Tag: nuclear weapons
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New START and the Lingering Nuclear Cold War
This article was originally published on The Huffington Post.
As the Senate attempts to wrap its lame duck session with the New START finale, lost in the back and forth over ratification lies one question that few senators appear willing to ask: Why, now twenty years after the Cold War, do Moscow and Washington find it acceptable to retain thousands of warheads pointed at the other with or without the treaty? Recent official strategy documents by both countries fail to address the matter convincingly leaving each country dedicated to continuing the mutual nuclear hostage relationship that ought to have been put to bed long ago.
Today’s Russian-American arsenals remain remnants of a bygone era. During the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons became both the currency of power and the acute source of preemption anxiety born out of the surprise attack scars the two countries suffered in World War II. The result propelled the exponential growth of weapons to prevent a nuclear Pearl Harbor.
At its height, the United States stocked 31,000 weapons, the Soviet Union over 40,000 by some estimates. Largely reflecting the Cold War’s demise, but also the legacy of earlier arms limitation treaties, Moscow and Washington have come a long way in curbing inventories. Today the United States deploys some 2000 strategic warheads and Russia 2500. Still, under New START, millions of people will remain in the cross hairs of 1550 deployed warheads.
In February 2010, Moscow unveiled its rationale. Notwithstanding deterrent weight it now gives to a new generation of precision guided conventional weapons, the Kremlin’s continues to see the nuclear arsenal as its ultimate security blanket: “Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a use of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction against her and (or) her allies, and in a case of an aggression against her with conventional weapons that would put in danger the very existence of the state.”
In its April 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, the Obama administration took a more nuanced approach. It eliminated nuclear targeting of non nuclear weapons states that complied with NPT vows. It added, only in “a narrow range of contingencies” would it use nuclear weapons to deal with chemical, biological and conventional attack. But all other circumstances, including targeting of Russia with the bulk of the arsenal, nuclear war plans remain in tact. The presumption: the Bomb provides “stability.” “As long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States will maintain secure and effective nuclear forces” to deter, reassure allies and promote stability globally and in key regions.
Despite the president’s pledge to seek nuclear abolition, the Review registered “very demanding” “conditions” that make more dramatic nuclear reductions practically impossible: resolution of regional disputes that motivates nuclear possession, greater nuclear transparency, better verification to detect nonproliferation violators and credible enforcement mechanisms to deter cheating. The Review concluded, “Clearly, such conditions do not exist today. But we can — and must — work actively to create those conditions.”
New START marks a step to meet the conditions in the Russian-American sphere, but ultimately a modest one. Eighteen on site inspections, data exchanges, a consultative committee to iron out disputes serve verification goals. But the Obama administration’s commitment to an $85 billion ten year refurbishment of the nuclear weapons complex signals little reduction in policies that continue the nuclear hostage relationship.
Indeed the new nuclear doctrines, budgets to boost the weapons enterprise and congressional skepticism about New START serve as reminders of President Obama’s lament in his 2009 call for a world without nuclear weapons — “This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime.” The difficult New START debate punctuates the deeper underlying point: the nuclear Cold War has never gone away. The fact should give comfort to no one.
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Changing the Climate of Complacency
Representatives of governments and civil society organizations are gathered in Cancun to take action on the climate change that is threatening our beautiful but beleaguered planet. The changes, which are resulting in global warming, pose extremely dangerous threats to quality of life and even survival for people today and in the future. We must heed the warnings of scientists who are examining this phenomenon and change our habits with regard to fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions. We must dramatically lower our fossil fuel consumption and our carbon imprint on the planet and this must be undertaken immediately and seriously by the over-industrialized nations that are the worst energy and resource abusers.
There is another way in which the term “climate change” may be used. That is, to refer to “climate” in the sense of “ambiance.” There is a strong need to change the climate of our thinking, specifically the passive acceptance of the abuse of our planet and its myriad species, including our own. In this sense, humanity lives far too much in a “climate” of ignorance and indifference. We have organized ourselves into consumer societies that demonstrate little concern for our responsibilities to the planet, to each other and to the future.
There are many ongoing problems in the world that deserve our awareness and engagement. The fact that these problems receive insufficient attention and action speak to the change of climate that is needed. Many of these problems were identified in the eight Millennium Development Goals: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality; reducing child mortality; reducing maternal mortality; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and establishing a global partnership for development.
While these major problems on our planet are not adequately addressed, the world is wasting more than $1.5 trillion annually on its military establishments. Many states are attempting to create military security at the expense of human security. The poor people on the planet are being marginalized while countries use their scientific resources and material wealth to produce ever more deadly and destructive armaments. In a climate of complacency, the military-industrial complexes of the world fulfill their gluttonous appetites while the poor and politically powerless of the Earth are left to suffer and die.
At the apex of the global order, the countries that emerged victorious in World War II anointed themselves as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. They continue to flaunt international law by their reliance upon nuclear weapons and by failing to engage in good-faith negotiations for the elimination of these weapons as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Because these countries behave as though their power and prestige are built upon these weapons of mass annihilation, other countries seek to emulate them. Nuclear proliferation is thus encouraged by the very states that seek to set themselves apart with these weapons.
Large corporations that stand to profit from a “renaissance” of nuclear power are promoting large nuclear energy projects as an alternative to using fossil fuels. They are trying to make nuclear power appear to be green. But they have not solved the four major problems with nuclear power: the potential for nuclear weapons proliferation; the failure to find any reasonable solution to storing the nuclear wastes, which will threaten the environment and humanity for tens of thousands of years; vulnerability to terrorism; and propensity to dangerous accidents.
If the large global corporations have their way, the Earth will become home for thousands of nuclear power plants, nations will seek to protect themselves with nuclear weapons (an impossibility), the threat of nuclear annihilation and global warming will continue to hang over our collective heads, extreme poverty in its many manifestations will persist, and we will follow either a slow path to extinction or a rapid one.
This is why we must change the climate of indifference and complacency that currently prevails upon our planet. We humans have the gifts of consciousness and conscience, but these gifts must be used to be effective. We must become conscious of what threatens our common future and we must care enough to demand that these threats be eliminated. The only force powerful enough to challenge the corporate and military power that is leading us to catastrophe is the power of an engaged global citizenry. This remains the one truly great superpower on Earth, but it can only be activated by compassion and caring.
If we do not care enough about the future to engage in the fight to save our species from catastrophe and our planet from omnicide, we need only to continue our complacency and leave the important decisions about protecting the environment and human life to powerful corporations and the world’s militaries. They have a plan, one based upon dangerous technologies and plunder. Their plan is shortsighted, designed to further enrich the already overly rich. To be silent is a vote for their plan.
As Albert Camus, the great French writer and existentialist, wrote in the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing: “Our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests. Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only battle worth waging. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments – a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.”
Let us stand with Camus in waging peace. Let us stand with Camus in choosing reason. Let us raise our voices and choose peace and a human future. Let us fulfill the responsibility of each generation to pass the world on intact to the next generation. We may be the only generation that has faced the choice of silence and annihilation, or engagement and rebuilding the paradise of our exceedingly precious planet, the only one we know of in the universe that supports life.
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John F. Kennedy Speaks of Peace
On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated. Nearly every American who is old enough can remember where he was when he heard the news of Kennedy’s death. In my case, I was on a train platform in Japan when I was told of the assassination. A Japanese man came up to me and said, “I’m very sorry to tell you, but your president has been shot and killed.” I remember being stunned by the news and by a sense of loss.
On June 10, 1963, just six months before his life was cut short, Kennedy gave the Commencement Address at American University. His topic was peace. He called it “the most important topic on earth.” As a decorated officer who served in combat during World War II, he knew about war.
Kennedy spoke of a generous and broad peace: “What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek?” he asked. “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons or war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”
He recognized that nuclear weapons had created “a new face of war.” He argued, “Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”
Just eight months before giving this speech, Kennedy had been face to face with the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He knew that it was possible for powerful, nuclear-armed nations to come to the brink of nuclear war, and he knew what nuclear war would mean for the future of humanity. “I speak of peace,” he said, “as the necessary rational end of rational men.”
Kennedy asked us to examine our attitudes toward peace. “Too many of us think it is impossible,” he said. “Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable – that mankind is doomed – that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.”
He understood that there was no “magic formula” to achieve peace. “Genuine peace,” he argued, “must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process – a way of solving problems.” He also recognized that peace requires perseverance.
Kennedy gave wise counsel in his speech. In the midst of the Cold War, he called for reexamining our attitude toward the Soviet Union. “Among the traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war.” He pointed out the achievements of the Soviet people and the suffering they endured during World War II.
In the speech, Kennedy announced two important decisions. First, he pledged to begin negotiations on a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Second, he initiated a moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing. The Partial Test Ban Treaty would be signed that August, ratified by the Senate in September and would go into effect on October 10, 1963. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was not reached until 1996, and the United States Senate rejected ratification of this treaty in 1999. The treaty still has not entered into force.
In his insightful and inspiring speech, Kennedy did get one thing wrong. He said that “[t]he United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.” One can only imagine Kennedy’s severe disappointment had he lived to see the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War and many other costly and illegal wars the U.S. has started and engaged in since his death.
Every American should read Kennedy’s Commencement Address at American University and be reminded that peace is a possibility that is worth the struggle. As Kennedy understood, war does not bring peace. Peace itself is the only path to peace. Kennedy believed, “No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable – and we believe they can do it again.” Peace is attainable. It is within our reach, if only we will learn from the past, stretch ourselves and believe that this is our destiny.
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Indefensible
This op-ed was originally published by the Los Angeles Times.
A year ago this week, American officials wrapped up a two-day inspection of a Russian strategic missile base at Teykovo, 130 miles northeast of Moscow, where mobile SS-25 intercontinental ballistic missiles are deployed.
Twelve days later, their Russian counterparts wrapped up a two-day inspection at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, home to a strategic bomb wing.
These inspections are noteworthy because they are the last to be conducted under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which expired in December 2009. No American inspectors have set foot on a Russian nuclear base since, depriving us of key information about Russian strategic forces.
Worse, if Republicans in the Senate succeed in delaying ratification of the New START agreement — a distinct possibility — it may be months before American inspectors get another look at Russian nuclear weapons.
This profoundly negative outcome would damage U.S. national security and set the cause of global arms control back years.
It would deprive the U.S. of the ability to assess, up close, the status and operations of Russian nuclear forces. It would undermine both nations’ ability to tamp down tensions as they arise. And it would signal to the rest of the world that the nations that hold 90% of nuclear weapons are incapable of taking a leadership role in arms control. This in turn would threaten nonproliferation efforts worldwide.
There are no substantive objections to the treaty. Instead, it is being held hostage to demands that the Obama administration pour billions more into the United States’ nuclear weapons complex, for modernization of weapons and increased spending on facilities and personnel.
Last week, the administration offered to add $4.1 billion to its previous commitment to spend $80 billion on modernization over the next decade.
The fact is, New START — signed on April 9 in Prague, the Czech capital, by President Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev — has been thoroughly vetted in 18 hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations, Armed Services and Intelligence committees. Concerns that have been raised, such as claims the treaty would hinder U.S. missile defense plans or interfere with conventional missile forces, have been debunked. The Senate has done its due diligence and is ready for an up-or-down vote on ratification.
To see what’s at stake, consider the Russian missile base at Teykovo. The Russians have upgraded at least one of the four garrisons there this year, replacing the single-warhead SS-25 ICBMs with new SS-27s capable of carrying multiple warheads, according to Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. All without any oversight by American inspectors.
So it’s clear why the New START treaty is strongly supported by our military and national security establishment, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael G. Mullen and numerous current and former commanders of U.S. Strategic Command and its predecessor, the Strategic Air Command.
The New START agreement will not erode our nuclear capabilities, strategic deterrent or national defense. In fact, as arms-control treaties go, it is modest stuff. It would cut deployed nuclear warheads by 30%, to 1,550 each, and launch vehicles — such as missile silos and submarine tubes — by more than 50%, to 800 each.
These levels are “more than enough … for any threat that we see today or might emerge in the foreseeable future,” said Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former head of U.S. Strategic Command.
During the 15-year lifespan of the old START agreement, the United States conducted 659 inspections of Russian nuclear facilities, and Russia conducted 481 inspections of our facilities.
It would be foolish and wrong to let partisan politics bring this era of cooperation to an end. Worse, it would make us blind to the true size and capabilities of the Russian arsenal. There is no question this would weaken our national security. That would be indefensible.
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Playing Politics with the New START Agreement
Soon after President Obama came to office he delivered a speech in Prague in which he said, “I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” He said America has a responsibility to act and to lead.
He then initiated negotiations with the Russians that resulted in a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, what has been labeled a “New START.” This treaty, signed on April 8, 2010 by Presidents Obama and Medvedev, has significant advantages for U.S. national security. It is an important next step in U.S.-Russian efforts to lessen the nuclear threat to humanity.
The treaty will accomplish four important objectives. First, it will lower the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons on each side to 1,550 and the number of delivery vehicles to 800 (700 deployed and 100 in reserve). Second, it will restore the verification procedures that expired with the START I agreement in December 2009. Third, it will strengthen our relations with the Russians, and put us on a footing to take future downward steps in the size of nuclear arsenals. Fourth, it will show the world that the U.S. and Russia are serious about their obligations to pursue negotiations in good faith for nuclear disarmament.
Many current and former U.S. military leaders and statesmen have spoken out in favor of the treaty. The commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, General Kevin Chilton, for example, has said, “Without New START, we would rapidly lose insight into Russian strategic nuclear force developments and activities, and our force modernization planning and hedging strategy would be more complex and more costly.”
Republican Senator Richard Lugar, a strong proponent of the treaty, has pointed out, “It is unlikely that Moscow would sustain cooperative efforts indefinitely without the New START Treaty coming into force.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid released a statement on November 17, in which he said, “It is vitally important to America’s national security for the Senate to ratify the New START treaty before Congress adjourns this year. We need our inspectors back on the ground and the critical information they can provide about Russia’s nuclear capabilities. Ratification of this treaty would accomplish both.”
So, what is the problem? We have a treaty negotiated and signed by the parties that both sides think benefits them and it benefits the rest of the world at the same time. The treaty should be a slam dunk for Senate ratification, but unfortunately that isn’t the case.
Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Minority Whip, who has been the Republican point person on this treaty in the Senate, is preventing a vote on the treaty. He is doing so despite the fact that the treaty was approved by a vote of 14 to 4 in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September. Sadly, America’s national security is being held hostage by one Republican leader in the Senate.
Senator Kyl has already negotiated a commitment from the White House of over $80 billion for modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal over the next ten years. This is a high price that is being paid, making many countries and world leaders doubt the sincerity of the U.S. commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. Recently, President Obama went even further to sweeten the deal for Senator Kyl by committing an additional $4.1 billion for modernization of the U.S. nuclear complex over the next five years.
The bottom line is that Senator Kyl is playing politics with a treaty that affects the national security interests of the United States. It appears he is trying to prevent a vote on the treaty in the Senate this year, either in order to embarrass President Obama on the world stage or to push consideration of the treaty off to 2011 when the new Senate is seated and less likely to ratify the treaty.
Click here to take action by asking your senators to encourage Sen. Kyl and Sen. McConnell to allow the New START agreement to come before the full Senate.
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Nobel Summit: Final Declaration on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons
The undersigned Nobel Peace Laureates and representatives of Nobel Peace Prize organizations, gathered in Hiroshima on November 12-14, 2010, after listening to the testimonies of the Hibakusha, have no doubt that the use of nuclear weapons against any people must be regarded as a crime against humanity and should henceforth be prohibited.
We pay tribute to the courage and suffering of the Hibakusha who survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and honour those that have dedicated their lives to teaching the rest of the world about the horrors of nuclear war. Like them, we pledge ourselves to work for a future committed to peace, justice and security without nuclear weapons and war.
“Nuclear weapons are unique in their destructive power, in the unspeakable human suffering they cause, in the impossibility of controlling their effects in space and time, in the risks of escalation they create, and in the threat they pose to the environment, to future generations, and indeed to the survival of humanity.” We strongly endorse this assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross, three times recognised with the Nobel Peace Prize for its humanitarian work.
Twenty-five years ago in Geneva, the leaders of the two largest nuclear powers declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” There has been some substantive progress since then. The agreements on intermediate range nuclear forces (INF); strategic arms reductions (START); and unilateral and bilateral initiatives on tactical nuclear weapons, have eliminated tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. We welcome the signing by the United States and Russia of the New START treaty and the consensus Nuclear Disarmament Action Plan that was adopted by the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference.
Nevertheless, there are still enough nuclear weapons to destroy life on Earth many times over. The proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possibility of their use for acts of terrorism are additional causes for deep concern. The threats posed by nuclear weapons did not disappear with the ending of the Cold War.
Nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented, but they can and must be outlawed, just as chemical and biological weapons, landmines and cluster munitions have been declared illegal. Nuclear weapons, the most inhumane threat of all, should likewise be outlawed in keeping with the 2010 NPT Review Conference final document, which reaffirmed “the need for all States at all times to comply with applicable international law, including international humanitarian law”.
Efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons must proceed along with measures to strengthen international law, demilitarize international relations and political thinking and to address human and security needs. Nuclear deterrence, power projection and national prestige as arguments to justify acquiring and retaining nuclear weapons are totally outdated and must be rejected.
We support the UN Secretary General’s five point proposal on nuclear disarmament and proposals by others to undertake work on a universal treaty to prohibit the use, development, production, stockpiling or transfer of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon technologies and components and to provide for their complete and verified elimination.
• We call upon heads of government, parliaments, mayors and citizens to join us in affirming that the use of nuclear weapons is immoral and illegal.
• We call for the ratification without delay of the START agreement by the United States and Russia and for follow-on negotiations for deeper cuts in all types of nuclear weapons.
• We call on all nuclear weapon possessor states to make deep cuts in their existing arsenals.
• We call on the relevant Governments to take urgent steps to implement the proposals agreed on in the 2010 NPT Review Conference Final Document towards realising the objectives of the 1995 resolution on the Middles East.
• We call on China, the United States, Egypt, Iran, Israel and Indonesia to ratify, and on India, Pakistan and North Korea to sign and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that has already been ratified by 153 nations so that the Treaty can be brought into full legal force.
• We call on nations to negotiate an universal treaty to abolish nuclear weapons, in partnership with civil society
To ensure that the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki never reoccur and to build a world based on cooperation and peace, we issue this call of conscience. We must all work together to achieve a common good that is practical, moral, legal and necessary – the abolition of nuclear weapons.
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Answering Bolton and Yoo: New START Will Strengthen U.S. National Security
Two staunch ideologues who served in the George W. Bush administration, John Bolton and John Yoo, ask rhetorically in a New York Times opinion piece, “Why Rush to Cut Nukes?” Bolton, a recess appointment as United Nations Ambassador under Bush II, never met an arms limitation agreement that he supported. Yoo, the lawyer who wrote memos supporting the legality of water boarding under international law (not a very favorable prospect for captured U.S. soldiers), worked in Bush II’s Justice Department. Bolton and Yoo can find no good reason to support the New START agreement with the Russians, arguing that without amendments it will weaken “our national defense.”
Let me answer the question posed in the title of their article. The Senate should support and ratify this treaty because it will strengthen U.S. national security by:
- reducing the size of the bloated nuclear arsenals in both countries, creating a new lower level from which to make further reductions;
- reinstating verification procedures that ended with the expiration of the first START agreement in December 2009;
- building confidence in the Russians that we stand behind our agreements; and
- sending a signal to the rest of the world that we are taking steps to fulfill our legal commitment under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to achieve nuclear disarmament.
The downsides of failing to ratify the treaty would be to remove restraints on the size of the Russian arsenal, forego inspection and verification of the Russian arsenal, undermine Russian confidence in U.S. commitments, and encourage further nuclear proliferation by other countries thereby increasing the possibilities of nuclear terrorism. Further, if the treaty is not ratified before the new Congress is seated in January 2011, its future ratification will be far more difficult.
What do Bolton and Yoo say they want? First, to remove language in the treaty’s preamble, which is not legally binding, that says there is an “interrelationship” between nuclear weapons and defensive systems. That language only recognizes a reality. Of course, there is a relationship between missiles and missile defenses. Second, they don’t want the U.S. to be limited in putting conventional weapons on formerly nuclear launch systems. But that is a price, and a fair one, that each side will pay for lowering the other side’s nuclear capabilities. Third, they want a Congressional act for the financing, testing and development of new U.S. warhead designs before the treaty is ratified. In other words, they want guarantees that the U.S. nuclear arsenal will be modernized. They seek long-term reliance on the U.S. nuclear threat, but this means that U.S. citizens will also remain under nuclear threat for the long-term.
Bolton and Yoo are an interesting pair. The first would lop ten floors off the United Nations, the second do away with the laws of war when they aren’t convenient. Do they deserve their own opinions? Of course. Do their opinions make any sense? Only in the context of the American exceptionalism and militarism that were the trademarks of the Bush II administration and have done so much to weaken the spirit, values and resources of the country while continuing to haunt us in our aggressive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One must wonder what possessed the New York Times to publish their rantings. Additionally, using the word “Nukes” in the title suggests somehow that nuclear weapons are cute enough to have nicknames and not a serious threat to the very existence of civilization. That Bolton and Yoo could rise to high positions in our country is a sad commentary on the country, but perhaps understandable in the context of the Bush II administration’s persistent flouting of international law. That the New York Times would find sufficient merit in their discredited opinions to publish their article is an even sadder commentary on the editorial integrity of one of the country’s most respected newspapers.
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Another World Is Possible
Dorothy and I are pleased and delighted to be here for this occasion. And on behalf of our families and ancestral families, on behalf of our sons and grandchildren, on behalf of the struggle of people everywhere for that other world that is possible, that other society that is possible, we accept with deep appreciation this award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. I am profoundly moved this evening for this opportunity, and in so many different ways you have encouraged my own spirit. The things that we’ve heard this evening are just wonderful, marvelous. The way in which this Foundation and David Krieger and the Board have sought to push the matter of peace, the end of war, the end of nuclear weapons, is for me a great shot of encouragement and adrenaline to keep on keeping on.
I have friends in this audience and I’m delighted to see them, as well. To walk in and see Stanley Sheinbaum here, one of my own personal heroes, a man with whom I’ve been related in a great variety of ways over the last 35 or 40 years, and who remains a stalwart figure in the tradition of what Joshua Heschel spoke of as God’s pathos, God’s passion. He is a wonderful illustration of that.
I looked over the invitation for this evening fairly carefully at home for several days. I noticed you have Glenn Paige and me joining a distinguished group of people, and I want to express my own humility to be on this list of people. I appreciate all that Glenn Paige has done, he belongs in that category, and his “nonkilling” notion, politics, are a tremendous idea, an idea whose time has come, and I want to especially applaud that we can have another kind of society.
I decided, in fact, I wanted to address quite briefly from the perspective of one on your Advisory Council, Harrison Ford, who is, in addition to his fame and celebrity and acting, an environmentalist who has worked in many different parts of the world as well as in the United States. This past January, I was taking a trip somewhere on Southwest Airlines. As I often do, I picked up their monthly magazine called The Spirit, and in that issue, January’s issue, there was this conversation between Bill Ford, of the Ford Company, and Harrison Ford—a conversation around the issues of the environmental movement and struggle. They have both participated in this cause around the world and know each other from that participation. It’s a very interesting piece, but towards the end of the piece, Harrison Ford, after talking with Bill Ford about environmental issues and the movement and the struggle, said something like this, and I’m not going to quote it exactly, but I’m going to give you the gist of what he said. He said what he sees now, after the years he’s given to it, is the failure of the environmental movement. He suggested something that I think is a point of strategy that has interested me ever since. He said the movement has failed because we have worked over the years from issue to issue and from species to species. That made a vivid picture in my mind, as I followed that movement across these decades. Then he said, concluding his critique of his own work and of a great movement, that what we need is a movement like the civil rights movement of a few years ago. So that’s going to frame the structure of what I’m going to say this evening.
In many ways, we who are the advocates of peace, we who want peace, have obviously failed in our own country and in the world. One could say this about the civil rights movement. One could say this about the anti-poverty movement. One could say this about the living-wage movement of which I’ve been a part for some now 25 years. I suspect many of the critical issues that you and I have worked for, and believe in, and imagine, have over the last 30 years, maybe more, simply not taken off in the mind of the people, the mind of the nation. We know our work remains in many different ways and forms. We can’t afford to have the peace movement fail. And in the first instance, across these last 30 years, we 300 million, plus a few, of this land are now participants in this nation that—as David has said here, which I have rarely heard anyone say—because of its military power and its financial power, has become, as Martin King said, the genitor of violence around the world. I’ve said it like this in the past: We in the United States have intentionally or unintentionally become the number one enemy of peace and justice in the world today. We’ve become the number one military, bar none, today or in the past, with 800 military installations in 130 countries, with naval fleets and with air fleets, and with military people on the ground, with massive technology, even with nuclear weapons for our use.
The nation has become a military security nation in many different ways, whether we have liked it or not, or whether we ourselves are or have been victims of it. But a major way in which we’ve failed is that we’re in a society now where there’s tremendous confusion and animosity, a lack of civil conversation and discussion, the unwillingness to put on the table the issues that we feel deeply about and the issues that are hurting and paining millions of our fellow citizens around the country. In all complexions and in all parts of the country, our own visions for our own land are being smashed steadily by a media that talks and talks and talks and talks, but very rarely about real human beings, very rarely about our country, very rarely about this magnificent 300 million people that we represent. On almost every issue in the present electoral scheme, there is little common sense being put on the table. There is very little wisdom from our own past as a nation, and the wisdom of the human race is nowhere to be found to any extent in most of the elections and the campaigns. And I’m sure there are a few instances where that’s not the case, but in most of the ones we hear about and read about, that wisdom from our own ancestry of the human race is simply not there.
Take this matter of nuclear weapons. This issue is a very personal issue with me. In August 1945, I was preparing for my senior year in high school in Massillon, Ohio, when the bomb was dropped on the 6th on Hiroshima, and then on Nagasaki on August 9th. For quite a number of years now I’ve tried to observe those two days in some ways of contemplation and peace. Within a few days after the 9th of August, the National Forensic League of the country sent out urgent letters to high schools across the country, saying the topic that had been designated for 1945-46 had been changed. It would now be “Does the atomic bomb make mass armies obsolete?”
So for the next nine months, my colleagues and I at Washington High School studied and explored and read about this question about which there was very little written. It was three months after that topic was chosen that the director of the Manhattan Project wrote a book called The Manhattan Project. No one knew very much about this at all. So, I learned in my reading that the soldiers of World War II in 1945 went into Japan to occupy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were told that the radiation was beneath the levels that would affect them. And when they began to report their sickness, they were told that whatever it was was not connected to the bomb. It took 30 years before the Army and the Navy and the U.S. Government admitted that the impact of those weapons upon those men had indeed produced the things the men and their wives and their families were reporting across the decades.
The weapons must be abolished. Not just nuclear weapons, but also every form of mass destruction weapons must be abolished.
I ask us the question, “What kind of people are we that we do not rise up with indignation?” That our own land, in spite of the lofty ideals and history that is extraordinary, will be using its energy and resources, as it has been said already this evening, for trying to get the human race to commit suicide, trying to reduce and discontinue this extraordinary species of life that you and I and billions of others represent.
I want to go to the second point here, namely, that we have not persuaded the American people that there is a quality of life that they’re missing, and that the leadership of many different governmental levels is refusing to allow us to have or to reach.
And that comes then to the concluding point that I wanted to make, namely, that in all the good work we are doing, somehow, we must help to ignite the non-violent struggle in the 21st century in our country, in the United States, that will help us on the one side not only to continue to dismantle those elements of our history and of our life today that we know are wrong, unjustified, impractical. At the same moment then, we lift up the highest values that we can achieve, namely equality, liberty and justice for every boy and every man and every girl and every woman in every part of our land, access to life, access to the opportunity for life, access to make themselves what God decrees their life is about, access to the resources that we have in the 21st century that can make life, human life, beyond our imagination, even maybe beyond the graphs of past history and the like.
For a non-violent struggle, what we do must sow the seeds. Nonkilling is critically important. I like Professor Paige’s use of the words “a science of non-killing.” I love it.
May I suggest to you the things about Gandhi and non-violence that are critical? Because Gandhi again and again insisted, “I am experimenting with, I am offering the evidence and the facts and the history of, a science of non-violence that allows human beings to create the sort of nation, and world, and community that they want. Non-violence is a science of social change. I will not say much beyond that, but I do want to insist upon this, something that Glenn has said, and also that David has said, namely: “Why is it that we are not at the place where we’d hope to be in this 21st century, where many of our ancestors wished us to be?” Part of the reality is that we have deceived ourselves, not only with these myths of violence and killing and nuclear deterrence. But most of all, we think that human life allows us to take a short cut, that we can create good out of wrong or evil, that we can create human affections that will hold us together in unity out of thinking and practicing the very opposite of human affections, namely hatred and despising or, very specifically, in some of our own systems, out of racism, sexism, violence, and economic greed, all of which denigrate human beings of infinite worth in the journey of life.
There’s a beautiful story, in the 19th chapter of the Book of Luke in the Christian Bible, of Jesus looking down across Jerusalem and weeping and saying, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, would that even today you knew the things that make for peace, but they are hidden from your eyes.” We today in our country, our leadership, our Pentagon, and the rest, do not know the things that make for peace. As A.J. Muste said at one point, “Peace is the way to peace,” the things that make for peace. We have great need for socio-political and economic change in the United States. Somehow we must persuade ourselves that the arena of social change, the arena of hope for the nations, is not in the troubled places around the world where we have our hands and our resources, but in Santa Barbara, in Chicago, in Waycross, Georgia, in Florida—here in our own country. The movement of which I was a part—which represents for me, indeed, an exhilarating time of life—did make the impact because King and Rosa Parks and Fanny Lou Hamer, and a whole host of people whose names are long forgotten, were convinced, like Gandhi, that, in a very real way, you cannot resist indignities in life with new indignities. Gandhi in South Africa invented the term “non-violence” for the first time, around 1906 or 1908. The reason he invented this was because he was organizing Muslims and Hindus for resisting the very racist and colonialist sort of laws that were being imposed upon his fellow countrymen in South Africa. He said, after great conversations and great contemplation, “I cannot resist this; I cannot move to change this by imitating it; I cannot challenge the government with the government’s theory and the government’s practice, that will only compound our difficulty.” It was there in that cauldron that he coined the term “non-violence” not as a negative, but as he says in his own writings, a positive. That love, the paramount force of life and of the universe, must be the context by which we resist the wrong that we feel and know. The reason that the Movement had the energy it did in those days was because we sought to insist that what we human beings are about anyway are not the things that are the agenda of the powers. They were about our families, sustaining love, encouraging life, healing love. We’re about the business of organizing our neighborhoods, our congregations, our schools, hoping to nurture life, not destroy it. The agenda of others who want power and domination are not where we see ourselves, and Gandhi insisted that the vast multitude of people of India and around the world were of the same mind.
Harrison Ford was right. The movement for which in part you celebrate my life and work this evening was a 20-year period of intensive strategizing and action and work of civil disobedience and, yes, of martyrdom for some, of injury for others; a 20-year period when, in each of those years from 1953-1973, there were literally thousands of actions across the country to make a difference, in which the people, millions of us, all around the country, worked on the new agenda, such as “Head Start,” worked in a legislative way while people were in jail and marching. We worked to pull the signs down in California, as well as in Tennessee. And we did this out of a sense that we could have another kind of society, somehow in our time and in our day.
I accept this award with a personal sense that I will continue to work on it. Somehow in our day we must convince ourselves we can have another world, we can have another nation. There is a more powerful vision that cannot only hold us in a way, but will allow us in the United States to find the burst of freedom and equality and liberty that will shock our imaginations, and will help us to see that we can be and will be the people history designates us to be in the 21st century.
Thank you very much.