Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Obama administration

  • On Bradley Manning and America

    I am posting on this blog two important texts that deserve the widest public attention and deep reflection in the United States and elsewhere. I would stress the following:

    –the extraordinary disconnect between the impunity of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, and others who authorized and vindicated the practice of torture, were complicit in crimes against humanity, and supported aggressive wars against foreign countries and the vindictive rendering of ‘justice’ via criminal prosecutions, harsh treatment, and overseas hunts for Snowden and Assange, all individuals who acted selflessly out of concern for justice and the rights of citizens in democratic society to be informed about governmental behavior depicting incriminating information kept secret to hide responsibility for the commission of crimes of state and awkward diplomacy; a perverse justice dimension of the Manning case is well expressed in the statement below of the Center of Constitutional Rights “It is a travesty of justice that Manning who helped bring to light the criminality of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, is being punished while the alleged perpetrators are not even investigated.” And “We fear for the future of our country in the wake of this case.”

    –the vindictive punishment of Bradley Manning, a historically stiff imprisonment for the unlawful release of classified documents, a dishonorable discharge from military service that is a permanent stain, a demotion to the lowest rank, and imprisonment for 35 years;

    –the failure of the prosecution or the military judge or the national leadership to acknowledge the relevance of Manning’s obviously ethical and patriotic motivations and the extenuating circumstance of stress in a combat zone that was producing observable deteriorations in his mental health;

    –an increasingly evident pattern of constructing a national security state that disguises its character by lies, secrecy, and deception, thereby undermining trust between the government and the people, creating a crisis of legitimacy; it is part of the pattern of ‘dirty wars’ fought on a global battlefield comprehensively described in Jeremy Scahill’s book with that title;

    –the mounting challenge directed at President Obama to grant Manning’s request for a presidential pardon, and to reverse course with respect to the further authoritarian drift that has occurred during his time in the White House; ever since Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech when he claimed American adherence to the rule of law, it has been evident that such a commitment does not extend to high level governmental violators at home (“too important to prosecute”) or to the sovereign rights of foreign countries within the gunsights of the Pentagon or the CIA or to the crimes of America’s closest allies; international law is reserved for the enemies of Washington, especially those who resist intervention and occupation, or those who dare to be whistle-blowers or truth-tellers in such a highly charged atmosphere that has prevailed since the 9/11 attacks; the opening of Manning’s statement below suggests the relevance of such a context to the evolution of his own moral and political consciousness;

    –read Bradley Manning’s statement and ask yourself whether this man belongs in prison for 35 years (even granting eligibility for parole in seven years), or even for a day; imagine the contrary signal sent to our citizenry and the world if Manning were to be awarded the Medal of Freedom! It is past time that we all heeded Thomas Jefferson’s urgent call for ‘the vigilance’ of the citizenry as indispensable to the maintenance of democracy.

    STATEMENT BY BRADLEY MANNING ON BEING SENTENCED

    The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.

    I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

    In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

    Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown our any logically based intentions [unclear], it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

    Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Japanese-American internment camps to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

    As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

    I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

    If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.

    STATEMENT OF THE CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS

    August 21, 2013 – Today, in response to the sentencing of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement.

    We are outraged that a whistleblower and a patriot has been sentenced on a conviction under the Espionage Act. The government has stretched this archaic and discredited law to send an unmistakable warning to potential whistleblowers and journalists willing to publish their information. We can only hope that Manning’s courage will continue to inspire others who witness state crimes to speak up.

    This show trial was a frontal assault on the First Amendment, from the way the prosecution twisted Manning’s actions to blur the distinction between whistleblowing and spying to the government’s tireless efforts to obstruct media coverage of the proceedings. It is a travesty of justice that Manning, who helped bring to light the criminality of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, is being punished while the alleged perpetrators of the crimes he exposed are not even investigated.  Every aspect of this case sets a dangerous precedent for future prosecutions of whistleblowers – who play an essential role in democratic government by telling us the truth about government wrongdoing – and we fear for the future of our country in the wake of this case.

    We must channel our outrage and continue building political pressure for Manning’s freedom. President Obama should pardon Bradley Manning, and if he refuses, a presidential pardon must be an election issue in 2016.

    This article was originally published on Richard Falk’s blog.

    Richard Falk is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and NAPF Senior Vice President.

  • Is the Obama Administration Abandoning Its Commitment to a Nuclear-Free World?

    This article was originally published by the History News Network.

    In a major address in Prague on April 5, 2009, the newly-elected U.S. President, Barack Obama, proclaimed “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”  On January 24, 2013, however, Senator John Kerry, speaking at Senate confirmation hearings on his nomination to become U.S. secretary of state, declared that a nuclear weapons-free world was no more than “an aspiration,” adding that “we’ll be lucky if we get there in however many centuries.”  Has there been a change in Obama administration policy over the past four years?

    There are certainly indications that this might be the case.

    During the 2008 presidential election campaign, Obama made his support for nuclear weapons abolition quite clear on a number of occasions, most notably in Berlin.  Speaking on July 24 before a vast, enthusiastic crowd, the Democratic presidential candidate promised to “make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy.”  He argued that “this is the moment to secure the peace of the world without nuclear weapons.”

    Obama certainly seemed to follow through with this program during his first year in office.  His Prague speech of April 5, 2009 — the first major foreign policy address he delivered as president — was devoted entirely to building a nuclear weapons-free world.  In September of 2009 he became the first American president in history to chair a meeting of the UN Security Council — one dealing with nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation.  The upshot was unanimous Security Council support for Resolution 1887, which backed the goal of nuclear abolition and an action plan to reduce nuclear dangers.  Obama’s promotion of a nuclear weapons-free world played a key role in the announcement that October that he would receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

    The anti-nuclear momentum, however, slowed somewhat in 2010.  In April of that year, the White House released its Nuclear Posture Review, which did reorient U.S. policy toward less reliance on nuclear weapons.  But the policy shifts were fairly minor and smaller than anticipated.   Soon thereafter, the U.S. and Soviet governments announced the signing of the New START treaty, which set lower limits on the number of deployed nuclear warheads and deployed delivery systems for the two nations.  Although the U.S. Senate ratified New START by a vote of 71 to 26, the reductions in all types of nuclear weapons held by the United States and Russia were actually rather modest.  Consequently, the two nations continued to possess about 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.

    Much worse, from the standpoint of nuclear disarmers, was the fact that strong Republican opposition to the treaty led to an Obama administration retreat on the issue of building a nuclear-free world.  The most obvious indication was the White House pledge to provide roughly $214 billion over the next decade for modernizing U.S. nuclear forces and infrastructure.  Apparently offered in an attempt to buy GOP support for the treaty, this pledge set the U.S. government on a course that totally contradicted its talk of disarmament.  In addition, the administration withdrew plans to submit the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996) for Senate ratification, did not even begin negotiations for further nuclear arms reductions with Russia, and — with the exception of mobilizing other nations against the possibility of Iran joining the nuclear club — let nuclear arms control and disarmament vanish from the policy agenda.  In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remarked dismissively that a nuclear weapons-free world would be attained “in some century.”  President Obama’s January 2013 inaugural address did not discuss a nuclear-free world, or even specific arms control and disarmament measures.

    The hearings on Senator Kerry are revealing.  As the Republicans were eager to have him leave the Senate and open up his seat for a Republican (then presumably former Senator Scott Brown), Kerry had a very easy time of it, and used his newfound popularity to defend the more controversial Chuck Hagel, the administration’s nominee for secretary of defense.  When the Republicans raised the issue of Hagel’s support for Global Zero, a group advocating the abolition of nuclear weapons, Kerry responded that he did not believe Hagel wanted to completely eliminate them.  Kerry added that, personally, he favored a policy of nuclear deterrence and believed that “we have to maintain” the U.S. nuclear stockpile.  “We have to be realistic about it,” Kerry explained, “and I think Senator Hagel is realistic about it.”  Kerry’s remarks about the “many centuries” it would take to eliminate nuclear weapons emerged in this context.

    Of course, actions can speak much louder than words.  Kerry’s remarks might represent no more than soothing pabulum for GOP hawks.  The real test of the Obama administration’s commitment to a nuclear-free world will be its actions in the coming years.  Will it reduce expenditures for modernizing U.S. nuclear weapons and facilities, promote Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, negotiate a treaty with Russia for deeper weapons reductions, and take actions that do not require Senate ratification (for example, join with Russia to remove nuclear weapons from high alert status)?  Above all, will it begin to negotiate a treaty for the verifiable, worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons?  We shall see.

    In the meantime, people interested in removing the dangers posed by over 17,000 nuclear weapons around the globe might want to press the administration to honor its commitment to seek a nuclear-free world.

    Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual (University of Tennessee Press).

  • The Path to Nuclear Security: Implementing the President’s Prague Agenda

    This speech was delivered by Joe Biden to the National Defense University on February 18, 2010.

    Ladies and gentlemen; Secretaries Gates and Chu; General Cartwright; Undersecretary Tauscher; Administrator D’Agostino; members of our armed services; students and faculty; thank you all for coming.

    At its founding, Elihu Root gave this campus a mission that is the very essence of our national defense: “Not to promote war, but to preserve peace by intelligent and adequate preparation to repel aggression.” For more than a century, you and your predecessors have heeded that call. There are few greater contributions citizens can claim.

    Many statesmen have walked these grounds, including our Administration’s outstanding National Security Advisor, General Jim Jones. You taught him well. George Kennan, the scholar and diplomat, lectured at the National War College in the late 1940s. Just back from Moscow, in a small office not far from here, he developed the doctrine of Containment that guided a generation of Cold War foreign policy.

    Some of the issues that arose during that time seem like distant memories. But the topic I came to discuss with you today, the challenge posed by nuclear weapons, continues to demand our urgent attention.

    Last April, in Prague, President Obama laid out his vision for protecting our country from nuclear threats. 

    He made clear we will take concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons, while retaining a safe, secure, and effective arsenal as long as we still need it.  We will work to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  And we will do everything in our power to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to terrorists and also to states that don’t already possess them.

    It’s easy to recognize the threat posed by nuclear terrorism.  But we must not underestimate how proliferation to a state could destabilize regions critical to our security and prompt neighbors to seek nuclear weapons of their own. 

    Our agenda is based on a clear-eyed assessment of our national interest.  We have long relied on nuclear weapons to deter potential adversaries. 

    Now, as our technology improves, we are developing non-nuclear ways to accomplish that same objective. The Quadrennial Defense Review and Ballistic Missile Defense Review, which Secretary Gates released two weeks ago, present a plan to further strengthen our preeminent conventional forces to defend our nation and our allies.

    Capabilities like an adaptive missile defense shield, conventional warheads with worldwide reach, and others that we are developing enable us to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, as other nuclear powers join us in drawing down. With these modern capabilities, even with deep nuclear reductions, we will remain undeniably strong.

    As we’ve said many times, the spread of nuclear weapons is the greatest threat facing our country.

    That is why we are working both to stop their proliferation and eventually to eliminate them. Until that day comes, though, we will do everything necessary to maintain our arsenal.

    At the vanguard of this effort, alongside our military, are our nuclear weapons laboratories, national treasures that deserve our support. Their invaluable contributions range from building the world’s fastest supercomputers, to developing cleaner fuels, to surveying the heavens with robotic telescopes.

    But the labs are best known for the work they do to secure our country. Time and again, we have asked our labs to meet our most urgent strategic needs. And time and again, they have delivered.

    In 1939, as fascism began its march across Europe, Asia, and Africa, Albert Einstein warned President Roosevelt that the Nazis were racing to build a weapon, the likes of which the world had never seen. In the Southwest Desert, under the leadership of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicists of Los Alamos won that race and changed the course of history.

    Sandia was born near Albuquerque soon after the Second World War and became our premier facility for developing the non-nuclear components of our nuclear weapons program.

    And a few years later the institution that became Lawrence Livermore took root in California. During the arms race that followed the Korean War, it designed and developed warheads that kept our nuclear capabilities second to none.

    These examples illustrate what everyone in this room already knows—that the past century’s defining conflicts were decided not just on the battlefield, but in the classroom and in the laboratory.

    Air Force General Hap Arnold, an aviation pioneer whose vision helped shape the National War College, once argued that the First World War was decided by brawn and the Second by logistics. “The Third World War will be different,” he predicted. “It will be won by brains.” General Arnold got it almost right.  Great minds like Kennan and Oppenheimer helped win the Cold War and prevent World War Three altogether.

    During the Cold War, we tested nuclear weapons in our atmosphere, underwater and underground, to confirm that they worked before deploying them, and to evaluate more advanced concepts. But explosive testing damaged our health, disrupted our environment and set back our non-proliferation goals.

    Eighteen years ago, President George H.W. Bush signed the nuclear testing moratorium enacted by Congress, which remains in place to this day. 

    Under the moratorium, our laboratories have maintained our arsenal through the Stockpile Stewardship Program without underground nuclear testing, using techniques that are as successful as they are cutting edge.

    Today, the directors of our nuclear laboratories tell us they have a deeper understanding of our arsenal from Stockpile Stewardship than they ever had when testing was commonplace. 

    Let me repeat that—our labs know more about our arsenal today than when we used to explode our weapons on a regular basis.  With our support, the labs can anticipate potential problems and reduce their impact on our arsenal.

    Unfortunately, during the last decade, our nuclear complex and experts were neglected and underfunded.

    Tight budgets forced more than 2,000 employees of Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore from their jobs between 2006 and 2008, including highly-skilled scientists and engineers.

    And some of the facilities we use to handle uranium and plutonium date back to the days when the world’s great powers were led by Truman, Churchill, and Stalin. The signs of age and decay are becoming more apparent every day.

    Because we recognized these dangers, in December, Secretary Chu and I met at the White House with the heads of the three nuclear weapons labs. They described the dangerous impact these budgetary pressures were having on their ability to manage our arsenal without testing.  They say this situation is a threat to our security. President Obama and I agree.

    That’s why earlier this month we announced a new budget that reverses the last decade’s dangerous decline.

    It devotes $7 billion to maintaining our nuclear stockpile and modernizing our nuclear infrastructure.  To put that in perspective, that’s $624 million more than Congress approved last year—and an increase of $5 billion over the next five years.  Even in these tight fiscal times, we will commit the resources our security requires.

    This investment is not only consistent with our nonproliferation agenda; it is essential to it.   Guaranteeing our stockpile, coupled with broader research and development efforts, allows us to pursue deep nuclear reductions without compromising our security.  As our conventional capabilities improve, we will continue to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons.

    Responsible disarmament requires versatile specialists to manage it.

    The skilled technicians who look after our arsenal today are the ones who will safely dismantle it tomorrow.

    And chemists who understand how plutonium ages also develop forensics to track missing nuclear material and catch those trafficking in it. 

    Our goal of a world without nuclear weapons has been endorsed by leading voices in both parties. These include two former Secretaries of State from Republican administrations, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz; President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense Bill Perry; and my former colleague Sam Nunn, for years the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

    Together, these four statesmen called eliminating nuclear weapons “a bold initiative consistent with America’s moral heritage.”

    During the 2008 Presidential campaign, both the President and Senator McCain supported the same objective.

    We will continue to build support for this emerging bipartisan consensus like the one around containment of Soviet expansionism that George Kennan inspired.

    Toward that end, we have worked tirelessly to implement the President’s Prague agenda.

    In September, the President chaired an historic meeting of the UN Security Council, which unanimously embraced the key elements of the President’s vision.

    As I speak, U.S. and Russian negotiators are completing an agreement that will reduce strategic weapons to their lowest levels in decades. 

    Its verification measures will provide confidence its terms are being met.  These reductions will be conducted transparently and predictably. The new START treaty will promote strategic stability and bolster global efforts to prevent proliferation by showing that the world’s leading nuclear powers are committed to reducing their arsenals. 

    And it will build momentum for collaboration with Russia on strengthening the global consensus that nations who violate their NPT obligations should be held to account. 

    This strategy is yielding results.  We have tightened sanctions on North Korea’s proliferation activities through the most restrictive UN Security Council resolution to date—and the international community is enforcing these sanctions effectively.

    And we are now working with our international partners to ensure that Iran, too, faces real consequences for failing to meet its obligations.

    In the meantime, we are completing a government-wide review of our nuclear posture.

    Already, our budget proposal reflects some of our key priorities, including increased funding for our nuclear complex, and a commitment to sustain our heavy bombers and land and submarine-based missile capabilities, under the new START agreement.

    As Congress requested and with Secretary Gates’ full support, this review has been a full interagency partnership.

    We believe we have developed a broad and deep consensus on the importance of the President’s agenda and the steps we must take to achieve it. The results will be presented to Congress soon.

    In April, the President will also host a Nuclear Security Summit to advance his goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear material within four years.  We cannot wait for an act of nuclear terrorism before coming together to share best practices and raise security standards, and we will seek firm commitments from our partners to do just that.

    In May, we will participate in the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. 

    We are rallying support for stronger measures to strengthen inspections and punish cheaters.

    The Treaty’s basic bargain—that nuclear powers pursue disarmament and non-nuclear states do not acquire such weapons, while gaining access to civilian nuclear technology—is the cornerstone of the non-proliferation regime.

    Before the treaty was negotiated, President Kennedy predicted a world with up to 20 nuclear powers by the mid-1970s.  Because of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the consensus it embodied, that didn’t happen.

    Now, 40 years later, that consensus is fraying.  We must reinforce this consensus, and strengthen the treaty for the future.

    And, while we do that, we will also continue our efforts to negotiate a ban on the production of fissile materials that can be used in nuclear weapons.  

    We know that completing a treaty that will ban the production of fissile material will not be quick or easy—but the Conference on Disarmament must resume its work on this treaty as soon as possible.

    The last piece of the President’s agenda from Prague was the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

    A decade ago, we led this effort to negotiate this treaty in order to keep emerging nuclear states from perfecting their arsenals and to prevent our rivals from pursuing ever more advanced weapons.  

    We are confident that all reasonable concerns raised about the treaty back then – concerns about verification and the reliability of our own arsenal – have now been addressed.  The test ban treaty is as important as ever.

    As President Obama said in Prague, “we cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.”

    Some friends in both parties may question aspects of our approach. Some in my own party may have trouble reconciling investments in our nuclear complex with a commitment to arms reduction. Some in the other party may worry we’re relinquishing capabilities that keep our country safe.

    With both groups we respectfully disagree. As both the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, and as a strong proponent of non-proliferation, the United States has long embodied a stark but inevitable contradiction. The horror of nuclear conflict may make its occurrence unlikely, but the very existence of nuclear weapons leaves the human race ever at the brink of self-destruction, particularly if the weapons fall into the wrong hands.

    Many leading figures of the nuclear age grew ambivalent about aspects of this order. Kennan, whose writings gave birth to the theory of nuclear deterrence, argued passionately but futilely against the development of the hydrogen bomb. And Robert Oppenheimer famously lamented, after watching the first mushroom cloud erupt from a device he helped design, that he had become “the destroyer of worlds.”

    President Obama is determined, and I am as well, that the destroyed world Oppenheimer feared must never become our reality. That is why we are pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. The awesome force at our disposal must always be balanced by the weight of our shared responsibility. 

    Every day, many in this audience help bear that burden with professionalism, courage, and grace. A grateful nation appreciates your service. Together, we will live up to our responsibilities.  Together, we will lead the world.  Thank you.  May God bless America.  May God protect our troops.