Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear weapons

  • Time to Let Vanunu Go Now

    In l986 a young Israeli man, called Mordechai Vanunu, followed his conscience and told the World that Israel had a nuclear weapons program. He was convicted of espionage and treason and given an 18-year sentence. After serving this (12 of which were in solitary confinement) Mordechai Vanunu was released. In April 2004 about 80 people from around the world went to welcome him out of prison. Unbelievably, upon his release Mordechai was served with severe restrictions, which forbade him many basic civil liberties including his right to leave Israel, to speak to foreigners and foreign media and his travel within Israel restricted.

    Each year around the 2lst April, he receives a letter from the Prime Minister renewing restrictions, and Mordechai starts, yet again, the process of appealing these restrictions through the Israeli court. Most recently he has been charged with breaking the restrictions, by talking to foreign media, and given a 6 months prison sentence, which when he appealed, was set as community service. On 8th July, 2008, he will appear before an Israeli court regarding this service and his case.

    Four years since leaving Ashkelon prison, (and 22 years since he told about Israeli nuclear weapons) Mordechai Vanunu lives in modest accommodation in East Jerusalem, confined within a few miles radius, unable to earn a living, unaware of what to do to gain his freedom, unable to leave Israel, his life in danger, and left wondering if the Israeli Security will ever agree to let him leave the country. They say he is a threat to National Security, but everyone know that it is 22 years since Mordechai worked in Dimona Nuclear Plant, and the Nuclear industry has moved on. A well-known Israeli Nuclear scientist has testified that Mordechai can know nothing after such a long period, yet Israeli Security insists he is a risk to National Security, and Israeli Court and Government, refuse to let him go thereby compounding an injustice, and breaking international laws.

    Governments around the world have let Mordechai Vanunu down. They remain silent when they should be demanding the Israeli government uphold its obligations under UNDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and allow Vanunu to leave. (Everyone has the right to leave any country including their own and to return to their country – Article 13 – 2 UNDHR).

    So will Mordechai remain in Israel until he dies, or can anything be done to gain his freedom? I believe now Mordechai Vanunu’s freedom rests in the hands of the Israeli people themselves. Some years ago I asked a young Israeli friend why she thought Israel was holding Mordechai. She replied simply, “Because our Government does not trust its own people.” She added, “If the Israeli people would demand his release, it might be possible that he would be free to leave Israel and get on with his life.” I don’t know if she is right or wrong, I don’t know the Israeli mind or politics well enough to guess, but what I do know is that in the Jewish faith and tradition, there is a great deal of emphasis put on justice and doing what is right. I can now only hope and pray that on 8th July, 2008, that some Israeli voices will be raised to call for justice for Mordechai Vanunu, who has paid the high price of 22 years of his life for following his conscious, and whether you hate or love Mordechai Vanunu, to be fair you have got to admit that he has suffered enough and it’s time to let him go NOW.

    Mairead Maguire is a Nobel Peace Laureate and is Honorary President of the Peace People (www.peacepeople.com). She is also a member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Advisory Council.

  • Learning From Past Disasters, Preventing New Ones

    *This article is the foreword to the book Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents are Rarely Accidental by Dr. Marc Gerstein with Michael Ellsberg.

    I have participated in several major organizational catastrophes. The most well known of them is the Vietnam War. I was aware on my first visit to Vietnam in 1961 that the situation there — a failing neocolonial regime we had installed as a successor to French rule — was a sure loser in which we should not become further involved. Yet a few years later, I found myself participating as a high-level staffer in a policy process that lied both the public and Congress into a war that, unbeknownst to me at the time, experts inside the government accurately predicted would lead to catastrophe.

    The very word catastrophe, almost unknown in the dry language of bureaucracy, was uttered directly to the president. Clark Clifford, longtime and highly trusted adviser to U.S. presidents, told President Lyndon Johnson in July 1965: “If we lose fifty thousand men there, it will be catastrophic in this country. Five years, billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of men-this is not for us. . . .”

    But it was for us, casualties included, after Johnson launched an open-ended escalation just three days later. In time, Clifford’s estimates were all exceeded: Before our ground war was ended in eight years (not five), the cost in dollars was in hundreds of billions, over five hundred thousand men served in Vietnam in a single year (1968) out of three million altogether, and — uncannily close to his predicted figure — more than fifty-eight thousand soldiers had died. Clifford’s prophecy in his face-to-face session with the president at Camp David — “I can’t see anything but catastrophe for our nation in this area” — could not have been more urgent in tone or, tragically, more prescient.

    And Clifford’s was not a lone voice. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, had used almost the same words with him five months earlier; others, including Johnson’s career-long mentor Senator Richard Russell, had also made the same argument. Yet Johnson went ahead regardless.

    Why? I have pondered and researched that question for forty years. (The documentation in the Pentagon Papers provides no adequate answer.) But one seemingly plausible and still widely believed answer can be ruled out. The escalation in Vietnam was not the result of a universal failure of foresight among the president’s advisers, or to a lack of authoritative, precise, and urgently expressed warnings against his choice of policy.

    The nuclear arms race, in which I was intimately involved between 1958 and 1964 as a RAND Corporation analyst serving the executive branch, is a moral catastrophe on a scale without precedent in human history, even though its full tragic potential has not yet occurred. The arms race involved — under both Democratic and Republican administrations, soon joined by the USSR — the mutual construction of a physical and organizational capability for destruction of most of the world’s population within a matter of hours. That project — building two matched and opposed “doomsday machines” and keeping them on hair-trigger alert — is the most irresponsible policy in human experience, involving as it does a genuine possibility of creating an irreversible catastrophe for humanity and most other living species on a scale that the world has not seen since the dinosaurs perished sixty million years ago. Even if the system were decommissioned totally — and it is not yet remotely close to being dismantled — such a course of action would not cancel out the fact that over the past sixty years, a moral cataclysm has already occurred, with ominous implications for the future of life on earth.

    I have been trying since 1967 — when I realized that the Vietnam War must end — to understand how we got into that war, and why it was so hard to end it. Since 1961, even earlier, I have viewed the nuclear arms race as an ongoing catastrophe that has to be reversed, and a situation that has to be understood. I assumed then, and still believe, that understanding the past and present of these realities is essential to changing them. In my life and work, I have tried to do what Dr. Gerstein’s book is trying to help us do: to understand these processes in a way that will help us avert them in the future.

    A major theme to be gained from this important book is that organizations do not routinely and systematically learn from past errors and disasters — in fact, they rarely ever do. This intentional lack of oversight can partly explain why our predicament in Iraq is so precisely close to the Vietnam experience, both in the way that we got into the war, deceptively and unconstitutionally, and in the way the war is being conducted and prolonged.

    It might not seem surprising that after thirty years, a generation of decision-makers and voters would have come along that knew little about the past experience in Vietnam. What is more dismaying is to realize that much the same processes — the same foolish and disastrous decision-making, the same misleading rationales for aggression — are going on right now with respect to Iran, with little political opposition, just three years after the invasion of Iraq, and while the brutal and tragic consequences of that occupation are still in front of our eyes every day.

    One reason for this folly is that many aspects of disasters in decision-making are known only within the organization, and not even by many insiders at that. The organizations involved tend not to make relevant and detailed studies of past errors, let alone reveal them outside the organization. In fact, the risk that such a study or investigation might leak to the outside is a factor sufficient to keep inquiries from being made in the first place. Making or keeping possibly incriminating documentation earlier, at the time of the decision, or later is similarly sidestepped.

    This deliberate decision within organizations not to try to learn internally what has gone wrong constitutes what I have called, with respect to Vietnam, an anti-learning mechanism. Avoiding improved performance is not the point of the mechanism. But because studying present and past faulty decision-making risks may invite blame and organizational, political, perhaps even legal penalties, those outcomes “outweigh” the benefits of clearly understanding what needs to be changed within the organization.

    The valuable cases studies, analyses, and information in the pages of this book were not provided by the organizations involved. This compendium arose from the accounts of individual whistle-blowers, journalistic investigations, and in some cases congressional action- and from Dr. Gerstein’s own initiative in collecting and analyzing the data. Did any one of the organizations detailed herein conduct a comparable study? Quite possibly not a single one. And even if they did, they certainly didn’t publish the results in a way that would allow other organizations and individuals to learn from their mistakes.

    Societally, then, we don’t have an easy way to learn from organizational mistakes of the past. That’s one reason that disasters are so likely, and why comparable disasters occur again and again, across organizations and even within the same organizations. In the case of Vietnam, Americans did not learn from the French or Japanese occupations before ours. Nor did Republicans under Nixon manage to learn from Democratic missteps before theirs. Specifically, there was no systematic study of the Pentagon Papers, which were available within the Defense Department to the Nixon administration, but no one ever admitted to having read them or even to directing their staff to analyze possible lessons from them. (I personally urged Henry Kissinger, in a discussion at the Western White House in 1970, to do both of these, or at least the latter, but he later claimed he had never read anything of them or about them, though he had a copy available to him.) As far as we know, Secretary of Defense Laird, Henry Kissinger, and others had no interest in the documentary record and analysis of twenty-three years of decision-making in the same geographic area, against precisely the same adversaries. And so they ended up committing many of the mistakes made by those who’d gone before, with the same results.

    This “anti-learning” phenomenon also explains why it is possible to reproduce our experience in Vietnam years later in Iraq, and now, from Iraq to Iran. In sum, there is strong and successful resistance within many organizations to studying or recording past actions leading to catastrophe — because doing so would reveal errors, lies, or even crimes.

    There is no substitute for the kind of comparative study analysis Dr. Gerstein shares on these pages. I hope this book is read widely; if we are to avoid the kinds of disasters and catastrophes described, we first need to understand them. Flirting with Disaster is a pathbreaking, indispensable step toward such a goal.

    Daniel Ellsberg Berkeley, California July 2007

    Daniel Ellsberg is a Fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org)

  • Questions for the Candidates

    Article originally appeared in the International Herald Tribune

    There has been unusual interest throughout the world in the U.S. presidential race.

    Skeptics, of whom there are quite a few, say the campaign is just a marathon show that has little to do with real policymaking. Even if there’s a grain of truth in that, in an interdependent world the statements of the contenders for the White House are more than just rhetoric addressed to American voters.

    Major policy problems today cannot be solved without America – and America cannot solve them alone.

    Even the domestic problems of the United States are no longer purely internal. I am referring first of all to the economy. The problem of the huge U.S. budget deficit can be managed, for a time, by continuing to flood the world with “greenbacks,” whose rate is declining along with the value of U.S. securities. But such a system cannot work forever.

    Of course, the average American is not concerned with the complexities of global finance. But as I talk to ordinary Americans, and I visit the United States once or twice a year, I sense their anxiety about the state of the economy. The irony, they have said to me, is that the middle class felt little benefit from economic growth when the official indicators were pointing upward, but once the downturn started, it hit them immediately, and it hit them hard.

    No one can offer a simple fix for America’s economic problems, but it is hard not to see their connection to U.S. foreign policies. Over the past eight years the rapid rise in military spending has been the main factor in increasing the federal budget deficit. The United States spends more money on the military today than at the height of the Cold War.

    Yet no candidate has made that clear. “Defense spending” is a subject that seems to be surrounded by a wall of silence. But that wall will have to fall one day.

    We can expect a serious debate about foreign policy issues, including the role of the United States in the world; America’s claim to global leadership; fighting terrorism; nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and the problems caused by the invasion of Iraq.

    Of course I am not pretending to write the script for the presidential candidates’ debates. But I would add to this list of issues two more: the size of America’s defense budget and the militarization of its foreign policy. I am afraid these two questions will not be asked by the moderators. But sooner or later they will have to be answered.

    The present administration, particularly during George W. Bush’s first presidential term, was bent on trying to solve many foreign policy issues primarily by military means, through threats and pressure. The big question today is whether the presidential nominees will propose a different approach to the world’s most urgent problems.

    I am extremely alarmed by the increasing tendency to militarize policymaking and thinking. The fact is that the military option has again and again led to a dead end.

    One doesn’t have to go very far to find an alternative. Take the recent developments on nonproliferation issues, where the focus has been on two countries – North Korea and Iran.

    After several years of saber-rattling, the United States finally got around to serious talks with the North Koreans, involving South Korea and other neighboring countries. And though it took time to achieve results, the dismantling of the North Korean nuclear program has now begun.

    It’s true that nuclear issues in Iran encompass some unique features and may be more difficult to solve. But clearly threats and delusions of “regime change” are not the way to do it.

    We have to look even deeper for a solution. “Horizontal” proliferation will only get worse unless we solve the “vertical” problem, i.e. the continued existence of huge arsenals of sophisticated nuclear weapons held by major powers, particularly the United States and Russia.

    In recent months there seems to have been a conceptual breakthrough on this issue, with influential Americans calling for revitalizing efforts aimed at the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have now endorsed that goal.

    I have always been in favor of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction. On my watch, the Soviet Union and the United States concluded treaties on the elimination of a whole class of nuclear weapons – Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) missiles – and on A 50 percent reduction of strategic weapons, which led to the destruction of thousands of nuclear warheads.

    But when we proposed complete nuclear disarmament, our Western partners raised the issue of the Soviet Union’s advantage in conventional forces. So we agreed to negotiate major cuts in non-nuclear weapons, signing a treaty on this issue in Vienna.

    Today, I see a similar and even bigger problem, but the roles have been reversed. Let us imagine that 10 or 15 years down the road the world has abolished nuclear weapons. What would remain? Huge stockpiles of conventional arms, including the newest types, some so devastating as to be comparable to weapons of mass destruction.

    And the lion’s share of those stockpiles would be in the hands of one country, the United States, giving it an overwhelming advantage. Such a state of affairs would block the road to nuclear disarmament.

    Today the United States produces about half of the world’s military hardware and has over 700 military bases, from Europe to the most remote corners of the world. Those are just the officially recognized bases, with more being planned. It is as if the Cold War is still raging, as if the United States is surrounded by enemies who can only be fought with tanks, missiles and bombers. Historically, only empires had such an expansive approach to assuring their security.

    So the candidates, and the next president, will have to decide and state clearly whether America wants to be an empire or a democracy, whether it seeks global dominance or international cooperation. They will have to choose, because this is an either-or proposition: The two things don’t mix, like oil and water.

    Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, is president of the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies in Moscow.

  • Cold War Has Thawed Only Slightly

    Article originally appeared in Columbia Tribune

    At the conclusion of their April 2008 summit, Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin agreed the Cold War was over and that another Cuban missile crisis would be “unthinkable.” Standing nearby were U.S. and Russian military officers, each holding a briefcase from which their respective president could quickly transmit a launch order that, in about three minutes, would cause hundreds of ballistic missiles armed with thousands of nuclear warheads to begin their 30-minute flights toward Russia or the United States.

    Regardless of public expressions of friendship, the United States and Russia continue to operate under policies that assume each could authorize a nuclear attack against the other. The failure to end their Cold War nuclear confrontation causes both nations together to maintain a total of at least 2,600 strategic nuclear warheads on high-alert, launch-ready status, whose primary missions remain the destruction of the opposing side’s nuclear forces, industrial infrastructure and civilian/military leaders.

    Most Americans don’t know these weapons exist. They have no idea a single strategic nuclear warhead, when detonated over a city or industrial area, could ignite an enormous firestorm over a total area of 40 to 65 square miles. The vast nuclear arsenals have effectively been hidden from public view and removed from public knowledge, thus making it easy for smiling U.S. and Russian presidents to proclaim “peace in our time.”

    Another Cuban missile crisis might be “unthinkable,” but the continued U.S.-Russian nuclear confrontation means it certainly isn’t impossible. Presidential assurances to the contrary, the relations between Washington and Moscow are worse than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union. And nuclear weapons remain at the heart of U.S.-Russian political disagreements.

    Eleven months before the April 2008 summit, Putin revealed Russian tests of a new ballistic missile capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads were a response to the planned deployment of a new U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe. Bush said the U.S. system is designed to intercept Iranian missiles aimed at America. Russia argues Iran has no long-range missiles and is not soon likely to have them – and even if it did have them, the sites for the proposed U.S. radar and interceptors are hundreds of miles north of where they should ideally be located.

    The U.S. system, however, would be in an ideal spot to track European-based Russian nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. X-band radar in the Czech Republic and missile interceptors in Poland are to be located between 800 and 1,000 miles from Moscow. If the situation were reversed, it would be the geographical equivalent of putting Russian missiles on the northern edge of Lake Superior. Russia views the proposed U.S. system as a direct threat to its strategic nuclear weapons and warns it will target its missiles at the Czech and Polish sites where the system is to be based.

    Russian arguments are supported by two respected U.S. physicists, George Lewis and Theodore Postol. They say the U.S. missile defense system would be able to track and engage almost every Russian missile launched toward the United States from Russian sites west of the Urals. The physicists said the only obvious reason for choosing Eastern Europe for a missile defense site is to place U.S. interceptor missiles close to Russia, making it possible for the European-based radar and interceptors to be added as a layer against Russia to the already developing U.S. continental missile defense.

    Russia is also deeply threatened by constant efforts to expand NATO and encircle Russia with U.S. military bases. Despite vehement Russian objections, Bush continues to insist the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia be allowed to join NATO. Should this happen, NATO military forces will be positioned on the borders of Russia. If Ukraine joins NATO and accepts the deployment of U.S. anti-missile defenses on its territory, Russia has threatened to target it with nuclear warheads.

    NATO, which began as an anti-Soviet alliance, is locked in a Cold War mentality that regards Russia as the enemy and keeps nuclear weapons as a primary military option. Four hundred eighty U.S. nuclear bombs (a force larger than the entire deployed nuclear arsenals of France, the United Kingdom, China or Israel) are stored at eight European NATO bases. These forward-based U.S. weapons are intended for use, in accordance with NATO nuclear strike plans, against targets in the Middle East or Russia.

    The Cold War will not really end until the United States and Russia stand down their high-alert, launch-ready nuclear arsenals and finally cease their nuclear confrontation. This surely will not happen as long as the United States continues to push for NATO expansion while ignoring Russian concerns about its proposed European missile defense system.

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

    Firings and Hirings: the US Nuclear Arsenal Versus the People

    Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has announced the firing of two top Air Force officials for failure to adequately secure the nation’s nuclear weapons, citing a report that found a “problem…not effectively addressed for over a decade.” The individuals fired were the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But why stop there?

    The firing of these two men suggests that the problem is the adequate safeguarding of nuclear weapons and materials in the US arsenal. That is a serious problem, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Even if we could assure the security of all US nuclear weapons, we would not have dealt with the larger problem of assuring the security of US citizens from nuclear weapons. It is not only our own nuclear weapons we must worry about, but those of all other nuclear weapon states as well.

    What most Americans don’t realize is that nuclear weapons do not and cannot protect us. They are not a defensive shield. All we can do with nuclear weapons is threaten their use against a country that would attack us and then hope that our threat is adequately communicated and believed, and that the leadership on the other side behaves rationally. In other words, deterrence (threat of retaliation) is a theory about how people may behave, and not a means of defense. We are staking the future of our country and the world on deterrence working under all circumstances. Whoever came up with this concept should be fired immediately.

    In fact, some of the strongest proponents of deterrence during the Cold War are now calling for US leadership for a nuclear weapons-free world, precisely because they have concerns about the capacity of deterrence to provide for US security. Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have joined with former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn in pressing for a new approach to US nuclear policy. They wrote in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal article, “We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.”

    Working to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons will require far more than firing two air force officials. In the current administration, it would require firing the president. He has failed to pursue US obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; threatened preemptive use of nuclear weapons; kept US nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert status; sought to develop new nuclear weapons; failed to support US ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue missile defenses (or, more accurately, missile offenses); and has blocked proposals by Russia and China to ban the weaponization of space. The one nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia that the president achieved, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), does not go as low in the number of weapons as the Russians proposed, has no provisions for verification, requires no dismantling of weapons taken off deployed status, and ends on December 31, 2012.

    Both major party presidential candidates have said in general terms that they support the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. McCain stated that he shares Ronald Reagan’s dream “to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.” However, he characterizes that dream as “a distant and difficult goal.”

    Barack Obama has stated, “A world without nuclear weapons is profoundly in America’s interest and the world’s interest. It is our responsibility to make the commitment, and to do the hard work to make this vision a reality. That’s what I’ve done as a Senator and a candidate, and that’s what I’ll do as President.”

    Both candidates are short on details of how they intend to move forward. It is the responsibility of the American people to assure that the next president they elect have a solid plan for getting from where we are now to a world free of nuclear weapons and that he be ready to begin the process on his first day in office. It is certain that without determined US leadership a nuclear weapons-free world will remain a distant goal and the security of the American people will continue to be endangered by the threat of nuclear war, by design or accident, and by nuclear terrorism; and further, that our current arsenal of some 10,000 nuclear weapons will provide us with no protection.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The Foundation’s Appeal to the Next President can be signed at www.wagingpeace.org/appeal.

  • No Nuclear Weapons: An Interview with George Shultz

    Article originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

    George Shultz was there when nuclear disarmament slipped through our fingers. Today, he says, action is even more urgent. Sarah van Gelder interviews George Shultz, former Secretary of State.

    Twenty years ago, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev came within a hair’s breadth of agreeing to phase out their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The encounter took place at Reykjavik, Iceland, and one of the people who was there was Secretary of State George Shultz. When the proposal came up, he is reported to have said, “Let’s do it!”

    Today, from his office at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, he’s back on the case. In collaboration with former Senator Sam Nunn, William Perry, who was secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, this veteran of the Cold War is taking on what may be the biggest threat to human security.

    YES! executive editor Sarah van Gelder spoke to Secretary Shultz in March 2008, shortly after he returned from Oslo, where he led the third in a series of conferences on eliminating nuclear weapons—this one involving representatives of all the countries of the world that have nuclear weapons.

    Sarah: Can the United States be secure without its nuclear stockpile?
    Shultz: You’re going to be more secure if there are no nuclear weapons in the world, because if you achieve this goal, you won’t be risking having nuclear weapons blow up in one of our cities.

    At the conferences abroad I’ve been attending, it was certainly borne in on me that the notion of a two-tiered world—where some countries can have nuclear weapons and others can’t—is getting less and less acceptable.

    The Nonproliferation Treaty in Article 6 says that those who don’t have nuclear weapons will have access to nuclear power technology and they won’t try to get nuclear weapons, and those who do have nuclear weapons will phase down their importance eventually to zero. People are looking for governments to live up to that treaty.

    Sarah: Is it possible to verify that nuclear weapons have been eliminated?
    Shultz: That’s one of the main subjects to be worked on. The British government has volunteered to take on verification—to try to think through how you work it out.

    We have the START Treaty between the United States and Russia that includes the best verification procedures of anything that’s been developed. It expires in December of 2009, so we’re suggesting that the treaty be extended so as not to lose those verification provisions.

    Sarah: How would it affect our relative power in the world if nuclear weapons were eliminated?
    Shultz: At a meeting in Washington, DC, about a year ago, Henry Kissinger said, “The thing that I lost sleep over, and that I agonized about more than anything else when I was in office, was what would I say if the president ever asked my advice on whether to use a nuclear weapon, knowing that a hundred thousand or maybe more would be killed, and if there were a nuclear exchange, it would be in the billions.”

    Now that we know so much about these weapons and their power, they’re almost weapons that we wouldn’t use. So I think we’re better off without them.

    Of course the United States has such awesome conventional power, I think probably that on the relative balance we would be well off.

    Sarah: Do you think there can be nuclear energy without proliferation?
    Shultz: If you get the nuclear fuel cycle under control, yes. But I listen to people talk about nuclear power plants, and they hardly ever mention the issue. I don’t think people are alert to this problem.

    In terms of the nuclear fuel cycle, there is just as strong a feeling that you don’t want to have another two-tiered system, in which some countries are allowed to enrich uranium and others aren’t. I think there’s going to have to be an international regime on that.

    Sarah: Why is the reaction today so different from the reaction to President Reagan’s proposal at Reykjavik to eliminate nuclear weapons?
    Shultz: After Reykjavik, you may remember, the reaction was very negative. Margaret Thatcher came over, practically summoned me to the British ambassador’s residence, and she read me out: How could I possibly take part in such a discussion?

    I think it has dawned on people that we’ve gone to sleep on this subject. The proliferation problems are growing, and the amount of nuclear fissile material around is large, and some of it isn’t well safeguarded. We have a terrorist phenomenon, and the non-proliferation treaty is fraying at the edges. So maybe we should do something a little different.

    Sarah: You just returned from a conference in Norway on the abolition of nuclear weapons. What happened there?
    Shultz: Sam Nunn and I went. Henry Kissinger and Bill Perry were not able to go. Twenty nine countries were represented—all the countries with nuclear weapons, including Israel. The people there had their doubts, but they were intrigued; they can see there is a danger—a tipping point problem.

    We’re getting to the point where proliferation could get out of control. If a terrorist group gets a nuclear weapon or the fissile material from which they can make one, they aren’t getting it for deterrence. They are getting it to use it.

    The Doctrine of Deterrence justified nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The deterrent impact of Mutual Assured Destruction kept an uneasy peace, although if you were involved, you knew that there were more close calls than you were comfortable with.

    At the end of the Cold War, more countries were acquiring nuclear weapons, and others were aspiring to have them.

    The Gulf states all want nuclear power plants, and if you enrich your own uranium—as the Iranians aspire to do—you can enrich it for a weapon. When the fuel is spent, it can be reprocessed into plutonium. If nuclear power spreads—as the people who are worried about global warming are pushing for—then the problem of the nuclear fuel cycle emerges. All of these things together give you that uneasy feeling.

    Sarah: Have you had a response from the leading presidential contenders?
    Shultz: I haven’t seen anything from Senator McCain. Senator Obama has made a statement supporting what we’re doing. Senator Clinton has been a little less forthcoming than Senator Obama, but has indicated interest.

    I hope that I, or Henry, or someone can get a chance to talk to Senator McCain before long.

    Sarah: Is there active opposition to your initiative to eliminate nuclear weapons?
    Shultz: There are people who think that the idea is not a good idea and that it will never happen. Mostly, however, they say that they are in favor of the steps that we’ve identified. So we say, OK, let’s get going on the steps that we can do today that will make the world safer.

    Sarah: What response have you had from the Russians to this proposal?
    Shultz: No formal response. But, at our meeting in London, two former Russian foreign ministers were there, one of whom, I understand, is close to the current regime. When he finished speaking, I said, “Igor, will you let me translate what you said? It is that as far as Russia is concerned, the door is open.” He said, “That’s a fair translation. We’re ready to think about it.”

    That’s as good as you can get.

    Sarah: What is the first thing you would like the next president to do to move this process forward?
    Shultz: I’m not trying to prescribe for the next president. We’re trying to get the building blocks ready. We’ve talked to people from some other countries, and they’re interested enough so that if the United States, working with Russia, were to take this initiative and get other people to join, it might be pretty exciting. And it might once again put us in the role of doing something that people feel good about.

    There is quite a list of people—large numbers of former secretaries of state, defense, and national security advisors—who have publicly stated their support. So we’d be in a position to say to a new president, “If you decide to go this way, here are a bunch of people from both sides of the aisle who are willing to stand up behind you and applaud.”

    Sarah van Gelder interviewed George Shultz as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is Executive Editor of YES! Magazine.

  • Global Article 9 Campaign to Abolish War Launched in Japan

    ARTICLE 9: JAPANESE CONSTITUTION: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

    After World War II, the victorious allied powers, implementing a transition to democracy in Japan, required Japan to forego any future aggressive military action by including a provision in their new Constitution to renounce war and the threat or use of force. But by 1950, following the outbreak of the Korean War, when US General MacArthur ordered the establishment of a 75,000-strong Japanese National Police Reserve equipped with US Army surplus materials, numerous assaults have been made on the integrity of Article 9. By 1990, Japan was ranked third in military spending after the US and the Soviet Union, until 1996 when it was outspent by China and dropped to fourth place. Today, the US-Japanese joint Theater Missile “Defense” which in reality poses an “offensive” threat to China, as well as the US military bases in Japan, and other US-Japanese military cooperation have further undermined the spirit of Article 9. Presently, the Bush Administration is creating an all out assault on the peace constitution, pressuring the Japanese government to amend Article 9 in order to permit Japanese soldiers to serve in the wars of the Empire, providing fresh cannon fodder for battles in Iraq and Afghanistan and other imperial adventures yet undeclared.

    The citizen activists of Japan are resisting the US led assault on their beloved peace constitution. This May in Tokyo, at the launch of a Global Article 9 Campaign to Abolish War, organized by the Japanese NGO, Peaceboat, 15,000 people showed up for the first day’s plenary and over 3,000 people had to be turned away from the filled-to-capacity convention center, causing the organizers to set up an impromptu program outdoors for the overflow crowd where keynote speakers, including Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate, rallied the participants to call on their government to preserve their constitution’s provision for the renunciation of war. This unprecedented turnout to uphold Japan’s constitution, launched a Global Article 9 Campaign to Abolish War with more than 22,000 people attending the three day meeting in Tokyo, and 8,000 more gathering in Hiroshima, Osaka, and Sendai to organize for peace. More than 40 countries were represented at the various plenaries and workshops with over 200 international visitors, which examined opportunities to reinforce and expand Article 9 in a new 21st century context. Article 9 was promoted not only as a disarmament measure for all the nations of the world, but as a means of redistributing the world’s treasure, now wasted at the rate of over one trillion dollars per year to feed the murderous war machine, using those funds to restore the health of the planet and end poverty on earth.

    One of the most moving and inspiring presentations was the shared experiences of a young Iraqi Sunni soldier, Kasim Turki, who quit fighting in the middle of a fierce battle in Ramadhi and has now organized a team working to rebuild schools and hospitals in Iraq, joined by Aidan Delgado, an American Iraq war vet, who also laid down his arms in the middle of a battle in Iraq and took conscientious objector status, refusing to ever kill again.. The two young soldiers and former enemies have become friends, sharing experiences and urging the abolition of military power and war. Their presentations were welcomed resoundingly by the participants who were inspired and moved by their fierce devotion to peace.

    Although cruel wars have been common throughout human history, there has been nothing like the enormous speed up of destructive war, fueled by science and technology, suffered in this last century, starting with 20 million deaths after World War I and ending with well over 100 million deaths by the end of the 20th Century– the horrors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda– only a few of the tragic catastrophes rendered by the instruments of war. Yet it was only in 1969, less than 40 years ago, that humanity landed on the moon and, for the first time saw the image of our fragile, beautiful blue planet, floating in space, giving us a new perspective of a unified world, sharing this small spaceship earth. It could only have been a profound influence on our consciousness that is bound to help us shift from the paradigm of war and technological domination and control to a more balanced nurturing interdependent vision for the health of earth’s inhabitants in an expanded understanding of Article 9.

    The US Constitution was imperfect at its drafting, failing to consider slaves as people or to recognize women’s right to vote. Evolving consciousness led to the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women. Similarly, it is hoped, by the many participants who gathered in Japan, that a transformed earth consciousness will perfect the original limited vision of the “Renunciation of War” infusing the Article 9 initiative for a global effort to stop all violence on the planet, not only for Japan, but for the whole earth. We discussed not only the violence of wars in the traditional meaning but in an expanded context of destruction against all living things and the very living systems of our planetary home itself– or as Professor Keibo Oiwa at at Meiji Gakuin University characterized it in the workshop, “Linking Environment and Peace”, a Pax Ecologia.

    And as we met in Tokyo, half way around the world in Berlin, only a few days earlier, Germany convened a meeting of sixty nations to launch a Campaign for IRENA, an International Renewable Energy Agency, see www.irena.org, to facilitate new reliance around the world on the safe, abundant, free energy of the sun, wind, and tides, foregoing resource wars and food shortages, currently plaguing the earth’s people as a result of a non-sustainable out of date energy regime of fossil, nuclear and biofuels. Irene, the Greek word for peace adds a unique resonance to this critical initiative to shift our dependence on energy to benign sources, plentifully distributed around our planet for all to access peacefully. Support for the establishment of IRENA was issued in the final statement of the Article 9 conference to the participants at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Conference which convened at the same time in Geneva to address issues of nuclear disarmament and proliferation.

    Currently, only one other country, Costa Rica, has a constitutional provision similar to Japan’s to abolish war. At the close of the conference, Carlos Vargas, representing Costa Rica, invited the organizers to his country for a follow up planning meeting to expand the Article 9 Campaign to make peace provisions a reality in every national constitution around the world. For more information, see http://www.article-9.org/en/index.html ; http://www.peaceboat.org/english/index.html

    Alice Slater is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s New York representative (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • Simulated Attack Reveals Security Flaws at Livermore

    A recent mock terrorist infiltration conducted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), located near San Francisco, showed that fissile material necessary for building nuclear weapons was not hard to obtain. In Building 332, the faux-invaders found access to approximately 2,000 pounds of weapons-grade uranium and deadly plutonium, a surplus bountiful enough to build at least 300 nuclear weapons. The simulated attack also revealed problems with the lab’s hydraulic system which controls the Gatling gun responsible for protecting the facility.

    Voices from Capitol Hill, across party lines, called the incident “an embarrassment to those responsible for securing the nation’s nuclear facilities,” and called for immediate steps to correct the lab’s major security weaknesses. Danielle Brian, Executive Director of the Project on Government Oversight, explained the danger of allowing terrorists access to the wealth of nuclear materials at Livermore. She argued that terrorists willing to sacrifice their lives would not need to escape the lab safely with apprehended fissile materials. “They could simply detonate it as part of an improvised nuclear device on the spot.” With nearly seven million residents within 50 miles of the lab, the possibility of such a detonation has led many experts to urge the lab to choose a more remote location for nuclear material.

    The laboratory undergoes staged attacks annually, and the faux foes are timed to see how much damage real invaders could inflict. Can the attackers evade the lab’s security system just in time to build a “dirty bomb” for immediate detonation? Can they hold off the lab’s armed guards long enough to quickly construct a rudimentary device with a destructive capability akin to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or, would it be best to simply rush past the out-of-order Gatling gun and leave the lab altogether, fissile materials in tow, to use a nuclear device in the heart of San Francisco?

    Located above an irrigation canal, less than two miles from elementary schools, a pre-school, a middle school, a senior center, and a major highway junction, Livermore’s security defects have invigorated opposition to the storage of nuclear weapons materials at the lab. Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CARES, a nuclear weapons watchdog group, argued that the fissile materials at Livermore “simply cannot be made safe and secure.” She explained that the Livermore community, consisting of 81,000 residents, strongly desires that the plutonium and highly enriched uranium be moved elsewhere.

    The stores of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium across the street are not the only thing inducing anxiety among Livermore’s residents. The lab’s security system, assuming that its components are in working order, also serves to stir unease in the suburban homes nearby. The laboratory’s Gatling guns, which were purchased by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) just after the Department of Energy approved doubling the lab’s plutonium storing capacity, each release the force of a dozen armed guards, firing 4,000 rounds per minute and taking down targets up to a mile away. Former Administrator of the NNSA, Linton Brooks, explained that the guns “leave no doubt about the outcome” in the event of a military-style air or ground attack on the lab.”

    Kelley, of Tri-Valley CARES, referred to “children on bicycles and skateboards … people walking their dogs,” along the western perimeter of the lab, and questioned the transformation of the science laboratory into a fortified arsenal, prepared for military style attacks. In a residential neighborhood, she argued, “you can’t just indiscriminately open fire.” The Gatling guns are supposed to be tested regularly, and no explanation has been given for their malfunction.

    While the security failures exposed at Livermore seem unacceptable to most, many experts believe that many more exist, and remain undiscovered due to inherent flaws in the “force-on-force” simulated attacks. The mock intrusions generally occur at night or on weekends when the lab’s employees are safe at home and not susceptible to hostage-taking, and when the defenders are given advance notice of the attack. The staff-free corridors of the laboratory during these simulations do not give the defenders accurate practice at securing the lab, as they do not have to distinguish their firing between innocent bystanders and intruders. The “force-on-force” exercises also do not assess the lab’s capability of withstanding an attack from a rogue aircraft passing along one of the flight paths to or from one of the nearby airports.

    In a press release on the newly exposed security flaws, the Department of Energy (DOE) explained that the “force-on-force” simulation revealed both positive aspects of the security system and others “requiring corrective action.” A spokesperson told Time that the DOE does not believe the nuclear materials at Livermore are at risk, but is “interested in examining any deficiencies.”

    As long as there are those who seek access to the US’ stores of plutonium and uranium at Livermore, and those who build their lives on the suburban streets around the lab, perhaps the DOE should examine the prospect of transplanting its fissile material fortress, rather than waiting for new deficiencies to emerge, or simulated failures to become real tragedies.

    Rachel Hitow is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Washington, DC Intern.

  • Major Lapses in Nuclear Security Are Routine

    Article originally appeared in The Independent (UK)

    Do you know the story of the grizzly bear that nearly destroyed the world? It sounds like a demented fairytale — but it is true. On the night of 25 October 1962, when the Cold War was at its hottest and Kennedy and Krushchev’s fingers were hovering over the nuclear button, a tall, dark figure tried to climb over the fence into a US military installation near Duluth, Minnesota. A panicked sentry fired at the figure but it kept coming — so he sounded the intruder alarm. But because of faulty wiring, the wrong alarm went off: instead, the klaxon announcing an incoming Soviet nuclear warhead began its apocalyptic wah-wah. Everyone on the base had been told there would be no drills at a time like this. The ashen men manning the station went ahead: they began the chain reaction of retaliation against Moscow.

    It was only at the last second that the sentry got through to the station. It was a mistake, he cried — just a bear, growling at the fence. If he had made that call five minutes later, you wouldn’t be reading this article now.

    I have been thinking about that bear recently, because there has just been a string of startling security lapses in the British and American nuclear arsenals. In the past year alone, a truck carrying a fully-assembled nuclear weapon has skidded off the road in Wiltshire and crashed, while six nuclear warheads were lost by the US military for 36 hours.

    A new documentary called Deadly Cargo, recently premiered in Glasgow, documents a simple and extraordinary fact: every week, fully assembled Weapons of Mass Destruction are driven along the motorways and byways of Britain. Britain’s nuclear submarines are up in Scotland, while the factories that need to test and replenish them are down in Reading — so they are shuttled between them all the time in large green trucks that are followed a half-mile behind by decontamination units. It slipped on ice and crashed not long ago.

    The film shows how a group of brave protesters called NukeWatch have been able to figure out the exact route of the convoy and track it. One of them explains, “You reach out on the motorway and they’re an arm’s length from you. That’s how close the British public come to nuclear weapons.” If they could work it out, couldn’t other groups with uglier motives do the same?

    Leaked documents from the Ministry of Defence show them fretting that an attack on the convoy “has the potential to lead to damage or destruction of a nuclear warhead within the UK” and “considerable loss of life”.

    More amazingly still, Britain’s weapons do not have a secret launch code. They can be fired or detonated by the commander in charge of them simply by opening them up manually and turning some switches and buttons. Every other nuclear power has an authorisation code known only to the country’s leader, which has to be read out to the soldiers in charge of the weapon before it can be used. Not us. Whenever the British government has tried to introduce this basic safety procedure, the Navy has got huffy and refused to participate, saying it is “tantamount” to claiming their officers are not “true gentlemen”.

    The Navy dismiss the risk of a hijacking, or a Doctor Strangelove situation where a navy commander goes nuts. But the latter has almost happened. In 1963, a US B-47 bomber crew guarding a nuclear bomb discovered that one of their colleagues had broken all the seals, removed all the safety wires, and turned on the pilot’s readiness switch and the navigator’s control switch on the nuclear bomb. The man seemed to be going through a bout of insanity.

    In the US, an even-more startling nuclear lapse occurred last summer: bombs with the force of 60 Hiroshimas were simply lost by the military. On 29 August, a group of US airmen accidentally attached six nuclear warheads to their plane, mistaking them for unarmed cruise missiles intended for a weapons graveyard. They were then flown across the continental United States and left, unwatched by anyone, on an airstrip in Louisiana. Nobody even noticed they were gone for more than a day. This is not, it seems, a freak event: the Air Force’s inspector general found in 2003 that half of the “nuclear surety” inspections conducted that year were failures. Yes, that’s half.

    This is what we know is happening in relatively orderly and open societies. There have almost certainly been incidents in China and North Korea and Pakistan that we will never hear about — until the worst happens.

    The dangers of any individual nuclear accident are, of course, very small — but small risks of massive death, accumulating over the 60 years of the nuclear age, suddenly don’t look so negligible any more. Those who campaign for a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons are often referred to as utopian, or naïve. In fact, it is utopian to believe we can carry on like this without an explosion sooner or later.

    So it is disturbing that the number of nuclear weapons in the world may be about to dramatically increase. Not in Iran, where (thankfully) sanctions seem to be working, but in Russia and China. The Bush administration, backed by the British government, has been insisting for more than 20 years on building a “nuclear shield” that would, in theory, shoot down any incoming nuclear weapons before they struck the US and its allies. After more than $100bn of military-industrial bungs, the technology still doesn’t work, but they are pushing on with it anyway. Russia and China have been pleading for a treaty that would prevent it because they want to retain the existing balance of power — but the Bush administration has flatly refused.

    The result? China and Russia are now saying they will significantly increase their nuclear weapon production. It is, they insist, the only way to ensure they would be able to punch through the US missile shield and so retain some parity with US power.

    The more weapons, the more likely an accident — or worse. But when the world should be scaling down the number of nukes, the Bush administration is actually ensuring they are ramped up.

    Almost unnoticed in the Presidential race, Barack Obama has proposed the US recommit itself to moving towards a world without nukes. This isn’t out-of-the-blue: his best work as a Senator has been trying to lock up Russia’s barely guarded old weapons — while Bush tried to slash the funding for it. Some 66 per cent of the US public support the zero-nukes goal. Yet Hillary Clinton has been bragging about her ability to “obliterate” Iran instead, while McCain has cheered on the Bush shield-madness. There is no popular movement to pressure them into sanity.

    Without the careful multilateral dismantling of these weapons, thousands of them will remain scattered across the earth, waiting — waiting for an accident with a bear, or a hijacked convoy, or a flipped-out submarine commander. Precisely how many nuclear near-death experiences do you want to risk?

    Johann Hari writes for The Independent.

  • Ten Years of the Bomb

    Article originally appeared in The International News (Pakistan)

    It is 10 years since India and Pakistan went openly nuclear. The dangers of a nuclear south Asia are becoming more and more apparent, yet the governments of the two countries continue to build their arsenals. Both countries continue to produce plutonium for more and more bombs, both countries have been testing new kinds of delivery vehicles and both countries have conducted war games assuming the use of nuclear weapons. The pursuit of nuclear weapons is beginning to take, as elsewhere in the world, a logic of its own. South Asia awaits a strong peace movement that will make the governments of India and Pakistan see reason.

    In the 10 years since the May 1998 nuclear weapons tests by India and Pakistan, the bomb has largely faded from view in south Asia. But the bomb is not gone. The nuclear logic continues to unfold relentlessly.

    In both India and Pakistan, the nuclear tests were sold to the public as guaranteeing national security. It did not take long for both countries to discover that the bomb was no defence. The Kargil war followed barely a year after the nuclear tests. The war proved that the bomb would not defend India from attack and was no guarantee of victory for Pakistan. It only showed that two nuclear armed countries can fight a war and that in such a situation leaders in both countries will threaten to use nuclear weapons.

    But Kargil was not enough to teach caution and restraint. A little over two years later, India and Pakistan prepared to fight again. An estimated half a million troops were rushed to the border, and nuclear threats were made with abandon. What lessons have been learned? None, other than that they need to be better prepared to fight a war. Both countries have carried out major war games that assumed the possible use of nuclear weapons. effects of a Nuclear War Political leaders and military planners seem impervious to the fact that a war between Pakistan and India in which each used only five of their nuclear weapons on the other’s cities could kill several million people and injure many more. The effects of a nuclear war could be much worse if India and Pakistan use about 50 weapons each. They have made more than enough nuclear weapons material to do this. Recent studies using modern climate models suggest that the use of 50 weapons each by the two countries could throw up enough smoke from burning cities to trigger significant cooling of the atmosphere and land surface and a decrease in rainfall that could last for years. This could, in turn, lead to a catastrophic drop in agricultural production, and widespread famine that might last a decade. The casualties would be beyond imagination.

    India and Pakistan are still producing the plutonium and highly enriched uranium that are the key ingredients in nuclear weapons. Nuclear policymakers in both countries obviously do not think they have enough weapons. They have never explained how they will decide how many weapons are enough.

    For the past decade the two countries have also been waging a nuclear missile race. Both India and Pakistan have tested various kinds of missiles, including ones that would take as little as five minutes to reach key cities in the other country. Some of the tests are now carried out by the military, not scientists and engineers. These are user trials and field exercises. They are practising for fighting a nuclear war.

    There is more to come. Pakistan has been testing a cruise missile that could carry a nuclear warhead. India has tested a ballistic missile that can be fired from a submarine. It is reported that the plan is eventually to have a fleet of five submarines, with three deployed at any time, each armed with 12 missiles (perhaps with multiple warheads on each missile) with a range of 5000 km. Pakistan already has a naval strategic command and has talked also of putting nuclear weapons on submarines. It is a familiar logic that south Asia has still not learnt. The search for nuclear security is a costly and dangerous pursuit that will take on a life of its own and knows no end. It took almost 20 years to go from an American president declaring the bomb to be the “greatest thing in history”, to a successor recognising that nuclear weapons had turned the world into a prison in which man awaits his execution. This hard-won recognition has still not come to south Asia.

    Only when an active and sustained peace movement is able to awaken people and leaders to this terrible truth can we move to the next stage in resisting and eliminating the bomb and all that it represents.

    Zia Mian is a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, USA.