, those already in possession of nuclear weapons.  Current nuclear arsenals may be used by accident, miscalculation or intention.  And so long as some states possess nuclear weapons and base their security upon them, there will be an incentive for nuclear proliferation.


    Widespread nuclear complacency is difficult to understand.  Most people are aware of the tremendous damage that nuclear weapons can do, but perhaps feel reassured that the weapons have not been used since 1945.  The weapons are largely out of sight and out of mind.  It is also possible that people feel impotent to influence nuclear policy and thus defer to experts and policy makers.  This is unfortunate because until large numbers of people assert themselves on the need to eliminate nuclear weapons, the countries with nuclear weapons will continue to rely upon them to their peril and to the world’s peril.


    The New START agreement between the US and Russia is a modest step forward in reducing the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons on each side to 1,550 and the number of deployed delivery vehicles to 700.  The greatest value of the treaty may be in restoring inspections of each side’s nuclear arsenal by the other side.  But these steps provide only meager progress.  At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation we advocate the following next steps forward:



    • Reducing the total number of nuclear weapons – strategic, tactical and reserve – to under 1,000 on each side. 

    • Making a binding commitment to “No First Use” of nuclear weapons and to never using nuclear weapons under any circumstances against non-nuclear weapon states. 

    • De-alerting all nuclear weapons so that there will be no use by accident, miscalculation or in a fit of anger. 

    • Placing limits on missile defense systems and banning space weapons. 

    • Commencing multilateral negotiations for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, which would ban all nuclear weapons worldwide in a phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent manner.

    These steps would be indications that the immorality, illegality and cowardice of threatening to use nuclear weapons were being met with a seriousness of purpose.  It is not necessary for ignorance, apathy and complacency to dominate the nuclear arena.  With due regard for the sanctity of life and for future generations, we can do better than to live with such inertia.  We can eliminate a weapon that threatens civilization and human survival; we can move to zero, the only stable number of nuclear weapons.  This is the greatest challenge of our time, a challenge that we must respond to with engagement and persistence.  It is time to replace Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) with Planetary Assured Security and Survival (PASS).

  • Civil Society Challenges Nuclear Deterrence Doctrine

    This article was published by Inter Press Service News Agency.


    UNITED NATIONS, Feb 24, 2011 (IPS) – As the world’s nuclear powers continue to drag their collective feet, stalling all attempts at nuclear disarmament, a group of peace activists and civil society organisations is vigourously challenging the long-held myth of “nuclear deterrence”.


    “Nuclear deterrence is a doctrine that is used as a justification by nuclear weapon states and their allies for the continued possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons,” says the coalition, which met in Santa Barbara, California last week.


    Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation and one of the participants at the meeting, told IPS that members of the coalition agreed that the longstanding doctrine must be discredited and replaced with an urgent commitment to achieve global nuclear disarmament.


    “Before another nuclear weapon is used, nuclear deterrence must be replaced by humane, legal and normal security strategies,” she said.


    A declaration adopted by the coalition states: “We call upon people everywhere to join us in demanding that the nuclear weapon states and their allies reject nuclear deterrence and negotiate without delay a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of all nuclear weapons.”


    The participants at the meeting ranged from representatives from the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Disarmament and Security Centre.


    The world’s five “declared” nuclear powers are the five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council: the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.


    Additionally, there are four “undeclared” nuclear powers: India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel (which studiously maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” nuclear policy).


    Asked if a worldwide campaign for nuclear disarmament by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) would succeed – as it did in the campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines years ago – Peter Weiss, president of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, told IPS the analogy with the international campaign against landmines and cluster munitions must not be overdone.


    Those weapons, unlike nukes, were never seen by the countries that had them as ways of projecting their power to their neighbours or throughout the world, even if they never used them, he said.


    He pointed out that the last word on the difficulty which nuclear weapons countries have in giving them up was spoken years ago by Juan Marin Bosch.


    In his capacity as Mexico’s ambassador for disarmament, he said, in refreshingly undiplomatic language: “The big boys are scared shit that we’re going to take away their toys,” recounted Weiss, who is also a vice president of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA).


    Alyn Ware, director of the New Zealand-based Peace Foundation, said during the past four decades the international community has achieved treaties prohibiting and eliminating inhumane weapons such as anti-personnel landmines, cluster munitions, biological weapons and chemical weapons.


    However, the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons, the most inhumane and destructive of all, remains elusive.


    Ware acknowledged the role played by civil society in achieving the mine ban treaty and the convention on cluster munitions. He said two key factors in the success were a focus on the humanitarian consequences of the use of these weapons, and the application of international humanitarian law.


    Ware also said that civil society action has been effective in changing public attitudes to nuclear weapons, especially in the states possessing nuclear weapons or covered by extended nuclear deterrence.


    Whereas public opinion polls in the 1980s indicated majority acceptance of nuclear weapons, recent public opinion polls indicate the majority now supports the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons, he noted.


    However, such a change in public opinion appears to have had only a minimal impact on government policy.


    But there has been a slight shift, in that most governments now accept the vision and responsibility for achieving a nuclear weapons-free world, he added.


    Nonetheless, said Ware, few of the nuclear weapons states or their allies are prepared to abandon nuclear deterrence, prohibit the threat or use of nuclear weapons, or commence negotiations on anything other than minimal steps towards disarmament.


    The real potential of civil society to effect change in nuclear weapons policy is probably somewhere in between two polarised perspectives: public pressure is not irrelevant to a political realist world, but nor is it a magic cure that will by itself deliver the abolition of nuclear weapons, Ware declared.


    Dr Mary-Wynne Ashford of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War said there are many NGOs working on the issue of nuclear disarmament, including the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).


    “Yes, an NGO campaign is practicable and feasible,” she said. “I think consistent pressure from civil society is essential to motivate the nuclear weapons states to move to zero.”


    Doctors continue to raise the issues of the health consequences of the entire nuclear cycle from mining to production of weapons, said Ashford, who is also an associate professor at the University of Victoria in Canada.


    Dr Dale Dewar, executive director of Physicians for Global Survival (PGS), told IPS her organisation has been sustained by donors for 30 years in its campaign for a nuclear weapons-free world.


    “It will continue to do so as long as a donor base is willing to support it,” she added.


    Nancy Covington, also of PGS, told IPS: “I personally don’t see any other option than to mobilise civil society.”


    “If there is enough public education (on nuclear disarmament), then maybe civil society can make a strong enough statement that we can be heard,” she declared.

  • Breaking Free from Nuclear Deterrence

    This speech was delivered by Commander Robert Green at the 10th Annual Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future on February 17, 2011 in Santa Barbara, CA.


    Commander Robert GreenWhen David Krieger invited me to give this lecture, I discovered the illustrious list of those who had gone before me – beginning with Frank King Kelly himself in 2002. I was privileged to meet him the previous year when my wife Kate Dewes and I last visited Santa Barbara.  So I feel quite a weight on my shoulders. However, this is eased by an awareness of the uplifting qualities of the man in whose memory I have the huge honour of speaking to you this evening.


    As I do so, I invite you to bear in mind the following points made by Frank in his inaugural lecture:


    •  “I believe that we human beings will triumph over all the horrible problems we may face and over the bloody history which tempts us to despair.”


    • Some of the scientists who brought us into the Nuclear Age made us realize that we must find ways of living in peace or confront unparalleled catastrophes.


    • A nun who taught him warned him he would be tested, that he would “go through trials and tribulations.”


    As President Truman’s speechwriter, Frank discussed the momentous decisions Truman had to make – including this one:


    • “When I asked him about the decision to use atom bombs on Japan, I saw anguish in his eyes. He made it clear that he felt the weight of what he had done.”


    • “My experience in the Truman era indicated to me that the American people were not well informed about what was really going on in other countries and in the United States.”


    I have done my best to take all this wisdom to heart in what I now have to say about breaking free from nuclear deterrence.


    First, I will try to answer two challenging personal questions. People often ask why I am the only former British Navy Commander with experience of nuclear weapons to have come out against them. Others in the peace movement ask why it took me so long.


    A Child of the Nuclear Age


    In some ways, I am a child of the Nuclear Age. I was five days past my first birthday when 24-year-old Theodore Van Kirk, navigator of the Enola Gay, helped conduct the first nuclear atrocity, on Hiroshima. In 1968, I too was a 24-year-old bombardier-navigator when told that my Buccaneer strike jet pilot and I had been chosen as a nuclear crew in our squadron aboard the aircraft-carrier HMS Eagle. After being cleared to see top secret information, and indoctrinated about the honour and heavy responsibility of this role, we were given our target: a military airbase on the outskirts of Leningrad. We had to plan how to get there undetected from somewhere in the Norwegian Sea. This meant choosing the shortest route, over Sweden – a neutral country with very capable air defence. Our mission was to deliver a ten-kiloton WE177 tactical nuclear bomb, and then try to get back to our carrier, or at least bale out over Sweden or Norway. When I discovered there would not be enough fuel because the target was at the limit of our aircraft’s range, my pilot shrugged and said: “Well, Rob, if we ever have to do this, by then there won’t be anything to go back for.”  So we submitted our flight plan, and celebrated our initiation into the nuclear elite.


    Thirty years later, I was shocked to land at my target, to attend an anti-nuclear conference on European security on the eve of the 21st century. During the taxi drive into St Petersburg, I understood how my bomb would have caused massive civilian casualties from collateral damage. On TV that evening, I apologized to the citizens of Russia’s ancient capital. Then I told them I had learned that nuclear weapons would not save me – or them.


    Back in 1972, after retraining in anti-submarine warfare, I was appointed as senior bombardier-navigator of a Sea King helicopter squadron aboard the aircraft-carrier HMS Ark Royal. Our task was to use variable-depth sonar, radar and other electronic sensors, plus a variety of weapons, to detect and destroy enemy submarines threatening our ships. However, our lightweight anti-submarine torpedoes were not fast enough and could not go deep enough to catch the latest Soviet nuclear-powered submarines. So we were given a nuclear depth-bomb, an underwater variant of the WE177 design.


    The problem was that, if I had dropped one, it would have vaporized and irradiated one Soviet nuclear submarine, a large volume of ocean – and myself. This was because, unlike a strike jet, a helicopter was too slow to escape before detonation. So it would have been a suicide mission. Also, my leaders ignored the fact that there would have been heavy radioactive fallout from my bomb, plus the submarine’s nuclear power plant and any nuclear-tipped torpedoes it carried. And I might have escalated World War 3 to nuclear holocaust. All this, just to protect my aircraft-carrier.


    This time I did complain. I was reassured there would almost certainly be no need to use nuclear depth-bombs; no civilians would be involved; and the Soviets might not even detect it. Besides, I had a glittering career ahead of me, and did not want to spoil my prospects, did I? As I was ambitious, and no-one else raised concerns, I fell silent. In due course, I was promoted.


    However, the experience of such military incompetence and irresponsibility shocked me into a less trusting, more questioning frame of mind. That potent military tradition, carefully nurtured to carve out and hold down the British Empire, was immortalized in Tennyson’s Crimean war poem The Charge of the Light Brigade about an earlier suicide mission: “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.” That attitude was alive and well, in an all-volunteer Royal Navy. This was when I realized the significance of the fact that, unlike most of my colleagues, I had no military pedigree. My father worked in the Ministry of Agriculture. His father was a priest and divinity teacher at Trinity College, Dublin; and my paternal great-grandfather was an engineer. On my mother’s side, her father came from a line of professional gardeners and horticulturalists.


    UK Polaris Replacement and Falklands War


    In 1979, Margaret Thatcher swept into 10 Downing Street as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. I was working just across the street as a newly promoted Commander, in the Ministry of Defence. In my position as Personal Staff Officer to the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Policy), I watched my Admiral facilitate the internal debate on replacing the four British Polaris nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines. The nuclear submarine lobby insisted upon a scaled down version of the massively expensive, over-capable US Trident system, despite threatening the future of the Navy as a balanced, useful force. Mrs Thatcher rammed the decision through without consulting her Cabinet; and the Chiefs of Staff, despite misgivings, were brought into line.


    My final appointment was as Staff Officer (Intelligence) to Commander-in-Chief Fleet. It was a stimulating time to work in military intelligence in the command bunker in Northwood, just outside London, where operational control of the British Navy was coordinated. The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan; the Polish trade union movement Solidarnosc was pioneering the East European challenge to them; and new Soviet warship designs were emerging almost every month. I ran the 40-strong team providing round-the-clock intelligence support to the Polaris submarine on so-called “deterrent” patrol, as well as the rest of the Fleet.


    In 1981, the Thatcher government, desperate to find savings because of her determination to have Trident, announced a major defence review. With projected cuts to the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers, destroyers and frigates, my chances of commanding a ship – the next step to higher rank – were slim. So I took the plunge and applied for redundancy.


    Notification of my successful application came one week into the Falklands War. In 1982, Britain suddenly went to war with an erstwhile friend, Argentina; and the Royal Navy’s role was pivotal. So the war was directed from Northwood by my boss, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse. At one point the outcome was in the balance: our ships were being sunk, and some friends and colleagues killed. If Argentine strike aircraft or submarines had sunk an aircraft-carrier or troopship before the landing force got ashore, the British might have risked defeat. What would Mrs Thatcher have done? Until then, she had been the most unpopular Prime Minister in British history. Now she had become the ‘Iron Lady’, and needed a military victory to save her political career.


    Polaris had not deterred Argentine President Galtieri from invading the Falkland Islands. With victory in his grasp, would he have believed, let alone been deterred by, a threat from Mrs Thatcher to use nuclear weapons against Argentina? Yet after I left the Navy I heard rumours of a very secret contingency plan to move the British Polaris submarine on patrol south within range of Buenos Aires. The submarine was fitted with 16 launch tubes, each housing an intercontinental ballistic missile equipped with three 200 kiloton warheads. Then came corroboration, from France. François Mitterrand was President in 1982. In 2005, his psychoanalyst’s memoirs revealed that in his first counselling session Mitterrand had just come from an extremely stressful phonecall with Thatcher. A French-supplied Exocet missile fired from a French-supplied Argentine Navy Super Etendard strike jet had sunk a British destroyer. Mrs Thatcher had threatened to carry out a nuclear strike against Argentina unless Mitterrand ordered his brother, who ran the Exocet factory, to release the missile’s acquisition system frequencies to enable the British to jam them. Mitterrand, convinced she was serious, had complied.


    These nightmarish rumours led me to confront the realities of operating nuclear weapons for a leader in such a crisis. Defeat would have been unthinkable for the British military, and would have ended Mrs Thatcher’s career. She was a true believer in nuclear deterrence. Yet if she had threatened Galtieri with a nuclear strike, he would have publicly called her bluff and relished watching President Reagan try to rein her in. The Polaris submarine’s Commanding Officer, briefed by me before going on patrol, would have been faced with a shift of target. Had he obeyed the order, Britain would have become a pariah state, its case for retaining the Falklands lost in the international outrage from such a war crime, especially against a non-nuclear state. Nuclear deterrence failure would have compounded the ignominy of defeat. 


    Redundancy, Roof-thatching and Murder


    Back in 1982, on terminal leave after the British retook the Falkland Islands, I was 38 years old, with no qualifications except my rank and experience. Tired of weekend commuting to high-pressure jobs in London, I decided to try my luck and find local work which allowed me to be home every night. So I became a roof thatcher, enduring many painful jokes with stunned former colleagues. For eight idyllic years, I loved working with my hands in the open air restoring fine old houses, with a bird’s eye view of some of the most picturesque parts of southwest England. 


    Thatching proved vitally therapeutic in 1984, when my beloved aunt Hilda Murrell was murdered. My mother’s unmarried elder sister, she had become my mentor and close friend after my mother died when I was a 19-year-old Midshipman. Hilda was a Cambridge University graduate, and a successful businesswoman who ran the family rose nurseries. In retirement she became a fearless environmentalist and opponent of nuclear energy and weapons. At the age of 78, she applied to testify at the first British public planning inquiry into a nuclear power plant. Mrs Thatcher was determined to introduce a programme of reactors of a design which failed at Three Mile Island. Hilda, who had a formidable network of establishment contacts, did her homework about the insoluble problems of nuclear waste. A true patriot, she was not prepared to let the nuclear industry ruin and poison her country – and potentially the rest of the planet with nuclear weapons.


    Rumours of nuclear conspiracy swirled around an incompetent police investigation into her bizarre murder. Then in December 1984, a maverick member of parliament announced in the House of Commons that I had been suspected of leaking secret documents about the controversial sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in the Falklands War, and hiding them with my aunt. I had done nothing so stupidly treasonable; yet several reliable sources agreed that State security agents had allegedly searched her house. A cold case review resulted in the 2005 trial and conviction of a petty thief, who was 16 years old in 1984. I have evidence that he was framed; and I am completing a book about this. 


    First Gulf War and Breakout


    Implicating me in Hilda’s murder radicalized me. Then after Chernobyl, I took up her anti-nuclear energy torch. I learned that the nuclear energy industry had begun as a cynical by-product of the race to provide plutonium for nuclear weapons. My case for supporting nuclear deterrence crumbled with the Berlin Wall. However, it took the 1991 first Gulf War to break me out of my indoctrination.


    From the moment in November 1990 when the US doubled its original figure for ground forces to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait, I realised this was to be a punitive expedition. My military intelligence training warned me that the US-led coalition’s blitzkrieg strategy, targeting Iraq’s infrastructure as well as the leadership and military, would give Saddam Hussein the pretext he needed to attack Israel in order to split the coalition and become the Arabs’ champion. If personally threatened, he could order the launch of Scud ballistic missiles with chemical or biological warheads. If such an attack caused heavy Israeli casualties, Prime Minister Shamir would come under massive pressure to retaliate with a nuclear strike on Baghdad. Even if Saddam Hussein did not survive (he had the best anti-nuclear bunkers Western technology could provide), the Arab world would erupt in fury against Israel and its allies, its security would be destroyed forever, and Russia would be sucked into the crisis…


    In January 1991, I joined the growing anti-war movement in Britain and addressed a crowd of 20,000 in Trafalgar Square. A week later, the first Scud attack hit Tel Aviv two days after the Allied blitzkrieg began. For the first time, the second city of a de facto nuclear state was attacked and its capital threatened. Worse still for nuclear deterrence, Iraq did not have nuclear weapons. The Israeli people, cowering in gas masks in basements, learned that night that their so-called ‘deterrent’ had failed in its primary purpose. Thirty-eight more conventionally armed Scud attacks followed, causing miraculously few casualties. When US satellites detected Israeli nuclear armed missiles being readied for launch, President Bush rushed Patriot missiles and military aid to Israel, which was congratulated on its restraint.


    Meanwhile, in Britain, the Irish Republican Army just missed wiping out the entire Gulf War Cabinet with a mortar-bomb attack from a van in central London. A more direct threat to the government could barely be imagined. What if instead they had threatened to use even a crude nuclear device? A counter-threat of nuclear retaliation would have had zero credibility.


    Coming out against nuclear weapons was traumatic. My conversion was no sudden Damascene experience. I knew about indoctrination, the Official Secrets Act and top security clearances, linked to the carrots and sticks of a career requiring me uncritically to accept the nuclear policies of my government. My circumstances were unique. I went through a process of cumulative experiences, including the murder of my aunt and mentor in which British state security agents were allegedly involved. Nuclear weapons and power seem to make superficially democratic governments behave badly.


    Belatedly forced to research the history of ‘the Bomb’, I learned that the British scientific-politico-military establishment initiated and spread the nuclear arms race. Having alerted the United States to the feasibility of making a nuclear weapon, Britain participated in the Manhattan Project. On being frozen out of further collaboration by the 1946 McMahon Act, it began to develop its own nuclear arsenal. Thus Britain became a role model for France, and later Iraq and India: the first medium-sized power with delusions of grandeur to threaten nuclear terrorism. Also, I learned that nuclear deterrence does not work; it is immoral and unlawful, and there are more credible and acceptable alternative strategies to deter aggression and achieve security.


    Legal Challenge to Nuclear Deterrence


    Having given up thatching as the 1991 Gulf War loomed, after my breakout I became Chair of the British affiliate of the World Court Project. This worldwide network of citizen groups helped persuade the United Nations General Assembly, despite desperate countermoves by the three NATO nuclear weapon states, to ask the International Court of Justice for its Advisory Opinion on the legal status of nuclear weapons. In 1996, the Court confirmed that the threat, let alone use, of nuclear weapons would generally be illegal. For the first time, the legality of nuclear deterrence had been implicitly challenged.


    One aspect of the Court’s decision was especially important. It confirmed that, as part of international humanitarian law, the Nuremberg Principles apply to nuclear weapons. This has serious implications for all those involved in operating nuclear weapons – particularly military professionals who, unlike a President or Prime Minister, really would have to “press the button”. What is at stake here is a crucial difference between military professionals and hired killers or terrorists: military professionals need to be seen to act within the law. Nuclear weapons should be stigmatized as chemical and biological weapons have been, so that no military professional is prepared to operate them.


    The next year, recently retired General Lee Butler spoke out far more powerfully than I could. He is still encouraging me to keep going. Then in 1999 I found myself with David Krieger in a delegation to Tokyo not only with Lee Butler, but Robert McNamara too. In a heretical team of that calibre, I knew what I was doing was right.


    Why Nuclear Deterrence is a Scam


    It was the American writer H L Mencken who quipped: “There’s always an easy solution to every problem: neat, plausible, and wrong.” Nuclear deterrence fits this nicely. To make it acceptable to political leaders and those in the military who have to operate them, the appalling effects of even the smallest modern nuclear weapon have been played down, and that “there would almost certainly be no need to use them.” In fact, they are not weapons at all. They are utterly indiscriminate devices combining the poisoning horrors of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, plus inter-generational genetic effects unique to radioactivity, with almost unimaginable explosive violence. Yet nuclear deterrence is not credible without the will to use them. This is why a state practising nuclear deterrence is actually conducting a deliberate policy of nuclear terrorism.


    My next fundamental objection relates to the fact that, if deterrence based on conventional weapons fails, the damage is confined to the belligerent states and the environment recovers. What is at stake from nuclear deterrence failure is the devastation and poisoning of not just the belligerents, but potentially most forms of life on Earth.


    Closely related to this is a crazy reality: nuclear deterrence is a scheme for making nuclear war less probable by making it more probable. The danger of inadvertent nuclear war is greater than we think, when nuclear deterrence dogma demands that the United States and Russia persist with over 2,000 nuclear warheads between them poised for launch at each other inside half an hour. What are they playing at, over twenty years after the Cold War ended and when they are collaborating in the so-called “war on terror”?


    I now suspect that nuclear deterrence is an outrageous scam, devised sixty years ago by the US military-industrial monster dominating US politics and foreign policy. President Barack Obama’s vision for a nuclear weapon-free world, in his Prague speech in April 2009, was immediately contradicted by a caveat. He said: “…as long as these weapons exist, we will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies…” This is old, muddled thinking, because a rational leader cannot make a credible nuclear threat against a nuclear adversary capable of a retaliatory strike. And a second strike is pointless, because it would be no more than posthumous revenge. This is why enthusiasm for a nuclear weapon-free world is hypocrisy if some nuclear weapons will be kept “for deterrence as long as anyone else has them.”


    The deception deepens when the nuclear weapon states, aware that extremists armed with weapons of mass destruction cannot be deterred, plan pre-emptive nuclear attacks in “anticipatory self-defence” of their “vital interests” – not last-ditch defence of their homeland. Thereby, their unprovable claim that nuclear deterrence averts war is cynically stood on its head.
    Extremists would not only not be deterred by nuclear weapons. They could provoke nuclear retaliation in order to turn moral outrage against the retaliator and recruit more to their nightmarish causes.


    Consequences of Nuclear Deterrence Failure


    With such an irresponsible example from the five recognised nuclear weapon states, it is no surprise that India and Pakistan are trying to emulate it, locked toe to toe in hostile rivalry. Indian governments became convinced that the fetishistic power of nuclear deterrence held the key to guaranteed security and acceptance as a great power; whereupon Pakistan promptly followed suit.


    I will never forget a public meeting in Islamabad in 2001. The nuclear physicist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy had persuaded General Aslam Beg, one of the “fathers” of Pakistan’s Bomb, to join a panel with himself and me. Beg warned against raising awareness about the effects of a nuclear strike on a Pakistan city, “in case it scares the people.” He had a simplistic faith in nuclear deterrence, ignoring all the added dangers of a nuclear standoff with India. He is not alone: my experience is that most believers in nuclear deterrence refuse to discuss the consequences of failure. I will now confront them.


    Economic Consequences. In April 2005, an internal report for US Homeland Security appeared on the web. Titled Economic Consequences of a Rad/Nuc Attack, the report examined what it would take to recover from the detonation of just one nuclear device in various cities. Much depends on the size of bomb and level of decontamination, but the economic consequences for New York alone would be around $10 trillion. That is roughly the annual Gross Domestic Product of the entire US economy. Just one nuclear bomb, on one city.


    Environmental and Agricultural Consequences. A deeply disturbing article, published in January last year in Scientific American, reported on recent climate research about a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which about only 100 Hiroshima-size nuclear devices would be detonated over cities. Apart from the mutual carnage and destruction across South Asia, enough smoke from firestorms – let alone radioactive fallout – would be generated to cripple global agriculture. Plunging temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere would cause hundreds of millions of people to starve to death, even in countries far from the conflict.


    Health Consequences. In 2004, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War published their findings regarding casualties from a Hiroshima-size nuclear warhead detonated over New York. Total fatalities were estimated at about 60,000.  Another 60,000 would be seriously but non-fatally injured. These would clearly utterly overwhelm any hospitals surviving the explosion. Again, this is just one nuclear weapon on one city.


    In 1985, the Pentagon accepted the theory of ‘nuclear winter’ was valid. However, its response was reflected in this statement to Congress by US Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle: “Rather than eliminating nuclear weapons, the most realistic method of preventing nuclear winter is to build enough weapons to make sure that the Soviets will be deterred from attacking.” Redundant warhead numbers have been cut, but little has changed in such thinking.


    Nuclear Deterrence Does Not Work


    In London in 2008, Kate and I attended one of the last public lectures by Sir Michael Quinlan. Known as the British high priest of nuclear deterrence, he advised successive governments on how to justify nuclear deterrence. Almost twenty years after the end of the Cold War, he asserted that rejecting any threat or use of nuclear weapons amounted to “full-blown pacifism”. Ignoring conventional deterrence options, Quinlan swept aside any objections that:



    • Nuclear deterrence has a credibility problem;

    • It incites nuclear arms racing and the spread of nuclear weapons;

    • Nuclear weapons cannot be used discriminately or proportionately; and

    • Nuclear weapon use would inevitably risk escalation.

    He failed to take into account the environmental and health consequences of even a limited nuclear exchange, avoiding any mention of the word “radioactivity”; and he dismissed abolition as unrealistic. In light of the World Court Advisory Opinion, Kate asked him for a legal use of nuclear weapons. Revealing his disturbing Cold War mindset, he gave the Russian naval base at Murmansk.
     
    The 2009 report Eliminating Nuclear Threats by the Australia-Japan International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament challenged the assumption that nuclear weapons have deterred major war. It acknowledged that avoidance of nuclear war has been due more to luck than deterrence. It agreed that nuclear weapons are worse than useless to deter terrorists.
    It correctly argued that, just because nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented, this does not mean they should not be outlawed and abolished as chemical and biological weapons have been.


    Surprisingly, the report, chaired by former Foreign Ministers of Australia and Japan, also questioned the need for extended nuclear deterrence, arguing that conventional deterrence was adequate. Yet, having admitted that extended nuclear deterrence undermines progress towards a nuclear weapon-free world, it failed to follow the logic of its criticisms. No doubt this was because, unlike New Zealand, Australia and Japan continue to fall for the hoax of nuclear deterrence. 


    The report should have concluded that extended nuclear deterrence does not make Japan or Australia secure, and is not credible. The misnamed “nuclear umbrella” has helped the US maintain its military alliances and bases in both countries for its own purposes. However, the “umbrella” is really a lightning rod for insecurity, because the US risks being pushed past the nuclear threshold when its own security is not directly threatened.


    Why would any state attack Australia or Japan, let alone with nuclear weapons? If it did, the US would almost certainly not respond with nuclear weapons because it would risk inevitable, uncontrollable escalation to full-scale nuclear war. Instead, if the US decided it was in its national interest to come to their defence, it would rely on its formidable conventional firepower.


    Nuclear deterrence has not prevented non-nuclear states from attacking allies of nuclear weapon states. Examples include China entering the Korean War when the US had a nuclear monopoly in 1950; Argentina invading the British Falkland Islands in 1982; and Iraq invading close US ally Kuwait in 1990, and attacking nuclear-armed Israel with Scud missiles in 1991. In all these cases nuclear deterrence failed. The US in Korea and Vietnam, and the USSR in Afghanistan, preferred withdrawal to the ultimate ignominy of resorting to nuclear weapons to secure victory or revenge against a non-nuclear state.


    Safer Security Strategies


    The main security threats in the 21st century include climate change, poverty, resource depletion and financial crises as well as terrorism. Nuclear deterrence, provoking hostility and mistrust, prevents rather than assists the global non-military cooperation required to solve them.


    For all these reasons, all but about 35 states feel more secure without depending on nuclear deterrence. After Japan and Australia’s admirable leadership through co-sponsoring their recent report, they, South Korea and NATO’s non-nuclear members should therefore join the 140 states now supporting negotiating a Nuclear Weapons Convention.


    In Britain, a defence budget crisis has revived the debate about replacing Trident, and uncritical British support for US foreign policy. Indeed, the black hole in defence spending has been caused by desperate attempts to keep up with the Americans. Such poor decisions were driven by British nuclear dependence on the US.


    Instead, making a virtue from necessity, the British government should reassert its sovereignty and announce that it will rescue the dysfunctional nuclear non-proliferation regime by becoming the first of the recognized nuclear weapon states to rely on safer and more cost-effective security strategies than nuclear deterrence.


    A new world role awaits the British. By far the best-placed candidate for ‘breakout’, Britain’s nuclear arsenal is the smallest of the five recognized nuclear weapon states; and they are deployed in just one system, a scaled down version of Trident. Its government has to decide by 2016 whether to replace Trident with whatever the US decides. The minority Liberal Democrats, in coalition with the Conservatives, oppose Trident replacement. The alternative – nuclear-tipped Cruise missiles launched from attack submarines – has been ruled out, because the Obama Administration is scrapping its nuclear-armed Tomahawk missiles.


    All Britain has to do is decide not to replace its four Vanguard class Trident-armed submarines. British ‘breakout’ would be sensational, transforming the nuclear disarmament debate overnight. In NATO, Britain would wield unprecedented influence leading the drive for a non-nuclear strategy. British leadership would create new openings for shifting the mindset in the US and France, the other two most zealous guardians of nuclear deterrence. This would heavily influence India, Israel, Pakistan and states intent on obtaining nuclear weapons. The way would then open for a major reassessment by Russia and China, for all nuclear forces to be stood down, and for negotiations to begin on a Nuclear Weapons Convention.


    The key is to see nuclear disarmament as a security-building process, moving from an outdated adversarial mindset to a co-operative one where nuclear weapons are recognized as an irrelevant security liability. Mikhail Gorbachev was the first leader of a nuclear weapon state to understand this. In 1986, three years before the Berlin Wall was torn down, he briefly broke the grip of Cold War security thinking. Tragically, the opportunity to abandon Mutual Assured Destruction at the Reagan/Gorbachev summit in Iceland was defeated by the US military-industrial complex’s vested interests over ballistic missile defence, and the spurious US need to extend nuclear deterrence to its allies. Here was an example of how nuclear deterrence undercuts the political stability its proponents claim it creates. 


    Conclusions


    To conclude, I hope I have explained why I rejected nuclear deterrence, and why it is the last major obstacle to a nuclear weapon-free world.  Finding our way back from the nuclear abyss, on the edge of which nuclear deterrence has held us hypnotised and terrorised for sixty-five years, will not be easy. As with all advances in human rights and justice, the engine for shifting the mindset has to come from civil society.


    I recall what Mahatma Gandhi said in 1938, as he launched the final push towards evicting the British from India: “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” The American anthropologist Margaret Mead added: “Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”


    A surprisingly small network of individuals drove the campaign to abolish slavery. As with nuclear deterrence, slavery’s leading apologists were the power elites of the United States, Britain and France. They argued that slavery was a “necessary evil”, for which there was “no alternative”. They failed, because courageous ordinary British, American and French citizens mobilised unstoppable public and political support for their campaign to replace slavery with more humane, lawful and effective ways to create wealth. The analogy holds for nuclear deterrence, which can and must be discarded for more humane, lawful and safer security strategies if civilisation and the Earth’s ecosystems are to survive.

  • Doubts About Nuclear Deterrence

    Ward WilsonWhat’s striking about nuclear deterrence is not that occasionally people raise doubts about its efficacy, but rather that anyone believes in it at all. The evidentiary basis for nuclear deterrence is so thin as to be almost nonexistent.


    After sixty-five years of peace living under nuclear deterrence we tend to treat it as a certain, almost palpable thing. It is as if it were so real that it was an object you could pick up and handle in three dimensions. But the fact is that there is very little proof that nuclear deterrence even exists, much less works. If nuclear deterrence were on trial for murder, you’d never convict. There’s just not enough evidence.


    Lack of battlefield testing


    Consider: The most important actual test case for nuclear weapons is their use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This weapon, that we are resting so much of our safety and security on, has only been field tested once. This is sobering when you consider that the military establishments had known about machine guns and used them in colonial wars for almost fifty years before World War I, and yet in practice they were almost entirely ignorant of the impact they would have on the battlefield. It took three years and countless battles in which young men were sent across open ground in the face of machine guns before the British, French and Germans began to understand that massed charges would incur enormous costs. It often takes a great deal of experience with a new weapon before its characteristics and impact on war are fully understood. The fact that we have so little real experience with nuclear weapons should be a cause for humility. We don’t really know that much about them.


    Hiroshima


    Historians, over the last twenty years, have begun to doubt the traditional interpretation of Hiroshima. I am not talking about Gal Alperovitz’s effort to show that it was not necessary to drop the bomb – that is separate conversation largely about whether the United States is a good country or not. That is a moral conversation about the United States. What I am talking about is a practical question about nuclear weapons. I’m talking about the question of whether or not the Bomb worked – whether it did in fact coerce Japan into surrendering. Self-centered discussions about whether the United States is morally good or not do not affect the question of whether nuclear weapons coerce.


    Truman’s threat to bring a “rain of ruin” down on Japan if they did not surrender was the first real test of the special psychological “shock value” of nuclear weapons which Stimson claimed so much for after the war. Hiroshima is a major support for nuclear deterrence.


    Yet recent research throws the traditional interpretation into serious doubt. The evidence points toward the Soviet declaration of war as the decisive event. The bombing of one more city (we bombed 68 cities that summer) doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact. Of course, afterward Japan’s leaders used the atomic as a convenient reason to explain why they had lost the war, but that only proves that they were embarrassed about leading their country into a disastrous war.


    If Japan’s leaders essentially ignored the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where does that leave evidentiary proof of the “special shock” value of nuclear weapons? -The unique ability to coerce and deter?


    City attacks


    Of course, one reason we believe nuclear deterrence works is common sense: we are all afraid of the notion of having cities attacked with nuclear weapons. If we’re afraid of cities being blown sky high, then nuclear deterrence must work. There is troubling evidence from history, however. First, this is not the first time people have made extravagant claims for the power of city attacks. In the years between World War I and World War II there was a wave of excited commentators who talked about how bombing cities would either make war impossible or shorten any war to a matter of days. Chief among these was the Italian General, Giulio Douhet,whose basic thesis has been summed up in this way:


    1) Aircraft are instruments of offence of incomparable potentialities, against which no effective defence can be foreseen.
    2) Civilian morale will be shattered by bombardment of centres of population.
    3) The primary objectives of aerial attack should not be the military installations, but industries and centres of population remote from the contact of the surface armies. . . .


    Douhet was certain of the crippling effects of civilian attacks on any nation. Of such attacks he vividly wrote:



    And if on the second day another ten, twenty or fifty cities were bombed, who could keep all those lost, panic-stricken people from fleeing to the open countryside to escape this terror from the air?


    A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take place in a country subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air. The time would soon come when, to put an end to horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to the war–this before their army and navy had time to mobilise at all!


    American Air Force General William Mitchell agreed, saying, “It is unnecessary that these cities be destroyed, in the sense that every house be leveled to the ground. It will be sufficient to have the civilian population driven out so that they cannot carry on their usual vocation. A few gas bombs will do that.”


    It should stand as a warning to us that these predictions proved wildly wrong. Of course, it may be that the destruction and death simply wasn’t enough and that nuclear weapons will wreck so much havoc that they must surely be decisive. But we ought to be made at least a little cautious by this remarkable failure. It could, after all, also be the case that leaders simply don’ t care much about civilian deaths in war.


    When one reviews the evidence, there is a disturbing amount of evidence supporting the notion that cities and civilians don’t affect the outcome of war very much. A number of cities were destroyed in World War II as completely as if a nuclear weapon had been used (Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo), but none of them compelled surrender. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that city destruction ever wins wars. Killing civilians, even on a massive scale, does not seem to deter wartime leaders. In the Thirty Years War when Imperial forces burned Magdeburg to the ground and killed 30,000, it did not lead to the surrender of the Protestant forces. In fact, Protestant recruitment and support actually rose throughout Europe after the destruction of that city. Civilian losses in the Thirty Years War eventually amounted to something like 20 to 30% of Germany’s population.


    Civilians losses seem to almost encourage militant feelings rather than the reverse. Historians note that after word of the destruction of Nagasaki, the members of Japan’s cabinet – who were meeting to discuss surrender when the news came – seemed more militant, more “bullish” than before.


    In the Parguayan War of 1864 to 1870, an estimated 60% of Paraguayans lost their lives. But the war only came to an end when the country’s leader was killed. Killing civilians never seems to lead to surrender, even when it goes on on a massive scale. Even though we feel afraid of nuclear attacks against cities in peacetime, the evidence from war tells a different story. It would be wise to study this evidence more closely before leaping to any conclusions about the efficacy of nuclear deterrence.


    65 years of peace


    Of course, it is often argued – or simply stated as fact – that nuclear weapons have kept the peace for 65 years. This would be a more impressive argument if it weren’t based on such a shaky logical foundation. Saying that since there has been no war therefore nuclear deterrence keeps the peace is a proof by absence. Proof by absence is one of the most demanding forms of proof to successfully prove. The problem is that if there is any other possible cause for the outcome, the proof fails. If I assert that since the glass is empty then Bob must have drunk it, the proof only succeeds if there is no other possible way for the glass to have gotten empty. It can’ t be possible for it to have spilled, for Julie to have drunk it, for the water to have evaporated, and so on.


    The problem with the peace of the last sixty-five years is that it could have been the result of any number of factors. Close economic and trading ties between nations, for example. The strength of alliances and international organizations like NATO, the UN or the European Union. It could have been the result of simple exhaustion. The Soviet Union lost something like 27 million people in World War II and 30 to 40 percent of its industrial capacity. It is hardly a surprise that they didn’t want to fight a war during the next twenty or thirty years. And in fact the study of history provides evidence for this explanation: there are quite lengthy periods of peace after both the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars. It could have been the result of closer ties as the result of jet travel, easier immigration, and television.There is a theory that major wars only come every 100 years: the Thirty Years War in the 16th century, the Seven Years War in the 17th, the Napoleonic Wars in the 18th, and World Wars I and II in the twentieth. Finally, sometimes in history there are just periods of peace. From 1815 to 1848 Europe knew substantial peace for 33 years. But that peace had nothing to do with nuclear weapons.


    People say, “But it makes sense to believe in nuclear deterrence, because if we get rid of nuclear weapons it will just make the world safe for conventional war.” The underlying assumption here is that nuclear weapons prevent conventional war. There was, of course, a good deal of similar thinking before World War II. People said that the threat of aerial attack against cities would prevent war. In the event, all city attacks did was to add about a million additional casualties to the war without affecting the military outcome particularly. It could very well be that nuclear weapons will play a similar role: they won’t deter people from fighting wars but they will add immeasurably to the death and destruction that any war brings with it.


    War will come


    War has been – despite intermittent periods of peace – a remarkably constant part of human history. The appeal of war seems remarkably robust. I often think of the passage from the Iliad that Robert Kennedy quoted to illustrate the appeal of war.



    The wrath of war that makes a man go mad for all his goodness of reason,
    That rage that rises within and swirls like smoke in the heart and becomes 
    in our madness a thing more sweet than the dripping of honey.


    People seem to believe that nuclear weapons ensure that no major wars will ever be fought again. This is a very dangerous way of thinking. If I had to choose between the power of nuclear weapons to transform human nature and prevent major wars (for which there is almost no evidence at all) or the ongoing appeal of war, I would, frankly, put my money on war. As President Kennedy argued, we should base our hopes on a gradual evolution of human institutions rather than a sudden revolution in human nature.


    The question is not, “shouldn’t we keep our nuclear weapons in order to preserve the peace?” Humans have shown themselves capable of remarkable folly throughout history and the folly of fighting a war with nuclear weapons is hardly beyond man’s capacity for being unwise. The question should be, if major war comes, do you want it fought with hand grenades and rifles and tanks, or with nuclear weapons?

  • Ronald Reagan’s Great Dream

    David KriegerOn February 6, 2011, Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old.  It is worthwhile to recall that this conservative president’s great dream was the abolition of nuclear weapons.  According to his wife, Nancy, “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.”


    President Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist.  He believed that the only reason to have nuclear weapons was to prevent the then Soviet Union from using theirs.  Understanding this, he asserted in his 1984 State of the Union Address, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”  He continued, “The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used.  But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?”


    Ronald Reagan regarded nuclear weapons, according to Nancy, as “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.”


    In 1986, President Reagan and Secretary General Gorbachev met for a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland.  In a remarkable quirk of history, the two men shared a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.  Despite the concerns of their aides, they came close to achieving agreement on this most important of issues.  The sticking point was that President Reagan saw his Strategic Defense Initiative (missile defense) as being essential to the plan, and Gorbachev couldn’t accept this (even though Reagan promised to share the US missile defense system with the then Soviet Union).  Gorbachev wanted missile defense development to be restricted to the laboratory for ten years.  Reagan couldn’t accept this.


    The two leaders came heartbreakingly close to ending the era of nuclear weapons, but in the end they couldn’t achieve their mutual goal.  As a result, nuclear weapons have proliferated and remain a danger to all humanity.  Today, we face the threat of terrorists gaining possession of nuclear weapons, and wreaking massive destruction on the cities of powerful nations.  There can be no doubt that had Reagan and Gorbachev succeeded, the US and the world would be far more secure, and these men would be remembered above all else for this achievement.


    In his book, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Paul Lettow quotes Reagan as saying, “I know that there are a great many people who are pointing to the unimaginable horror of nuclear war….  [T]o those who protest against nuclear war, I can only say, ‘I’m with you.’”  Lettow also quotes Reagan as stating, “[M]y dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.”


    In the 18th and 19th centuries, individuals struggled for the abolition of slavery because they understood that every man, woman and child has the right to live in freedom.  Through the efforts and persistence of committed individuals like William Wilberforce in Great Britain and Frederick Douglass in the United States, institutionalized slavery was brought to an end, and humanity is better for it.  In today’s world, we confront an issue of even more transcending importance, because nuclear weapons place civilization and the human species itself in danger of annihilation.


    Ronald Reagan was a leader who recognized this, and worked during his presidency for the abolition of these terrible weapons.  He believed, according to Nancy, that “as long as such weapons were around, sooner or later they would be used,” with catastrophic results.  He understood that nuclear weapons themselves are the enemy.


    Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan died before seeing his goal of abolishing nuclear weapons realized.  It is up to those of us still living to complete this job.  It is not a partisan issue, but rather a human issue, one that affects our common future.

  • It’s Still the Same Old Story – From Guns to Nukes

    Lawrence WittnerThe discussion of the Tucson tragedy should be familiar, as we witness similar massacres in U.S. schools, shopping centers, and other public places played out periodically.  Each time, the NRA and other gun apologists tell us that the easy accessibility of firearms, including assault weapons, had nothing to do with it.  Indeed, they argue that the key to our safety is to obtain more guns.


    But does the fact that nearly 100,000 Americans are shot with guns and nearly 10,000 Americans are killed with them each year really have no connection to the remarkable availability of guns in the United States?


    A great deal of evidence suggests otherwise.  For example, according to a recent study, when twenty-three populous, high-income countries were compared for the year 2003, it was found that, among civilians, the United States had more firearms and more handguns per capita than the other countries, as well as the most permissive gun control laws.  Not surprisingly, the firearm homicide rate in the United States was 19.5 times higher than in the other countries.  The U.S. unintentional firearm death rate was 5.2 times higher.


    Although this death toll is bad enough, consider also the fact that the same dynamics operate in international relations.  No nation in recent decades has rivaled the military might of the United States.  Indeed, the U.S. government spends nearly as much on its military forces as the rest of the world combined—presumably, to keep Americans safe.  But are they safe?  Not long ago, the greatest terrorist attack in history occurred in the United States, and more are constantly threatened.  Meanwhile, U.S. military forces have been dying or coming home crippled from two very bloody, seemingly endless wars.  Could a key reason for this disastrous situation be that brandishing more and more weapons not only fails to protect us, but actually pulls us into a deadly cycle of violence?


    Of course, the safety through weapons theory is particularly dangerous when it comes to nuclear weapons.  Like the NRA, nuclear zealots assure us that massive nuclear arsenals will make us safer.  Thus, as the price for approving the recent New START Treaty, they demanded—and received—a hefty payoff:  a commitment from the Obama administration for $180 billion in funding over the next decade for “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex and the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  But this kind of nuclear buildup encourages nuclear nations to do the same thing and helps convince non-nuclear nations to develop their own nuclear arms.  Aren’t we supposed to be working for a world free of nuclear weapons?


    Certainly, that would be a good idea.  The more nuclear weapons that are available, the more likely it is that terrorists will acquire and use them, that embattled governments will employ them in their wars, and that they will be fired or exploded accidentally.  We have had some close scrapes along these lines in recent years.  These include terrorist nuclear plots, nations drawn to the brink of nuclear war, and the collision of nuclear submarines.  Disarmament activists are sometimes accused of naïveté.  But isn’t it far more naive to assume that, in an angry world bristling with nuclear weapons, they will never be used?


    And so we are brought back to the mass murder in Tucson and the question:  Are we safer with more firepower or less?  Despite the propaganda of the gunslingers, the arms manufacturers, and the military enthusiasts, it does seem that the world would be a lot safer with fewer guns and fewer nuclear weapons.

  • Remembering Eisenhower’s Farewell Address

    President Eisenhower's farewell addressJanuary 17, 2011 marked the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the nation in which he warned of the dangers of the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex.  I think he would be shocked to see how this influence has grown over the past half century and how it has manifested in the country’s immense military budgets, the nuclear arms race, our permanent war footing, the failure to achieve meaningful disarmament, and the illegal wars the US has initiated.  In addition to all of this, there is the influence of the military-industrial complex on the media, academia, the Congress and the citizenry.  It has also ensnared US allies, like those in NATO, in its net.  Eisenhower believed that the only way to assure that the military-industrial complex can be meshed “with our peaceful methods and goals” is through “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”


    Eisenhower was 70 years old when his term as president came to an end.  He had been a General of the Army and hero of World War II, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces Europe, and for eight years the president of the United States.  His Farewell Address was, above all else, a warning to his fellow Americans.  He stated, “The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.”  He worried about what this conjunction would mean in the future, famously stating, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.  The potential for misplaced power exists and will persist.”


    Eisenhower feared that this powerful complex would weaken democracy.  “We must never,” he said, “let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”  He felt there was only one force that could control this powerful military-industrial complex, and that was the power of the people.  In Eisenhower’s view it was only “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” that was capable of defending the republic “so that security and liberty prosper together.”


    What kind of report card would President Eisenhower give our country today if he could come back and observe what has transpired over the past 50 years?  For starters, I believe he would be appalled by the enormous increase in influence of the military-industrial complex.  Today the military receives over half of the discretionary funds that Congress allocates, over $500 billion a year for the Department of Defense, plus the special allocations for the two wars in which the country is currently engaged.  The Department of Defense budget does not take into account the interest on the national debt attributable to past wars, or the tens of billions of dollars in the Energy Department budget for nuclear arms, or the funds allocated for veterans benefits.  When it is totaled, the US is spending over a trillion dollars annually on “defense.”


    Surely Eisenhower would be dismayed to see how many national institutions have been drawn into and made subservient to the military-industrial complex, which some would now refer to as the military-industrial-Congressional-academic-media complex.  Every district in Congress seems to have links to the complex through jobs provided by defense contractors, putting pressure on Congressional representatives to assure that public funds flow to private defense contractors.  At the same time, academia and the mainstream media provide support and cover to keep public funds flowing for wars and their preparations.


    Near the end of his speech, Eisenhower lamented that he had not made greater progress toward disarmament during his time in office.  He said, “Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.”  It was true then, and remains so today.  He continued, “Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.  Because this need is so sharp and apparent, I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment.”  Indeed, there was reason for his disappointment, since the number of nuclear weapons in the US arsenal increased under his watch from approximately 1,400 in 1953 to over 20,000 in 1960.  I suspect that he would be even more disappointed today to find that the US has not been more proactive in leading the way toward disarmament and particularly nuclear disarmament since the end of the Cold War.


    Fifty years ago, Eisenhower feared the threat that nuclear war posed to the world and to our country, and expressed his desire for peace: “As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war – as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years – I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.”  He recognized that much remains to be done to “reach the goal of peace with justice.”  That was true when Eisenhower made his Farewell Address and it remains true today.


    We would do well to reflect upon the deeply felt concerns of this military and political leader as he retired from public service.  He prayed “that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”  That was his vision, and he passed the baton to us to overcome the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex.   Our challenge is to exercise our power as citizens of a democracy and to use that power to attain a more peaceful and nuclear weapons-free world.

  • Nuclear Weapons: The Goal is Zero

    David KriegerNuclear weapons release vast amounts of energy.  They do this by breaking apart the bonds of the atom, but this is not all they break apart.  They also break apart the bonds of our relationships with the Earth, with other forms of life and with the future.  This is part of the nuclear fallout that occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and has continued through the Nuclear Age.


    Nuclear weapons are capable of destroying cities, as was demonstrated by the US attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  We know that the destructive capacity of these weapons does not end there.  They are also capable of destroying countries and civilization as we know it.  The philosopher John Somerville coined the term “omnicide” to describe the potential destructive capacity of nuclear weapons – the death of all.  In the Nuclear Age, our destructive capacity has moved from homicide to genocide to omnicide. 


    In considering the fallout of nuclear weapons, we might ask: what have these weapons done to our psyches?  The destructive potential of our nuclear inventions transcends the death of an individual or group and shows us a glimpse of the death of all.  For those of us willing to look, this is a fearful view into the abyss, a darkened world of incineration and shadows, a world barren of life.  Although nuclear weapons bring us close to the precipice of such a world, most of us choose to avert our eyes and our minds from grasping the reality.  We gamble the human future on the judgment and human fallibility of political and military leaders.  This strikes me as a very bad bet. 


    It is argued that no weapon ever created has been discarded until another, more powerful weapon has taken its place.  But with nuclear weapons we do not have this luxury.  Nuclear weapons force us to put aside our childish and tribal ways of solving conflicts.  They push us to higher levels of maturity.  We cannot continue our old ways and survive in a nuclear-armed world. 


    Ten Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons


    Let me share with you ten reasons to abolish nuclear 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.   As such, they are instruments of dehumanization as well as annihilation.


    2. They threaten the destruction of cities, countries and civilization; of all that is sacred, of all that is human, of all that exists.  Nuclear war could cause deadly climate change, putting human existence at risk. 


    3. They threaten to foreclose the future, negating our common responsibility to future generations.


    4. They make cowards of their possessors, and in their use there can be no decency or honor.  This was recognized by most of the leading generals and admirals of World War II, including Dwight Eisenhower, Hap Arnold, and William Leahy. 


    5. They divide the world’s nations into nuclear “haves” and “have-nots,” bestowing false and unwarranted prestige and privilege on those that possess them. 


    6. They are a distortion of science and technology, siphoning off our scientific and technological resources and twisting our knowledge of nature to destructive purposes.  


    7. They mock international law, displacing it with an allegiance to raw power.  The International Court of Justice has ruled that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is generally illegal and any use that violated international humanitarian law would be illegal.  It is virtually impossible to imagine a threat or use of nuclear weapons that would not violate international humanitarian law (fail to discriminate between soldiers and civilians, cause unnecessary suffering or be disproportionate to a preceding attack). 


    8. They waste our resources on the development of instruments of annihilation.  The United States alone has spent over $7.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems since the onset of the Nuclear Age.


    9. They concentrate power in the hands of a small group of individuals and, in doing so, undermine democracy.


    10. They are morally abhorrent, as recognized by virtually every religious organization, and their mere existence corrupts our humanity. 


    New START


    In December 2010, the US Senate voted 71-26 to ratify the New START agreement with Russia.  It was a struggle to obtain the requisite two-thirds majority of the Senate needed for ratification, but in the end enough Republicans joined with the Democrats to assure the treaty’s ratification.  With previous strategic arms reduction treaties, however, the votes for ratification were largely bipartisan, reflected by overwhelming majorities. 


    The New START agreement was described by Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, as “vital to national security.”  The treaty has four important benefits. 


    First, it will reduce the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons on each side to 1,550 by the year 2017.  This is about a one-third reduction from the 2,200 agreed to in the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).  However, there are some accounting irregularities that were agreed to in New START, such as counting each bomber plane as having one nuclear weapon even though it could carry up to 20. 


    Second, it will reduce the number of delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons to 800 total, with an upper limit of 700 of these deployed. 


    Third, it will put inspectors back on the ground in both countries to verify compliance with the treaty.  There have been no inspections since December 2009, when the START I agreement expired. 


    Finally, it will hopefully keep the US and Russia moving forward on reducing their arsenals still further in the years to come.  A failure to ratify the New START agreement would have been disastrous for US-Russia cooperation.


    Despite the important benefits of the treaty, however, it should not be forgotten that it still leaves the US and Russia with 1,550 deployed strategic weapons each, more than enough to destroy the world many times over.  It also does not place limits on the shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons or the strategic nuclear weapons held in reserve.  These issues will be on the agenda of future US-Russia negotiations.


    There was also a heavy price pledged by President Obama for obtaining Republican votes for the treaty, approximately $185 billion over the next ten years.  About $85 billion will go to the modernization of the nuclear infrastructure in the country and the modernization of the US nuclear arsenal.  Another $100 billion will go to improving the delivery vehicles to carry the nuclear weapons.  These expensive improvements to US nuclear forces cast reasonable doubt on the seriousness of the US commitment to nuclear disarmament.


    The Republicans were also able to extract a promise from President Obama regarding missile defenses.  As a candidate for President in October 2007, Obama said, “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.”  In an effort to get the New START agreement ratified, President Obama wrote in December 2010 to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, “…as long as I am President, and as long as the Congress provides the necessary funding, the United States will continue to develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect the United States, our deployed forces, and our allies and partners.”  Candidate Obama had it right that missile defense systems were “unproven.”  President Obama had it wrong that such systems are “effective.”  In recent months, two missile defense tests from Vandenberg Air Force base have been admitted failures with no intercepts, and these were simple tests without multiple attack missiles or decoys.


    New START is only what it says – a start.  The only stable number of nuclear weapons in the world is zero, and this must be our goal.  The way to get to zero is through a negotiated Nuclear Weapons Convention, a new treaty for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.  A Nuclear Weapons Convention will require leadership from the US and other countries.  Leaders must be pushed from below.  In effect, the people must lead their leaders.  Achieving the goal of Zero must start with each of us.


    Implementing Change


    The path to achieving change in the Nuclear Age starts with the implementation of some traditional means for bringing about change: conscience, compassion, courage, cooperation, creativity and commitment.  


    Conscience is the voice inside that distinguishes right from wrong, and moves us to take action for what is right.  It is a capacity that is uniquely human.  We can recognize right from wrong and choose our course.  With conscience there is always choice.


    Compassion is the force of love put into action.  Along with poet John Donne, we must recognize that we are “a part of the continent, a piece of the main.”  We must care for the Earth and all its inhabitants.  Compassion does not recognize borders.  We all share a common Earth.  We are all created equal.  We are all diminished by nuclear threats or any other threats to the well-being of people anywhere. 


    It takes courage to think differently, to break away from the group-think of the tribe.  It takes courage to express compassion and to embrace the world.  It takes courage to wage peace rather than war. 


    Cooperation is needed to solve the world’s great problems.  There is no significant global problem – war, abuses of human rights, environmental degradation, climate change, nuclear threat – that can be solved by any one nation alone.  It takes not only a village, but a world to bring about the changes that are needed.


    Creativity is also essential to change.  It will take new and creative ways of thinking to prevent the ultimate catastrophe to ourselves and our fellow inhabitants of Earth.  Einstein said prophetically, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”  We must change our modes of thinking, and replace the old patterns with new ones.  We must become world citizens and peace leaders.


    Commitment will keep you going when the goal seems distant and the obstacles seem overwhelming.  No great goal is easy to attain, but some goals – and I would place the abolition of nuclear weapons among these – are challenges that cannot be ignored or cast aside.  The future, which cannot speak for itself and has only our voice, deserves our commitment.

  • Apocalypse Never: Assuring a Future for Humanity

    Apocalypse NeverIn Apocalypse Never, Forging a Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), author Tad Daley explores the dangers of the Nuclear Age, argues that the only way to prevent future nuclear catastrophes is to eliminate the weapons and provides a roadmap to achieve this goal. While it is a subject that many Americans prefer to avoid or deny, the threats of nuclear devastation are all too real. 


    When it comes to the serious perils that nuclear weapons pose to the continuation of human civilization that has developed over the past 10,000 years, and to the human future, far too many Americans remain ignorant and apathetic. Perhaps they believe that if they do not think about nuclear dangers, the dangers will disappear. That belief is dispelled by Daley’s important book.


    When the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many people thought that the nuclear threat to humanity had ended. In fact, the thaw in US-Russian relations gave that appearance. Large numbers of nuclear weapons were eliminated from US and Russian arsenals, but not enough. There are still some 20,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the two countries. There are also an increasing number of nuclear weapon states and potential nuclear weapon states. Today there are nine countries in possession of nuclear weapons and still other countries that have developed or are developing the capabilities to become nuclear weapon states.


    Apocalypse Never presents a comprehensive overview of the possibilities of nuclear terrorism, accidental nuclear war, mismanagement of a nuclear crisis, and the intentional use of nuclear weapons. One cannot read about these dangers and the close calls that have occurred in the past and remain complacent. The reality is that there must be zero tolerance for nuclear weapons proliferating to terrorist organizations, such as al Qaeda, that cannot be deterred from nuclear attack because they cannot be located. There must also be zero tolerance for accidental nuclear war or errors in crisis management that would allow a crisis to get out of control and go nuclear. 


    While zero tolerance is perhaps an unrealistically high standard, it is the only acceptable standard. Anything less could result in a nuclear catastrophe. And this standard must be maintained not only by the US, which has already had more than its share of slip-ups, but by all nuclear weapon states and all that may emerge in the future. 


    Daley points out that one of the greatest problems of the Nuclear Age is America’s nuclear hypocrisy, its double standards and its do-as-I-say-not as-I-do approach to international treaties and relations among countries. The US, for example, has one standard for its ally Israel’s nuclear arsenal (tolerance and silence) and another for countries such as Iraq and Iran (preventive war and regime change, and threat of attack, respectively). As any parent knows, double standards don’t hold up over time.   As a result, America is failing in what is perhaps its most important leadership role. It is failing to discipline its policy to a single standard for all, including itself, a standard that must be zero nuclear weapons rather than zero tolerance only for the countries disapproved of by the US.


    Roughly half of Daley’s book elucidates the dangers of continuing with the nuclear status quo. It is clear, to quote William Butler Yeats, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold….” Either the world will spin off toward nuclear proliferation and nuclear catastrophe; or, as a far preferable alternative, we will eliminate nuclear weapons from the world. The latter alternative is the subject of the second half of Apocalypse Never. It is the alternative that common sense and rationality dictate.  It is also dictated by international law, specifically by Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which calls for the “good faith” pursuit of nuclear disarmament. This was the principal trade-off in the treaty, promised by the nuclear weapon states to the non-nuclear weapon states, the vast majority of the countries in the world that agreed not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons. 


    As Daley rightly points out, the NPT should properly have been named the Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Elimination Treaty. Adding the word “elimination” to the title of the treaty would have made it readily understandable to the public that the treaty was not only about non-proliferation, but also about eliminating the existing weapons. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, advised in 1996 that the nuclear weapon states have an obligation to complete the task of achieving nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.


    Of course, it will not be easy to eliminate all nuclear weapons in the world; it is, in fact, the great challenge that we face in the Nuclear Age. Daley makes a strong case, however, that this is a goal that can be accomplished. He assesses the dangers of a “breakout” scenario and finds that a structure could be established with sufficient disincentives so that the costs of breakout would far exceed the benefits. The path we are currently on is nearly certain to lead to future catastrophes. 


    Those who think about the future and have a role in designing it must not shy away from the conclusion, reached by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist. The weapons are incompatible with a human future. They put all humanity on the endangered species list. We need to awaken to this reality and then, in Daley’s vision, “build the architecture of a nuclear weapon-free world.”


    Another way in which Daley conceptualizes our choices is: apocalypse soon or, as the book is titled, Apocalypse Never. When it comes to nuclear apocalypse, there is no place for neutrality or complacency. It is a life-or-death struggle between humans and the tools we have created, the long-distance devices of mass annihilation we call nuclear weapons. These weapons challenge our humanity. The mere existence of these weapons is a call to action. 


    Daley’s book provides the background and the vision for individuals to become informed and effective citizens of the Nuclear Age and to fulfill our shared responsibility to pass the world on intact to the next generation. We are the first generation in human history to run the risk of failing in that responsibility. To assure that we succeed, individuals must become agents of change.  The existential threat of nuclear weapons is not an issue for leaders alone. In fact, the issue is far too important to be left only in the hands of leaders. The people must care enough to lead their leaders.    


    Apocalypse Never takes the abolition of nuclear weapons out of the realm of utopian dream, pointing the way to a citizen-led political project. I urge you to read this book and, in the interests of all humanity, to become engaged in the great goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons.