Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear weapons

  • Tadatoshi Akiba to Take Up Duties as MPI Chairman in October

    Tadatoshi Akiba

    The former Mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba, who recently was named Chairman of the Middle Powers Initiative, will take up his duties in October 2012.  His first major task is to plan the next meeting of the MPI Framework Forum, which will be held in Berlin in early 2013.

    As President of Mayors for Peace, Professor Akiba developed a network of 5,300 mayors in 153 countries and regions who united in calling for negotiations to start on a nuclear weapons convention. He was Mayor of Hiroshima from 1999 until 2011.  He started his professional career as a mathematics professor in New York before being elected to the Japanese House of Representatives in 1990. David Krieger, Chairman of MPI’s Executive Committee, hailed Akiba, one of the world’s foremost campaigners for the abolition of nuclear weapons, as “an internationally respected leader for his stewardship of Mayors for Peace.”

    Founded in 1998 by eight prominent nuclear disarmament organizations, MPI works with influential middle power countries to bridge the political divide between nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states, and to advance practical proposals for nuclear disarmament. Akiba will direct MPI’s work, which consists of delegations to capitals, publishing briefs on nuclear disarmament, and organizing and facilitating informal government consultations.

    Since 2005, MPI has brought governments together in informal Article VI Forum consultations to forge an agreed pathway to a nuclear weapons-free world, based on the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Article VI obligation to achieve nuclear disarmament. MPI has started a new series of consultations, called the “Framework Forum,” for interested governments to start preparatory work leading to negotiations for a global ban on nuclear weapons.

    In addition to being a leading international voice for peace and nuclear disarmament, Akiba championed environmental protection and government transparency.  For his dedication to a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world, he has received many honors, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award (often considered Asia’s Nobel Prize), the Sean MacBride Peace Prize from the International Peace Bureau, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Distinguished Peace Leadership Award.

    Senator Douglas Roche, founding Chairman of MPI, welcomed the appointment of Akiba: “With his deep knowledge of nuclear disarmament issues, unending commitment to the abolition of nuclear weapons, immense personal prestige, and outstanding international reputation, Tad Akiba will lift up MPI and make it an even more effective instrument helping to produce a nuclear weapons-free world.”

    MPI’s co-sponsors include: Albert Schweitzer Institute, Global Security Institute, International Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation, International Peace Bureau, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

  • Declaration of Independence from a War Economy

    When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to dissolve the political and economic bands which have connected them with an industry and a bureaucracy that have held sway over their lives, and to assume an equal station among the peoples of the earth, living free from permanent war in an equal station to people of other nations as the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness living in a state of peace. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Humanity, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.

    Prudence, indeed, will dictate that patterns of Governance long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under an intolerable War Economy, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such improper Governance, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

    Such has been the patient sufferance of the people of these United States during seven long decades under a Permanent War Economy; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Governance. The history of recent decades is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of a highly militarized state functioning as a Tyranny over the citizens of these United States as well as to others in many nations around the world. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

    They have spent exorbitant sums on wars and munitions, undermining our security by leaving programs to care for our people and environment wanting. They have hollowed out our cities, left our schools crying for funding, allowed our infrastructure to decay, and generally disregarded important governmental functions critical to the security of our nation.

    They have even failed to adequately provide for the care of our veterans, so many of whom are suffering from injuries and psychological trauma as a result of their deployments.

    They have incurred unnecessary and odious debt, in order to fund the Military-Industrial Complex, cumulatively adding up to trillions of dollars, which will burden our progeny for decades to come, with no benefit to our populace.

    They have engaged repeatedly in illegal, aggressive war-making and foreign interventions that have had nothing to do with defending our nation. Our government has entered into a state of war repeatedly, without the constitutionally mandated declaration of war.

    They have repeatedly flouted international law that requires that military force be used only defensively or when authorized by the United Nations Security Council. This law, established under a treaty signed by our President and ratified by our Senate, is, under our Constitution, the highest law of the land.

    They have repeatedly violated the Nuremberg Principles which hold that aggressive war-making is a Crime Against Peace, and, as such, is the highest form of war crime.

    They have sent our young men and women off repeatedly to fight in these wars, leading to millions of casualties, including deaths, injuries, chemical poisoning and psychological traumatization of our military personnel.

    They have caused the death, injury, poisoning and traumatization of millions of people in the nations where our government has intervened, doing harm to these people and creating enemies in the process, thus undermining our security.

    They have overthrown, or participated in the overthrow of, democratically elected governments in many countries including Iran, Guatemala, Greece, Chile and Haiti, imposing, in the process, brutal, repressive regimes.

    They have supported, armed and trained the militaries of, and generally aided numerous unpopular and repressive governments. Our government and military have thus allied themselves with ruling elites and made our nation an enemy to the majority of the people of these countries
    in the process.

    They have created, armed, trained and operated proxy armies to conduct aggressive war-making on behalf of the interests of large trans-national corporations and their allies. This has been done in places like Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, Cuba and many other nations.

    They have used the geopolitical power generated through military intervention and force, combined with the economic leverage of the international banking and monetary system, to impose unfair trade regimes on the Global South. In the process, they have hurt not only the people of the developing world, but also American workers millions of whom have lost jobs to outsourcing.

    They have repeatedly used Napalm, White Phosphorus and other incendiary weapons in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq and other countries, causing horrific pain and suffering to combatants and civilians alike.

    They have illegally conducted drone warfare, repeatedly attacking, killing and maiming people, including non-combatants, in countries such as Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan, without legal or moral authority to do so.

    They have created and maintained vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction that threaten humanity’s survival. They’ve even used nuclear weapons, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. To this day, they refuse to abide by the provisions of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which require the mutual elimination of such weapons.

    They have produced enormous inventories of long-lived, carcinogenic radioactive waste without any plan as to how to isolate these wastes from the environment for the required hundreds of thousands of years.

    They have dispersed dangerous radionuclides into the atmosphere through nearly two decades of above ground nuclear weapons testing, contaminating military personnel and civilians alike. And they have poisoned underground aquifers through predictable leakage of these long-lived wastes.

    They have used Depleted Uranium weapons in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere leading to the chemical and radiological contamination of combatants, including our own troops, civilians, residential areas, farmland and water supplies.

    They have, through the creation of a Permanent War Economy, moved our nation in a direction dramatically at odds with the intention of our founders. More than two centuries ago, President George Washington warned us of the dangers of large standing armies and permanent military alliances. Over the past seven decades, we have ignored this advice, and have paid dearly.

    The Permanent War Economy has enriched the few and impoverished the majority. It has contributed to the skewing of income and lead to a dangerous concentration of wealth, power and political influence in the hands of a few. We have seen not just war on other nations, but War on the Environment as well, with corporate powers plundering our seas, ravaging our coasts, destroying our environment and laying waste to the natural resources that belong to us all, and future generations.

    In every stage of the growth of the War Economy We and our predecessors have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms. We have written letters, made phone calls, met with our Representatives and Senators, held peaceful vigils and demonstrations of all sorts: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. The Military-Industrial Complex has seen fit to continue its abuses unabated. Their actions make clear that they are unfit to be rulers of a free people.

    We, therefore, speaking for the peace loving people of our nation and appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name of the good People of this Nation, solemnly publish and declare, That these United States are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent of the control and influence of the War Economy; that we are Absolved from all Allegiance to the Military-Industrial Complex, and that all political connection between the people of this Nation and the perpetrators of the War Economy is and ought to be totally dissolved; And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

  • Why Waltz is Wrong

    David KriegerThe lead article in the July/August 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs is titled “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.”  The author, Kenneth Waltz, a former president of the American Political Science Association, argues that the world should stop worrying about Iran getting the bomb.  He sums up his basic argument this way: “If Iran goes nuclear, Israel and Iran will deter each other, as nuclear powers always have.  There has never been a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states.  Once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, deterrence will apply, even if the Iranian arsenal is relatively small.”


    In essence, Waltz puts his faith in nuclear deterrence and justifies this in historical terms.  But the history is short and there have been many close calls.  During the 67-year period since the dawn of the Nuclear Age there have been numerous accidents, miscalculations and threats to use nuclear weapons.  Fifty years ago, the US and Soviet Union stood at the precipice of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Waltz’s faith in nuclear deterrence reflects a belief in rationality, a belief that all leaders will behave rationally at all times, including under conditions of extreme stress.  This defies our understanding of human behavior and the ever-present potential for human fallibility. 


    Another way to view the historical data from which Waltz finds comfort is by an analogy of a man jumping off a hundred-story building.  As he passes floor after floor, he wonders why people on the ground are showing concern for his well-being.  He ignores the approaching ground and focuses his attention on the fact that nothing bad has happened to him yet.  In Waltz’s theory of nuclear deterrence, there is no hard ground below, nor gravity acting upon the jumper.  He argues that “history has shown that where nuclear capabilities emerge, so, too, does stability.  When it comes to nuclear weapons, now as ever, more may be better.”  While having more may be better, it may also be far worse. 


    Martin Hellman, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University and an expert in risk analysis, argues that a child born today has a ten percent or greater chance of having his or her life cut short by nuclear war.  Unlike Waltz’s analysis, risk analysis takes into account the odds of an event occurring and doesn’t base its analysis of the future simply on what the historical record shows at a given point in time.  Ten coin flips may produce ten straight “heads,” but it would be unwise to assume that the results between heads and tails would not even out over time.  With nuclear weapons, the consequences of being wrong in one’s projections are, of course, far more dire than with coin tosses.


    Another analogy that has been used to describe the standoff between nuclear-armed powers, particularly the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War, was of two men standing up to their waists in the same pool of gasoline and each man being ready to strike an unlit match.  If either man struck the match, both men would be consumed by the fire that would result.  With nuclear weapons, the conflagration would not stop at the two men – it would include their families, their communities, their countries and the world. 


    Waltz makes the bet that no leader of a nuclear weapon state will ever strike the match or allow the match to fall into hands that will strike it.  It is a foolish bet to make.  The two men, and the rest of us, would be far safer if the gasoline were drained from the pool.  In the same way, the world would be much safer if nuclear weapons were abolished, rather than shared in the hope they would enhance security in the Middle East or elsewhere.


    Waltz may believe that it is precisely the threat of conflagration that keeps the men from striking the matches.  For many, even most, men he may be correct, but the fact is that neither Waltz nor anyone else can predict human behavior under all conditions.  There may be some leaders in some circumstances for whom striking the match would seem rational.  In addition, even if neither man were to strike a match, lightning may strike the pool of gasoline or other sparks may ignite the pool from unforeseen causes.  Instances of accidents, madness and human fallibility abound.


    Nuclear weapons have brought humankind to the precipice.  These weapons threaten cities, countries, civilization and complex life on the planet.  It is the responsibility of those of us alive on the planet now to abolish these weapons of mass annihilation, not justify their spread, as Waltz would have us do.

  • Kenneth Waltz is not Crazy, but he is Dangerous: Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East

    Richard FalkIt seems surprising that the ultra-establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, would go to the extreme of publishing a lead article by the noted political scientist, Kenneth Waltz, with the title “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb” in its current issue. It is more the reasoning of the article than the eye-catching title that flies in the face of the anti-proliferation ethos that has been the consensus lynchpin of nuclear weapons states, and especially the United States. At the same time, Waltz takes pain to avoid disavowing his mainstream political identity. He echoes without pausing to reflect upon the evidence undergirding the rather wobbly escalating assumption that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons at this time. Waltz does acknowledge that Iran might be only trying to have a ‘breakout’ capability of the sort long possessed by Japan and several other countries, that is, the technological capacity if facing a national emergency to assemble a few bombs in a matter of months. Nowhere does Waltz allude to the recently publicized agreement among the 14 American intelligence agencies that there is no evidence that Iran has decided to resume its military program that had been reportedly abandoned in 2003. In other ways, as well, Waltz signals his general support for the American approach to Israeli security other than in relation to nuclear weapons, and so, it should be clear, Waltz is not a political dissenter, a policy radical, nor even a critic of Israel’s role in the region.


    Waltz’s Three Options


    Waltz insists that aside from the breakout option, there are two other plausible scenarios worth considering: sanctions and coercive diplomacy to induce Iran “to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons,” which he deems unlikely to overcome a genuine appetite for the bomb, or Iran defies the pressures and acquires nuclear weapons, which he regards as the most desirable of the three options. It seems reasonable to wonder ‘why.’ In essence, Waltz is arguing that experience and logic demonstrate that the relations among states become more stable, less war-prone, when a balance is maintained, and that there is no reason to think that if Iran acquired nuclear weapons it would not behave in accordance with the deterrence regime that has discouraged all uses of nuclear weapons ever since 1945, and especially during the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this regard, Waltz is expressing what I regard to be a wildly exaggerated faith in the rationality and prudence of leaders who make decisions on matters of war and peace.


    He does make a contextual argument that I mostly agree with, namely, that Israel alone possessing a regional nuclear monopoly is more dangerous and undesirable than Iran becoming a second nuclear weapons state in the region. In effect, a regional nuclear monopolist is worse than a regional system of balance that incorporates deterrence logic. For Israel to be deterred would contribute to peace and security in the region, and this seems likely to reduce somewhat, although at a level of risk far short of zero, the prospect of any use of nuclear weapons and other forms of aggression in the Middle East. But to say that A (Iran gets the bomb) is better than B (breakout capability but no bomb) and C (sanctions and coercive diplomacy induce Iran to forego bomb) is to forget about D, which is far better than A, B, and C in relation to sustainable stability, but also because it represents an implicit acknowledgement that the very idea of basing security upon the threat to annihilate hundreds of thousand, if not more, innocent persons is a moral abomination that has already implicated the nuclear weapons states in a security policy, which if ever tested by threat and use, would be genocidal, if not omnicidal, and certainly criminal. This anti-nuclear posture was substantially endorsed by a majority of judges in a groundbreaking Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on 8 July 1996, although these strong findings as to international law were, not surprisingly, cast aside and ignored by the nuclear weapons states, most defiantly by the United States.


    The Case for Option D


    What then is Option D? Option D would involve the negotiation and implementation of a nuclear weapons free zone throughout the Middle East (MENFZ), reinforced by non-aggression commitments, normalization of economic and political relations, and ideally accompanied by genuine progress toward a just and sustainable Palestine/Israel peace accord. Significantly, Waltz does not even pause to consider it as in all likelihood he regards such an approach as completely inconsistent with the hard power realities of global diplomacy, making it foolish and irrelevant to take the possibility of a MENFZ seriously. Needless to say, D is also not in the Netanyahu playbook, and quite likely no future Israeli leader will be prepared to give up the nuclear weapons arsenal that Israel has been consistently acquiring and developing over the last four decades. And it seems fair to conjecture that anyone who proposes a MENFZ would be at odds with the realist camp in international relations, and such a piece would almost certainly be rejected by the editors of Foreign Affairs, among the most ardent guardians of the realist status quo.


    Waltz’s preference for A, favoring an Iranian bomb, is an extension of his long-standing belief that proliferation as actually desirable based on a view of global security that depends on sustaining power balances. In my judgment this carries confidence in the logic of deterrence (that is, the rationality of not using the bomb because of a fear of nuclear retaliation) to absurd degrees that go well beyond even the extreme rationality relied upon by the most influential war thinkers during the Cold War era. In this sense, Waltz is correct to equate the Middle East with the rest of the world, and not engage in the widespread practice of ethno-religious profiling: that is, Israel’s bomb is okay because it is a rational and ‘Western,’ while Iran’s bomb would be a world order disaster as it is irrational and governed by Islamic zealots that have declared their implacable hostility to Israel. If such distinctions are to be made, which is doubtful, it should be appreciated that Israel is the antagonist that has been threatening war and pushing for coercive diplomacy, while it is Iran that has so far peacefully tolerated a variety of severe provocations, acts of war, such as the assassination of several of its nuclear scientists, the infecting of its enrichment centrifuges with the Stuxnet virus, and verified violent covert acts designed to destabilize the Tehran regime. Had such incidents been reversed, it is more than 100% likely that Israel would have immediately gone to war against Iran, quite likely setting the entire region on fire.


    Objections to Option A


    My basic objection to the Waltz position is a disagreement with two of his guiding assumptions: first, with respect to the region, that other countries would not follow Iran across the nuclear threshold, an assessment he bases largely on their failure to acquire nuclear weapons in response to Israel’s acquisition of the capability. Surely Saudi Arabia and Turkey would not, for reasons of international status and perceived security, want to be non-nuclear states in a neighborhood in which both Israel and Iran had the bomb. Such an expansion of the regional nuclear club would become more prone to accident, miscalculation, and the sort of social and political pathology that makes nuclear weaponry generally unfit for human use in a conflict, whatever the region or occasion. In this respect, the more governments possess the bomb, the more likely it becomes that one of those horrible scenarios about a nuclear war will become history.


    And secondly, Waltz does not single out nuclear weapons for condemnation on either ethical or prudential grounds. In fact, he seems to hold the view that we can be thankful for the bomb as otherwise the Cold War would likely have resulted in a catastrophic World War III. In my view to have sought the bomb and then used it against the helpless Japanese at the end of World War II was certainly one of the worst instances of Promethean excess in human history, angering not only the gods but exhibiting a scary species death wish. Leaders have acknowledged this moral truth from time to time, most recently by Barack Obama in his 2009 Prague speech calling for a world without nuclear weapons, but politicians, including Obama, seem unable and unwilling to take the heat that following through would certainly entail. In the end, anti-nuclearism for leaders seems mainly an exercise in rhetoric, apparently persuasive in Norway where the Nobel Prize committee annually ponders the credentials of candidates, but without any behavioral consequences relating to the weaponry itself.  To be sure nuclear policies are challenged from time to time by a surge of anti-nuclear populism. In this regard, to favor the acquisition of the bomb by any government or political organization is to embrace the nuclearist fallacy relating to security and the absurd hubris of presupposing an impeccable rationality over long stretches of time, which has never been the case in human affairs.


    The secrecy surrounding policy bearing on nuclear weapons, especially the occasions of their possible use, also injects an absolutist virus into the vital organs of a democratic body politic. There is no participation by the people or even their representatives in relation to this most ultimate of political decisions, vesting in a single person, and perhaps including his most intimate advisors, a demonic capability to unleash such a catastrophic capability. We now know that even beyond the devastation and radiation, the smoke released by the use of as few as 50 nuclear bombs would generate so much smoke as to block sunlight from the earth for as long as a decade, dooming much of the agriculture throughout the world, a dynamic that has been called ‘a nuclear famine.’ As disturbing as such a possibility should be to those responsible for the security of society, there is little evidence that such a realization of the secondary effects of nuclear explosions is even present in political consciousness. And certainly the citizenry is largely ignorant of such a dark eventuality bound up with the retention of nuclear weapons.


    It is for these reasons that I would call Kenneth Waltz dangerous, not crazy. Indeed, it is his extreme kind of instrumental rationality that is dominant in many influential venues, and helps explain the development, possession, and apparent readiness to use nuclear weapons under certain conditions despite the risks and the immorality of the undertaking. If human society is ever to be again relatively safe, secure, and morally coherent, a first step is to renounce nuclear weapons unconditionally and proceed with urgency by way of an agreed, phased, monitored, and verified international agreement to ensure their elimination from the face of the earth. It is not only that deterrence depends on perfect rationality over time and across space, it is also that the doctrine and practices of deterrence amounts to a continuing crime against humanity of unprecedented magnitude and clarity!   

  • Fear of Nuclear Weapons

    David KriegerI was recently asked during an interview whether people fear nuclear weapons too much, causing them unnecessary anxiety.  The implication was that it is not necessary to live in fear of nuclear weapons.


    My response was that fear is a healthy mechanism when one is confronted by something fearful.  It gives rise to a fight or flight response, both of which are means of surviving real danger.


    In the case of nuclear weapons, these are devices to be feared since they are capable of causing terrifying harm to all humanity, including one’s family, city and country.  If one is fearful of nuclear weapons, there will be an impetus to do something about the dangers these weapons pose to humanity.


    But, one might ask, what can be done?  In reality, there is a limited amount that can be done by a single individual, but when individuals band together in groups, their power to bring about change increases.  Individual power is magnified even more when groups join together in coalitions and networks to bring about change.


    Large numbers of individuals banded together to bring about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa.  The basic building block of all these important changes was the individual willing to stand up, speak out and join with others to achieve a better world.  The forces of change have been set loose again by the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement across the globe.


    When dangers are viewed rationally, there may be good cause for fear, and fear may trigger a response to bring about change.  On the other hand, complacency can never lead to change.  Thus, while fear may be a motivator of change, complacency is an inhibitor of change.  In a dangerous world, widespread complacency should be of great concern. 


    If a person is complacent about the dangers of nuclear weapons, there is little possibility that he will engage in trying to alleviate the danger.  Complacency is the result of a failure of hope to bring about change.  It is a submission to despair.


    After so many years of being confronted by nuclear dangers, there is a tendency to believe that nothing can be done to change the situation.  This may be viewed as “concern fatigue.”  We should remember, though, that any goal worth achieving is worth striving for with hope in our hearts.  A good policy for facing real-world dangers is to never give up hope and never stop trying.


    Nuclear weapons threaten the future of the human species and other forms of complex life on the planet.  Basically, we have three choices: active opposition to nuclear weapons, justification of the weapons, and complacency.  These are three choices that confront us in relation to any great danger. 


    It is always easier to choose, often by default, justification or complacency than it is to mount active opposition to a danger.  But dangers seldom melt away of their own accord and there is no reason to believe that policies of reliance on nuclear weapons will do so.  These policies need to be confronted, and such confrontation requires courage.  Fear can be most useful when it gives rise to the courage and commitment to bring about change for a safer and more decent future for humanity.

  • Letter to President Obama: Veto the National Defense Authorization Act

    2012_06_18_house_ndaa.pdf

  • Do Nuclear Weapons Really Deter Aggression?

    Lawrence WittnerIt’s often said that nuclear weapons have protected nations from military attack.

     

    But is there any solid evidence to bolster this contention? Without such evidence, the argument that nuclear weapons prevented something that never occurred is simply a counter-factual abstraction that cannot be proved.

     

    Ronald Reagan — the hardest of military hard-liners — was not at all impressed by airy claims that U.S. nuclear weapons prevented Soviet aggression. Kenneth Adelman, a hawkish official in the Reagan administration, recalled that when he “hammered home the risks of a nuclear-free world” to the president, Reagan retorted that “we couldn’t know that nuclear weapons had kept the peace in Europe for forty years, maybe other things had.” Adelman described another interchange with Reagan that went the same way. When Adelman argued that “eliminating all nuclear weapons was impossible,” as they had kept the peace in Europe, Reagan responded sharply that “it wasn’t clear that nuclear weapons had kept the peace. Maybe other things, like the Marshall Plan and NATO, had kept the peace.” (Kenneth Adelman, The Great Universal Embrace, pp. 69, 318.)

     

    In short, without any solid evidence, we don’t know that nuclear weapons have prevented or will prevent military aggression.

     

    We do know, of course, that since 1945, many nations not in possession of nuclear weapons and not part of the alliance systems of the nuclear powers have not experienced a military attack. Clearly, they survived just fine without nuclear deterrence.

     

    And we also know that nuclear weapons in U.S. hands did not prevent non-nuclear North Korea from invading South Korea or non-nuclear China from sending its armies to attack U.S. military forces in the ensuing Korean War. Nor did massive U.S. nuclear might prevent the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Also, the thousands of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal did nothing to deter the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on U.S. territory.

     

    Similarly, nuclear weapons in Soviet (and later Russian) hands did not prevent U.S. military intervention in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Nor did Soviet nuclear weapons prevent CIA-fomented military action to overthrow the governments of Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, and other nations.

     

    Other nuclear powers have also discovered the irrelevance of their nuclear arsenals. British nuclear weapons did not stop non-nuclear Argentina’s invasion of Britain’s Falkland Islands. Moreover, Israel’s nuclear weapons did not prevent non-nuclear Egypt and non-nuclear Syria from attacking Israel’s armed forces in 1973 or non-nuclear Iraq from launching missile attacks on Israeli cities in 1991. Perhaps most chillingly, in 1999, when both India and Pakistan possessed nuclear weapons, the two nations — long at odds — sent their troops into battle against one another in what became known as the Kargil War.

     

    Of course, the argument is often made that nuclear weapons have deterred a nuclear attack. But, again, as this attack never took place, how can we be sure about the cause of this non-occurrence?

     

    Certainly, U.S. officials don’t appear to find their policy of nuclear deterrence very reassuring. Indeed, if they were as certain that nuclear weapons prevent nuclear attack as they claim to be, why are they so intent upon building “missile defense” systems to block such an attack — despite the fact that, after squandering more than $150 billion on such defense systems, there is no indication that they work? Or, to put it more generally, if the thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons safeguard the United States from a nuclear attack by another nation, why is a defense against such an attack needed?

     

    Another indication that nuclear weapons do not provide security against a nuclear attack is the determination of the U.S. and Israeli governments to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state. After all, if nuclear deterrence works, there is no need to worry about Iran (or any other nation) acquiring nuclear weapons.

     

    The fact is that, today, there is no safety from war to be found in nuclear weaponry, any more than there was safety in the past produced by fighter planes, battleships, bombers, poison gas, and other devastating weapons. Instead, by raising the ante in the ages-old game of armed conflict, nuclear weapons have merely increased the possibility that, however a war begins, it will end in mass destruction of terrifying dimensions.

     

    Sensible people and wise government leaders have understood for some time now that a more promising route to national and international security is to work at curbing the practice of war while, at the same time, banning its most dangerous and destructive implements. This alternative route requires patient diplomacy, international treaties, citizen activism, the United Nations, and arms control and disarmament measures. It’s a less dramatic and less demagogic approach than brandishing nuclear weapons on the world scene. But, ultimately, it’s a lot safer.

  • Nuclear Insanity: A Brief Outline

    David KriegerAlbert Einstein, at the request of his friend and fellow physicist, Leo Szilard, sent a letter dated August 2, 1939 to President Franklin Roosevelt, in which he expressed concern about the potential for an atomic weapon and the possibility that the Germans would develop such a weapon.  Einstein recommended increased scientific efforts and better funding in the US.  This led to the establishment of a low-budget Uranium Project and then, in 1942, to the large-scale Manhattan Engineering Project to develop atomic weapons.


    The Nuclear Age began in the summer of 1945 with the first test of a nuclear device at Alamogordo, New Mexico, followed within a month by the destruction of two undefended Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The bombings demonstrated the direct effects of nuclear weapons: blast, fires and radiation.  Approximately 90,000 people in Hiroshima died immediately and 145,000 by the end of 1945.  Approximately 40,000 people in Nagasaki died immediately and 75,000 by the end of 1945.  The survivors of these bombings continue to suffer from radiation-related illnesses.


    By early 1946 the US had tested nuclear weapons in its Trust Territory, the Marshall Islands.  For the next three years, until the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapons, the US engaged in a unilateral nuclear arms race.  Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands with the equivalent explosive power of one-and-a-half Hiroshima bombs each day for 12 years.  The Marshall Islanders continue to suffer from radiation-related illnesses.


    In 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon, breaking the US nuclear monopoly and opening the way for a nuclear arms race between the US and Soviet Union. 


    In 1970, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) entered into force.  The parties to the treaty agreed that, in exchange for non-nuclear weapon states committing not to develop or acquire nuclear weapons, the nuclear weapon states would engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament.


    At the height of the nuclear arms race, in 1986, there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, with over 97 percent in the arsenals of the US and Soviet Union.


    In 1995, 25 years after the NPT entered into force, the parties to the treaty held a Review and Extension Conference, at which they agreed to extend the treaty indefinitely, despite the fact that the nuclear weapon states had made virtually no progress toward fulfilling their nuclear disarmament obligations. 


    A year later, in 1996, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an Advisory Opinion to the United Nations General Assembly in which they stated, “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”


    In 2012, some 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the number of nuclear weapons in the world has been reduced, but there remain more than 19,000 of them, 95 percent of which are in the arsenals of the US and Russia, but some of which are in the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.


    From the beginning of the Nuclear Age to the present, the US alone has spent more than $7.5 trillion on nuclear weapons, their delivery vehicles and their command and control systems.  The US is continuing to spend some $50 to $70 billion annually on its nuclear arsenal.  All nuclear weapon states, including the US, are engaged in modernizing (qualitatively improving) their nuclear arsenals.


    In the 1980s, scientists warned of Nuclear Winter, but their models were not highly sophisticated and were challenged.  In the past several years, though, their findings have been validated using more sophisticated models.


    Leading atmospheric scientists now warn of nuclear famine from the effects of even a small nuclear war.  They modeled a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in which each side detonates 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons on the other side’s cities.  Smoke from the burning cities would rise into the stratosphere, where it would reduce warming sunlight for up to ten years, dropping temperatures on Earth to the lowest levels in the past 1,000 years and shortening growing seasons across the planet.  The result would be crop failures and a nuclear famine, which could result in the deaths of hundreds of millions to a billion people globally.


    In the modeled India-Pakistan nuclear exchange, less than one-half of one percent of the explosive power in the deployed nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia would be used.  A nuclear war between the US and Russia, in which the cities and industrial areas of the two countries were attacked, could result in lowering global temperatures to those of the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago, leading to the extinction of most or all complex life on the planet. 


    Launch-ready, land-based nuclear-armed missiles are particularly dangerous, because there would be very little time for decision makers to determine whether an alarm were real or false.  The presidents of the US and Russia would have 12 minutes or less to decide whether to launch a retaliatory attack to what could be a false warning.


    Nuclear weapons and human fallibility are a dangerous mix, particularly when extinction could be the result of human or technological error.


    The possibility of nuclear famine makes nuclear weapons abolition imperative, since the future of human survival on the planet may well depend upon it.


    To end the threat of nuclear omnicide (death of all) by means of nuclear famine, a three-step process is needed.


    First, a major education program to warn policy makers and the public of the dangers of nuclear famine.


    Second, an advocacy program to obtain commitments from the nuclear weapon states of No Use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states and No First Use of the weapons against other nuclear weapon states.  If no country used their nuclear weapons first, they would not be used.


    Third, an advocacy program to achieve a new treaty for complete nuclear disarmament, as required by the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice.  The new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, would provide for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.


    Achieving such a treaty will require leadership from the US, the only country to have used nuclear weapons and the most technologically advanced country on the planet.  Pressure from US citizens and from non-nuclear weapon states will be needed in support of US leadership.


    To put pressure on the nuclear weapon states to commit to No First Use and a Nuclear Weapons Convention, bold action is needed.  At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we propose that, if the nuclear weapon states have not already begun negotiations for a Nuclear Weapons Convention by the start of the 2015 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, the non-nuclear weapon states boycott the Review Conference and initiate a process for negotiating a Nuclear Weapons Convention.

  • Should NATO Be Handling World Security?

    This article was originally published by History News Network.


    Lawrence WittnerThe North Atlantic Treaty Organization (better known as NATO) is in the news once again thanks to a NATO summit meeting in Chicago over the weekend of May 19-20 and to large public demonstrations in Chicago against this military pact.


    NATO’s website defines the alliance’s mission as “Peace and Security,” and shows two children lying in the grass, accompanied by a bird, a flower and the happy twittering of birds. There is no mention of the fact that NATO is the world’s most powerful military pact, or that NATO nations account for 70 percent of the world’s annual $1.74 trillion in military spending.


    The organizers of the demonstrations, put together by peace and social justice groups, assailed NATO for bogging the world down in endless war and for diverting vast resources to militarism. According to a spokesperson for one of the protest groups, Peace Action: “It’s time to retire NATO and form a new alliance to address unemployment, hunger, and climate change.”


    NATO was launched in April 1949, at a time when Western leaders feared that the Soviet Union, if left unchecked, would invade Western Europe. The U.S. government played a key role in organizing the alliance, which brought in not only West European nations, but the United States and Canada. Dominated by the United States, NATO had a purely defensive mission — to safeguard its members from military attack, presumably by the Soviet Union.


    That attack never occurred, either because it was deterred by NATO’s existence or because the Soviet government had no intention of attacking in the first place. We shall probably never know.


    In any case, with the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, it seemed that NATO had outlived its usefulness.


    But vast military establishments, like other bureaucracies, rarely just fade away. If the original mission no longer exists, new missions can be found. And so NATO’s military might was subsequently employed to bomb Yugoslavia, to conduct counter-insurgency warfare in Afghanistan, and to bomb Libya. Meanwhile, NATO expanded its membership and military facilities to East European nations right along Russia’s border, thus creating renewed tension with that major military power and providing it with an incentive to organize a countervailing military pact, perhaps with China.


    None of this seems likely to end soon. In the days preceding the Chicago meeting, NATO’s new, sweeping role was highlighted by Oana Longescu, a NATO spokesperson, who announced that the summit would discuss “the Alliance’s overall posture in deterring and defending against the full range of threats in the twenty-first century, and take stock of NATO’s mix of conventional, nuclear, and missile defense forces.”


    In fairness to NATO planners, it should be noted that, when it comes to global matters, they are operating in a relative vacuum. There are real international security problems, and some entity should certainly be addressing them.


    But is NATO the proper entity? After all, NATO is a military pact, dominated by the United States and composed of a relatively small group of self-selecting European and North American nations. The vast majority of the world’s countries do not belong to NATO and have no influence upon it. Who appointed NATO as the representative of the world’s people? Why should the public in India, in Brazil, in China, in South Africa, in Argentina, or most other nations identify with the decisions of NATO’s military commanders?


    The organization that does represent the nations and people of the world is the United Nations. Designed to save the planet from “the scourge of war,” the United Nations has a Security Council (on which the United States has permanent membership) that is supposed to handle world security issues. Unlike NATO, whose decisions are often controversial and sometimes questionable, the United Nations almost invariably comes forward with decisions that have broad international support and, furthermore, show considerable wisdom and military restraint.


    The problem with UN decisions is not that they are bad ones, but that they are difficult to enforce. And the major reason for the difficulty in enforcement is that the Security Council is hamstrung by a veto that can be exercised by any one nation. Thus, much like the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, which is making the United States less and less governable, the Security Council veto has seriously limited what the world organization is able to do in addressing global security issues.


    Thus, if the leaders of NATO nations were really serious about providing children with a world in which they could play in peace among the birds and flowers, they would work to strengthen the United Nations and stop devoting vast resources to dubious wars.


  • Book Review: Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual

    Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual by Lawrence S. Wittner


    Publisher:  University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, TN


    Publication Date: February 2012, 288 pages


    Paperback Price: $29.95


    Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual is a must read for all who are interested and involved in the search for peace, racial equality, and other aspects of social justice.  The book is a very well written autobiography by Lawrence S. Wittner, emeritus professor of history at the State University of New York-Albany.


    Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York,  Wittner graduated from Columbia College (B.A., 1962), the University of Wisconsin (M.A., 1963), and Columbia University (Ph.D. in history, 1967).  His teaching assignments were at Hampton Institute, Vassar College, the University of Toyko, and finally, SUNY/Albany from which he retired as a full professor in 2010.  His scholarship included authorship of eight books and the editing or co-editing of another four, plus the writing of over 250 published articles and book reviews.  His most challenging scholarly effort was the completion of a three book series The Struggle Against the Bomb on the history of the nuclear disarmament movement.  The books were:  One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953;  Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954-1970;  and Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present.  An abbreviated version of the entire trilogy is also available as Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Additionally, his Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933-1983 is a widely acclaimed, comprehensive account of the missing link between the mass peace and justice movements of the 1930s and their rebirth in the 1960s with emphasis on civil rights, non-violent resistance and the prevention of World War III.


    During the course of his research, Wittner delved into the records and periodicals of many peace organizations like the War Resisters League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and SANE (now Peace Action). Among the prominent peace activists whom he interviewed for his publications were A.J. Muste, Norman Thomas, Dave Dellinger, and Mercedes  Randall.  During his research for the Struggle Against the Bomb series, he interviewed such well known peace movement leaders as Randy Forsberg, Sandy Gottlieb, Helen Caldicott, John Isaacs, Randy Kehler, Jeremy Stone, Bernard Lown, Bob Musil and Frank von Hippel.


    In addition to his research and teaching roles, Wittner was a tireless agitator and social activist.  A paragraph in the Preface of the book describes those activities:


    ” Over the course of my life, I … have been tear-gassed, threatened by police with drawn guns, charged by soldiers with fixed bayonets, spied upon by U.S. government intelligence agencies, and purged from my job for political reasons.  Although, in my opinion, I did nothing that merited this kind of treatment, it is certainly true that much of my behavior was quite unconventional.  Indeed throughout most of my life I worked diligently as a peace agitator, civil rights activist, socialist organizer, labor union militant, and subversive songwriter. My experiences ranged from challenging racism in the South, to building alliances with maquiladora workers in Mexico, to leading the annual antinuclear parade through the streets of Hiroshima.  Like Wendell Phillilps, the great abolitionist leader, I have been a consistent thorn in the side of complacency – at least I hope so.”


    Clearly Wittner paid a price for his agitation and activism.  While he had a very enviable and successful academic career, his road to success was not easy.  Most major U.S. universities require three primary duties of their tenured professors and those who are seeking tenure.  Those duties are research, teaching, and community service.  If there ever was a university professor who excelled in all three of those functions, it was Lawrence Wittner.  That fact, notwithstanding, he had a VERY rough road to promotion and success because of ultra conservative presidents, deans, departmental chairs, and dead-wood academic colleagues.  Several of those individuals threw sand into the gears of his work as researcher, teacher, and community service provider.  Inane university politics delayed his achievement of tenure,  and ensured that his pay was not usually commensurate with his voluminous work output.   Lesser individuals would have succumbed to such outlandish obstacles.  This was not the case with Lawrence Wittner.  His life was, and is, a life of caring, persistence and dedication to the cause of peace, social justice and human survival.  It is important that his life’s contributions and achievements be passed on to young and old alike.  Working for Peace and Justice is an excellent book for general audiences, peace activists, ethicists, students of peace studies, students of history, and social activists of every stripe.