Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: peace

  • Public Mobilization for a Nuclear-Free World

    This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.

    One of the ironies of the current international situation is that, although some government leaders now talk of building a nuclear weapons-free world, there has been limited public mobilization around that goal — at least compared to the action-packed 1980s.

    However, global public opinion is strikingly antinuclear. In December 2008, an opinion poll conducted of more than 19,000 respondents in 21 nations found that, in 20 countries, large majorities — ranging from 62 to 93 percent — favored an international agreement for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. Even in Pakistan, the one holdout nation, 46 percent (a plurality) would support such an agreement. Among respondents in the nuclear powers, there was strong support for nuclear abolition. This included 62 percent of the respondents in India, 67 percent in Israel, 69 percent in Russia, 77 percent in the United States, 81 percent in Britain, 83 percent in China and 87 percent in France.   

    But public resistance to the bomb is not as strong as these poll figures seem to suggest.

    Supporting the Bomb

    For starters, a portion of society agrees with their governments that they’re safer when they are militarily powerful. Some people, of course, are simply militarists, who look approvingly upon weapons and war. Others genuinely believe in “peace through strength,” an idea championed by government officials, who play upon this theme.

    Furthermore, popular resistance to nuclear weapons tends to wane when progress toward addressing nuclear dangers occurs. For example, the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 not only halted most contamination of the Earth’s atmosphere by nuclear tests, but also convinced many people that the great powers were on the road to halting their nuclear arms race. As a result, the nuclear disarmament movement declined. A similar phenomenon occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the United States and the Soviet Union signed the INF Treaty. U.S.-Soviet nuclear confrontation eased and the Cold War came to an end. Although public protest against nuclear weapons didn’t disappear, it certainly dwindled.

    Indeed, today, the public in many nations seems complacent about the menace of nuclear weapons. While opposition to nuclear weapons is widespread, it does not run deep. For example, those people who said in late 2008 that they “strongly” favored a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons constituted only 20 percent of respondents in Pakistan, 31 percent in India, 38 percent in Russia, 39 percent in the United States, and 42 percent in Israel — although, admittedly, majorities (ranging from 55 to 60 percent) took this position in Britain, France, and China. Another sign support for a nuclear-free world is weaker than implied by its favorability ratings is that an April 2010 poll among Americans found that, although a large majority said they favored nuclear abolition, 87 percent considered this goal unrealistic.

    Yet another sign of the shallowness of popular support is that, despite widespread peace and disarmament movement efforts to mobilize supporters of nuclear abolition around the U.N.’s nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference this past May, the level of public protest fell far short of the antinuclear outpourings of the 1980s. Indeed, even with the encouragement of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the organizing efforts of numerous peace groups, the best turnout the worldwide nuclear abolition movement could manage was some 15,000 antinuclear demonstrators on May 2.

    That the nuclear disarmament issue does not have the same salience today as in earlier periods can be attributed, in part, to people feeling less directly threatened by nuclear weapons preparations and nuclear war. After all, the present U.S.-Russian nuclear confrontation seems far less dangerous than the U.S.-Soviet nuclear confrontation of the past. Today, nuclear war seems more likely to erupt in South Asia, between India and Pakistan. People living far from these nations find it easy to ignore this dangerous scenario.

    Lack of Information

    The public is also very poorly informed about what is happening with respect to nuclear weapons. Although the mass media devoted enormous air time and column space to Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons capability, they have devoted scant resources to educate the public on the nuclear weapons that do exist and on the dangers they pose to human survival. A 2010 survey of people from their teens through thirties in eight countries found that large majorities didn’t know that Russia, China, Britain, France and other nations possessed nuclear weapons. In fact, only 59 percent of American respondents knew that their own country possessed nuclear weapons. Among British respondents, just 43 percent knew that Britain maintained a nuclear arsenal.

    Public ignorance of nuclear issues occurs largely thanks to the commercial mass media’s focus on trivia and sensationalism. This emphasis on lightweight entertainment often reflects the interests of the media’s corporate owners and sponsors, who do their best to avoid fanning the flames of public discontent — or at least discontent with corporate and military elites. But the public is complicit with the blackout on nuclear matters, for many people prefer to avoid thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

    Thus, although there is widespread opposition to nuclear weapons, it lacks intensity and the global publics are ill-informed about nuclear dangers and nuclear disarmament.

    Lessons for Peace and Disarmament Groups

    The first is that nuclear disarmament and nuclear abolition have majority public support. Second, this support must be strengthened if progress is to be made toward a nuclear-free world.

    To strengthen public support, these organizations could emphasize the following themes:

    Nuclear weapons are suicidal. Numerous analysts have observed there will be no winners in a nuclear war. A nuclear exchange between nations will kill many millions of people on both sides of the conflict and leave the survivors living in a nuclear wasteland, in which — as Soviet party secretary Nikita Khrushchev once suggested — the living might well envy the dead. Even longtime nuclear enthusiast Ronald Reagan eventually concluded, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

    There are no safe havens from a nuclear war. Even in the event of a small-scale nuclear war — a regional conflict with relatively few nuclear weapons — the results would be catastrophic. A study published in the January 2010 issue of the Scientific American concluded that, should such a war occur between India and Pakistan, the consequences would not be confined to that region. The firestorms generated by the conflict would put massive amounts of smoke into the upper atmosphere and create a nuclear winter around the globe. With the sun blocked, the Earth’s surface would become cold, dark, and dry. Agriculture around the world would collapse, and mass starvation would follow.

    Nuclear weapons possession does not guarantee security. This contention defies the conventional wisdom of national security elites and a portion of the public. Yet consider the case of the United States. It was the first nation to develop atomic bombs, and for some time had a monopoly of them. In response, the Soviet government built atomic bombs. Then the two nations competed in building hydrogen bombs, guided missiles, and missiles with multiple warheads. Meanwhile, seven other nations built nuclear weapons. Each year, all these nations felt less and less secure. And they were less secure, because the more they increased their capacity to threaten others, the more they were threatened in return.

    Concurrently, these nations also found themselves entangled in bloody conventional wars. Their adversaries — the Chinese, the Koreans, the Algerians, the Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis, and other peoples — were not deterred by the nuclear weapons of their opponents. “Throughout the wide range of our foreign policies,” recalled Dean Rusk, the former U.S. Secretary of State, “I was struck by the irrelevance of nuclear weapons to decision making.”

    Nor do nuclear arsenals protect a country from external terrorist assault. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men staged the largest terrorist attack on the United States in its history. Given that terrorists are not state actors, it is difficult to imagine how nuclear weapons could be used strategically in the “war on terror” as either a deterrent or in military conflict.

    There is a significant possibility of accidental nuclear war. During the Cold War and  subsequent decades, there have been numerous false alarms about an enemy attack. Many of these came close to triggering a nuclear response, which would have had devastating consequences. In addition, emerging nuclear states may not have the same safeguards in place that were developed during the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, widening the possibilities of an inadvertent nuclear response. Furthermore, nuclear weapons can be exploded accidentally during their maintenance or transportation.

    As long as nuclear weapons exist, there will be a temptation to use them. Warfare has been an ingrained habit for thousands of years, and it’s unlikely this practice will soon be ended. As long as wars exist, governments will be tempted to draw upon nuclear weapons to win them.

    Nuclear weapons emerged in the context of World War II. Not surprisingly, the first country to develop such weapons, the United States, used them to destroy Japanese cities. President Harry Truman later stated, when discussing his authorization of the atomic bombing, “When you have a weapon that will win the war, you’d be foolish if you didn’t use it.” Recalling his conversation with Truman about the bomb, at Potsdam, Winston Churchill wrote, “There was never a moment’s discussion as to whether the atomic bomb should be used.” It was “never even an issue.”

    Of course, nuclear-armed nations have not used nuclear weapons in war since 1945. But this reflects the effectiveness of popular pressure against nuclear war, rather than the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence. Indeed, if nuclear deterrence worked, governments would not be desperately trying to stop nuclear proliferation and deploy missile defense systems. Thus, we cannot assume that, in the context of bitter wars and threats to national survival, nuclear restraint will continue forever. Indeed, we can conclude, the longer nuclear weapons exist, the greater the possibility they will be used in war.

    As long as nuclear weapons exist, terrorists can acquire them. Terrorists cannot build nuclear weapons by themselves. The creation of such weapons requires vast resources, substantial territory and a good deal of scientific knowledge. The only way terrorists will attain a nuclear capability is by obtaining the weapons from the arsenals of the nuclear powers — either by donation, by purchase or by theft. Therefore, a nuclear-free world would end the threat of nuclear terrorism.

    Expanding educational outreach to the public along these lines will not be easy, given corporate control of the mass communications media. Nevertheless, the internet provides new possibilities for grassroots communication. Even within the corporate press, more could be done to encourage letters to the editor and the placement of op-ed pieces. In addition, nuclear disarmament groups could reach broad audiences by working through the very substantial networks of sympathetic organizations, such as religious bodies, unions, environmental groups, and professional associations.

    Intensifying the level of popular mobilization can in turn push reluctant governments further down the road toward a nuclear weapons-free world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that can do so.

  • Peace Declaration

    In the company of hibakusha who, on this day 65 years ago, were hurled, without understanding why, into a “hell” beyond their most terrifying nightmares and yet somehow managed to survive; together with the many souls that fell victim to unwarranted death, we greet this August sixth with re-energized determination that, “No one else should ever have to suffer such horror.”

    Through the unwavering will of the hibakusha and other residents, with help from around Japan and the world, Hiroshima is now recognized as a beautiful city.  Today, we aspire to be a “model city for the world” and even to host the Olympic Games.  Transcending the tortures of hell, trusting in the peace-loving peoples of the world, the hibakusha offer a message that is the cornerstone of Japan’s Peace Constitution and a beacon to the world.

    The results of the NPT Review Conference held this past May testify to that beacon’s guiding influence.  The Final Document expresses the unanimous intent of the parties to seek the abolition of nuclear weapons; notes the valuable contribution of civil society; notes that a majority favors the establishment of timelines for the nuclear weapons abolition process, and highlights the need for a nuclear weapons convention or new legal framework.  In doing so, it confirms that our future depends on taking the steps articulated by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the more than 4,000 city members of Mayors for Peace, and the two-thirds of all Japanese municipalities that formally supported the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Protocol.

    That our cry of conscience, the voice of civil society yearning for a future free from nuclear weapons, was heard at the UN is due in large measure to the leadership of His Excellency Ban Ki-moon, who today has become the first UN Secretary-General to attend our Peace Memorial Ceremony.  President Obama, the United States government, and the 1,200-member U.S. Conference of Mayors also wielded their powerful influence.

    This ceremony is honored today by the presence of government officials representing more than 70 countries as well as the representatives of many international organizations, NGOs, and citizens’ groups.  These guests have come to join the hibakusha, their families, and the people of Hiroshima in sharing grief and prayers for a peaceful world.  Nuclear-weapon states Russia, China and others have attended previously, but today, for the first time ever, we have with us the U.S. ambassador and officials from the UK and France.

    Clearly, the urgency of nuclear weapons abolition is permeating our global conscience; the voice of the vast majority is becoming the preeminent force for change in the international community.

    To seize this unprecedented opportunity and actually achieve a world without nuclear weapons, we need above all to communicate to every corner of our planet the intense yearning of the hibakusha, thereby narrowing the gap between their passion and the rest of the world.  Unfortunately, many are unaware of the urgency; their eyes still closed to the fact that only through luck, not wisdom, have we avoided human extinction.

    Now the time is ripe for the Japanese government to take decisive action.  It should begin to “take the lead in the pursuit of the elimination of nuclear weapons” by legislating into law the three non-nuclear principles, abandoning the U.S. nuclear umbrella, legally recognizing the expanded “black rain areas,” and implementing compassionate, caring assistance measures for all the aging hibakusha anywhere in the world.

    In addition, the Prime Minister’s wholehearted commitment and action to make the dreams of the hibakusha come true would lead us all by 2020 to a new world of “zero nuclear weapons,” an achievement that would rival in human history the “discovery of zero” itself.  He could, for example, confront the leaders of the nuclear-weapon states with the urgent need for abolition, lead them to the table to sign a nuclear weapons convention, and call on all countries for sharp reductions in nuclear and other military expenditures.  His options are infinite.  

    We citizens and cities will act as well.  In accordance with the Hiroshima Appeal adopted during last week’s Hiroshima Conference for the Total Abolition of Nuclear Weapons by 2020, we will work closely with like-minded nations, NGOs, and the UN itself to generate an ever-larger tidal wave of demand for a world free of nuclear weapons by 2020.

    Finally, on this, the 65th anniversary of the atomic bombing, as we offer to the souls of the A-bomb victims our heartfelt condolences, we hereby declare that we cannot force the most patiently enduring people in the world, the hibakusha, to be patient any longer.  Now is the time to devote ourselves unreservedly to the most crucial duty facing the human family, to give the hibakusha, within their lifetimes, the nuclear-weapon-free world that will make them blissfully exclaim, “I’m so happy I lived to see this day.”

  • 2010 Sadako Peace Day

    Welcome to this 16th annual commemoration held in Sadako Peace Garden.  This garden – a project of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and La Casa de Maria – is made sacred by your presence; by your willingness to look back at the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and, most of all, by your commitment to building a more peaceful and decent world, free of nuclear threat.

    On this day 65 years ago, a single atomic bomb destroyed the city of Hiroshima, killing some 90,000 people by blast, fire and radiation.  By the end of 1945, some 140,000 victims of the bombing were dead and another 70,000 had died from the Nagasaki bombing.

    Hiroshima ushered in the Nuclear Age.  It was a tragic beginning that pointed toward the possibility of an even more tragic ending.  In the excitement that marked the end of World War II, the atomic bombings cast a dark shadow over the future of civilization and the human species.

    In the past 65 years, we have witnessed a truly mad nuclear arms race between the US and Soviet Union, based on the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction.  We have ascribed god-like characteristics of power and protection to bombs that have no purpose other than the threat of massive annihilation and the carrying out of that threat.

    At its peak in 1986, there were some 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world.  Today there are still more than 20,000 of these weapons in the arsenals of nine countries: the US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.  Without a plan of action to eliminate these weapons, they will continue to proliferate and will be used by accident, miscalculation or intention.

    Over the past 65 years, the United States alone has spent more than $7.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.  We still spend more than $50 billion annually on these weapons.  What a terrible waste of resources and opportunity!

    The possession of these weapons challenges our humanity and our future.  We are here to remember what these bombs have done in the past, to imagine what they are capable of doing in the future, and to reinvigorate our commitment to ending the nuclear weapons era.

    Imagination is the creative beginning of change.  If we can imagine that a world with zero nuclear weapons it is possible to achieve such a world.  President Obama says, “America seeks the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”  But he also says that he is not naïve and doesn’t see it happening in his lifetime.

    Perhaps I am naïve, but I can imagine achieving this goal in a far more urgent timeframe.  Over 4,000 Mayors for Peace throughout the world – mayors of cities large and small – believe the goal can be achieved by the year 2020.  Why not?  It is within our human capacity, if we will join together.

    To achieve a world free of nuclear weapons will require serious leadership from the US.  To achieve US leadership the people will need to lead their leaders.  That is our challenge and it is the daily work of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  We thank you for caring and for joining us in this most critical work.

    I’d like to end with a poem from my new book, God’s Tears: Reflections on the Atomic Bombs Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The poem tells the story of Shoji Sawada, a young boy at the time of the bombing of Hiroshima.

    FORGIVE ME, MOTHER

    for

    Shoji Sawada

    After the bomb,
    the young boy
    awakened beneath
    the rubble of his room.

    He could hear
    his mother’s cries,
    still trapped
    within the fallen house.

    He struggled to free
    her, but he lacked
    the
    strength.

    A fire raged
    toward them.  Many people
    hurried past.

    Frightened and
    dazed, they would not stop
    to help him free
    his mother.

    He could hear
    her voice from the rubble.
    The voice was
    soft but firm.

    “You must run
    and save yourself,”
    she told
    him.  “You must go.”

    “Forgive me,” he
    said, bowing,
    “Forgive me,
    Mother.”

    He did as his
    mother wished.
    That was long
    ago, in 1945.

    The boy has long
    been a man, a good man.
    Yet he still runs from those flames.

  • A Song for Peace Day

    When I think of Sadako folding cranes
                    to heal her bomb-caused sickness,
    and her friends crane-forming in hopes for her health,
                    in a yearning for safety and peace,
    at once arises a wish     for joy for all children on this earth,
    for the goodness of life they deserve,   that murder-wars will cease

                    as we cry out with fervor    against the plagues of pain:
                                    Never again.

    Never again to waste young growth-time, squander play and pleasure; 
    O, defend the glory of children, their striving, their learning season;
    O, renew the pledge this Peace Day: end the lusts of greed and war,
    the slaughter of the innocents, insane beyond all reason.

                    And we cry out with fervor     against the plagues of pain:
                                    Never again.

                    Never again, in the name of all children;
                    Never again, in reverence of what young lives are for;
                    Never again: may the words come from the heart:
                    O, take up the work of peace, Peace-Warrior!

    No more bombing, no more burning, cranes of hope fly free;
    No more children slain in horror. Work and Love can make it be.

                    In the name of all the children:
                                    Never again.

                    In the name of all the children —
                    Work and Love can make it be.

  • Veterans

    We take off our shoes. Japanese style.
    I’m glad I changed my socks.

    Tsunami-san, your name
    like the tidal
    wave, crashes over me.
    In Hokkaido I slept in your six-tatami room
    head on a rice pillow.

    You taught me to cook shabu-shabu:
    enhoki mushrooms,  chrysanthemum leaves
    in broth. Confused, I called it Basho-Basho.

    Knowing I loved poets and books,
    you took me to see paper-making.
    I expected kozo drying.
    Logs floated in one end,
    bales of newsprint tumbled out the other.

    When I married, you visited my home.
    You and my husband, young sailors,
    fought at Midway. Opposite sides.

    At night we went to the funeral
    of the Marine Colonel we knew.
    Someone said, “Those veterans are going out
    fast.”

    Tsunami-san, I was impatient at the time.
    But thank you for making me go through
    the whole factory. Thank you for signing
    my guestbook in kanji. That tanka
    about the plum tree that bloomed
    even when the master was far away.

  • Message for Hiroshima Day 2010

    The Nuclear Age is 65 years old.  The first test of a nuclear device took place on July 16, 1945 at the Alamogordo Test Range in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto Desert.  The Spanish name of this desert means “Journey of Death,” a fitting name for the beginning point of the Nuclear Age.  Just three weeks after the test, the United States destroyed the city of Hiroshima with a nuclear weapon, followed by the destruction of Nagasaki three days later.  By the end of 1945, the Journey of Death had claimed more than 200,000 human lives and left many other victims injured and suffering.  

    Over the past 65 years, the Journey of Death has continued to claim victims.  Not from the use of nuclear weapons in war, but from the radiation released in testing nuclear weapons (posturing).  We can be thankful that we have not had a nuclear war in the past 65 years, but we must not be complacent.  Our relative good fortune in the past is not a guarantee that nuclear weapons will not be used in the future.  Over the years, the power of nuclear weapons has increased dramatically.  They have become capable of ending civilization and complex life on the planet.  What could possibly justify this risk?

    We remember the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as cautionary tales.  The survivors of the bombings, the hibakusha, have been strong proponents of “Never Again!”  They have spoken out about what they experienced so that their past does not become our future.  They have warned us repeatedly, “Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist.”  We must choose: nuclear weapons or a human future.  The choice should not be difficult.  Humanity should shout out with a single voice that we choose a world free of the overarching nuclear threat, a world free of nuclear weapons.

    The people must lead their leaders, choosing hope for a far more decent human future.  The United States alone has spent more than $7.5 trillion on nuclear weapons over the span of the Nuclear Age.  The world currently spends more than $1.5 trillion annually on weapons, war and the preparation for war, while spending only a small portion of this on efforts to meet human needs and achieve social justice.  Clearly, change is needed.  Bringing about this change could begin by joining together to eliminate the nuclear weapons threat to the human future.  

    The future is now.  Sixty-five years of nuclear threat to humanity is enough.  We continue to rely upon the theory of deterrence at our peril.  The theory requires rationality from leaders who are not always rational.  The higher rationality and greater good for humanity would be to eliminate the threat by eliminating the weapons.  The time to raise our voices and demand a world free of nuclear weapons is now, before it is too late.  On this demand we must be both insistent and persistent.

  • Disarmament Work and Justice in a Divided World

    This article was originally published on disarmamentactivist.org

    We are now several years in to a deep global economic and political crisis that shows no sign of abating. Those in command of the world’s political systems seem capable of doing little beyond protecting the immediate interests of privileged elements in their societies. At the same time, the familiar forms of oppositional activity seem spent, unable to pose a coherent and convincing alternative to the current order of things. Movements for peace and for a society that is more fair economically and sustainable ecologically can be found everywhere, but often are fragmented by specialization or particularized grievances and mired in habitual forms of thought and action. It is essential that all of us in these movements try to develop a broader understanding of this time and its challenges, starting from our particular work and location in the world and sketching the connections, however tentatively, to the larger whole. This will be one such sketch, with its starting point in disarmament work in the heartland of the U.S. aerospace-military-industrial complex in California.

    Disarmament “progress” in the United States: rhetoric vs. reality

    Last month in New York, the states that are parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty met to review the status of the treaty and the performance of its parties, a review that occurs every five years. After opening the conference with general endorsements of the concept of nuclear disarmament, the United States (together with other nuclear weapons states) spent the remainder of the month doing its best to weaken or eliminate language in drafts of the Review Conference final document that would impose any substantive disarmament obligations on the nuclear weapons states, such as time limits or definite commitments to negotiate a convention for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile in Washington D.C., the Obama administration proposals for increases in nuclear weapons spending were moving through Congress, the only significant opposition coming from those who claim that the budget increases are too small.We now have a flurry of elite rhetorical enthusiasm for disarmament, and much celebration of a U.S.-Russia treaty that will have little effect on the thousands of nuclear weapons they currently deploy, and even those requirements aren’t mandatory until 2017. But a few hundred nuclear weapons can destroy any country on earth, and a thousand are more could have effects that destroy much of the world’s civilization, killing a significant portion of its inhabitants.

    And in this year’s budget request, the Obama administration, if anything, seems determined to outflank its Congressional critics from the right, proposing a 10% increase in nuclear warhead research and production funding and further increases for future years. And that’s just the Department of Energy budget. The Defense Department budget also has sizable increases for nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In evaluating the level of commitment to disarmament of this administration, it might be wise to remember the observation repeated by several economists of the last century, that “the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.”

    In early June I spoke at a protest at the gates of Vandenberg Air Force Base, a vast installation sprawling for miles along the southern California coast. Unlike the rest of the U.S. economy, Vandenberg is thriving, playing key roles in both the present and the future of this country’s war cycle, fighting endless wars in the present while striving endlessly for dominance in all imaginable wars to come. Vandenberg represents a kind of microcosm both of the gigantic U.S. military machine and of the upper echelons of U.S. society, tending ever more towards a perpetual exercise in maintaining power over others through violence while hiding behind layers of gates, guards, and guns.

    The United States is continuing a broad effort aimed at developing new generations of strategic weapons and refining the techniques for using them, spending far more on high-tech weapons than any other country. This effort today includes upgrading existing intercontinental ballistic missiles and planning for work on next generation long-range missiles. For decades, Vandenberg Air Force Base has tested new generations of long range missiles, and continues to flight test those now operational.

    Vandenberg is both a test range and one of the first two deployment sites for mid-course ballistic missile defense interceptors. And just a few weeks ago, the Air Force launched a Hypersonic Technology Vehicle from Vandenberg aimed at a target area at Kwajelein Atoll in the Pacific. That test was part of a program to develop a new generation of maneuverable gliding delivery vehicles that will be able to hit targets anywhere on earth within an hour or two. If deployed, these systems are intended to carry highly accurate non-nuclear payloads, permitting destruction by missile at global ranges with non-nuclear weapons for the first time. And one of the sites being considered for deployment is Vandenberg Air Force Base, supposedly to avoid confusion with the launch of nuclear-armed missiles from their bases in the Midwest.

    Vandenberg is where the present and future of U.S. war making comes together. Many of the military satellites used for surveillance, to target weapons and to provide communications for current U.S. wars are launched here. The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg does day to day planning of missions for the positioning and use of military satellites in those ongoing wars.

    According to a Vandenberg Air Force Base fact sheet:

        “The Joint Space Operations Center… is a synergistic command and control weapon system focused on planning and executing USSTRATCOM’s Joint Functional Component Command for Space… mission. The purpose of the JSpOC is to provide a focal point for the operational employment of worldwide joint space forces, and enables the Commander, [Joint Functional Component Command for Space] to integrate space power into global military operations.”

    It is this globe-girdling network of command centers and satellites that allows young Americans sitting at an air force base in Nevada, looking at a screen and manipulating buttons and joy sticks, to use pilotless drone aircraft to kill people on the other side of the world with no more risk, and little more existential engagement, than if they were playing a video game.

    The Obama military budget also includes a ramp up of funding over the next five years for the “prompt global strike” weapons recently tested at Vandenberg. It should be noted that there are nothing but paper policy restrictions preventing the United States from using these new delivery systems technologies for nuclear weapons. Even in its conventional version, global strike underscores the aggressive global stance of the US military and its determination to maintain global military dominance, further complicating arms control efforts. It is also noteworthy that the launch vehicle used for the test was made from parts of MX missiles, nuclear-armed ICBMs decommissioned as a result of a prior round of arms agreements, another illustration of the ambiguities of current approaches to arms control.

    Beyond single issue politics: understanding the connections

    After decades in disarmament work, I have come to believe that disarmament initiatives unaccompanied by strong social movements for democracy, global economic equity, and a more ecologically sustainable way of life are highly unlikely to create the political conditions in which significant progress towards disarmament can occur. For those of us who work on disarmament, our goal must be to better understand what part disarmament work can play in these broader movements for fundamental social change.

    We need a way of looking at the world as it now is. Our approach must acknowledge the obstacles as well as the opportunities involved in transforming the global economy and our societies if they are to become ecologically sustainable, democratic, and peaceful.

    A significant part of this approach is a better understanding of the political nature of technology choices. We live in a world dominated by immense organizations that deploy particular combinations of advanced technology, bureaucratic technique, and ideology. These organizations are instrumentally rationalized both within and without. They are largely authoritarian in internal structure, and deal with the world around them instrumentally–as an environment to be controlled to the maximum extent possible in order to achieve their goals.

    The main goal of these organizations is to extract a privileged wealth stream for their upper echelon inhabitants from the rest of an increasingly globalized economy. They also form alliances, many of them long–running, to do so. The “military industrial complex” was only the first of these to be recognized.

    The legal character of these organizations varies from place to place, with the public/private boundary and the powers of large private organizations defined differently in different countries. But similar kinds of organizations–by which I mean organizations deploying similar sets of technology, bureaucratic technique, and ideology–in significant ways behave alike whether defined as “public” or “private.”

    Technologies are not chosen solely because they “work” better in some abstract sense, or even because they are somehow “cheaper” in some fundamental sense related to the organization of the physical world, for example in terms of their thermodynamic efficiency. They are chosen because they work well in combination with other aspects of modern large organization techniques to gain and sustain wealth and power for those in the upper echelons of the immense organizations that dominate every aspect of global economic and political life today.

    The upper level inhabitants of these organizations constitute roughly a fifth of the world’s population, and the divide between them and the rest is growing, as that top fifth and its predatory organizations insatiably seize, consume, and degrade the land, resources, and ecosystems that all depend on.

    This split, I believe, is the defining political fact of our time. It limits society’s potential for adaptation to resource and ecological limits and drives the growing chaos and conflict that the dominant constellations of large organizations meet only with more militarized high–tech “security.” And providing this security at every level from executive protection to high performance strike aircraft to ever more accurate long range missiles has become one of the most dependable strategies for organizational growth and profit everywhere.

    It is all of this we must understand and confront. Nuclear weapons are only a leading instance, their vivid irrationality both exemplar and metaphor for the whole.

    Beyond balance sheet economics and politics: neither we nor the world are for sale

    In August of 1967 Martin Luther King said,

        “A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will thingify them–make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.”[1]

    King understood that slavery was an expression of the social system that was and is the Western-style modernity. And he was telling us that one of its fundamental characteristics–the treating of human beings as objects, as things to be bought, sold, and profited from–was deeply rooted, and is with us still. Equally important is the same system’s reduction of the natural world to an array of things to be manipulated and controlled, seen as nothing more than a source of resource inputs and profit.

    Ultimately, it is these two fundamental characteristics of the economic and political system that has come to dominate the planet that we must overcome.

    These goals may seem huge and abstract, and also utterly impractical where the immense institutions of power and profit-seeking instrumentalism dominate every aspect of the political, economic, and cultural landscape. Yet we must do what we can to seek real change, even when what we can do seems awfully small.But at the same time, we are told over and over by political and NGO professionals that we must seek only incremental change, only what is “practical” and “achievable.”

    So what are our guideposts? How can we tell if the incremental steps offered us by our professional and political classes even are moving in the right direction?

    In that same address, King also said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

    I believe that this was, and is, less a description than a prescription. Only we can be the vehicle of that justice, only we can bend that arc.

    The measure of the incremental steps we are offered by our political classes today must be how much they move us in the direction of a more just world.

    Unfortunately we’re not seeing much movement towards fairness and justice, on disarmament or climate change or anything else. Instead we see the further entrenchment of a political and economic order that treats both people and nature like things, as profit centers to be exploited. We are seeing what should be opportunities for reform used to mask the further consolidation of power by the most powerful institutions.

    Here in the United States, an opportunity for health care reform turned into a mandate that will force Americans to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to a health insurance industry whose financial interests are served by providing as little health care as possible. The clear need for an energy system transformed to prevent catastrophic climate change and to replace diminishing fossil fuels has instead been turned into a veritable Christmas tree for existing energy interests, from coal to oil to nuclear power, with a small fig leaf of subsidies for renewable energy alternatives thrown in.

    As oil spews into the Gulf of Mexico from a well drilled by an industry that has successfully socialized much of its risks through liability limits for the damage it causes, the administration pushes forward with an energy plan that will encourage more offshore drilling, and that will subsidize a nuclear energy industry that also enjoys limits on its liability that are a tiny fraction of the damage that a serious accident would cause. But of course we are told that serious nuclear accidents, like massive deep sea oil blowouts, are far too unlikely to worry about.

    And the much touted new START treaty, advertised as the first step on the path towards disarmament, will have a still–unknown cost, equal to whatever the powerful advocates of the nuclear weapons complex can extort. The Obama administration already has made a down payment that will postpone meaningful movement towards disarmament for a decade or more, promising to spend at least $180 billion over the next ten years to sustain and modernize US nuclear forces and the vast array of laboratories and factories that build and maintain them.

    In early March, I joined thousands of people in California and around the United States, protesting rising tuitions at public universities and colleges and cuts in services at all levels of public education. Professors and students, school teachers, parents, and bus drivers organized  rallies and marches large and small all across the state.The day was full of a sense that people are ready for greater change, and to take more action to get it.

    Speaker after speaker called for ending California’s undemocratic supermajority requirements for budget and tax legislation, and for progressive taxation of corporations and the wealthy to reverse the steady flow of wealth upward that has been a defining feature of US economic and political life for the last three decades. There were signs everywhere with messages like “Fund Schools, Not War!”

    Whether or not it will develop into one, the wave of actions rippling out from the public university protests have some of the makings of a social movement. There was a sense of urgency, grounded in an understanding of how the issues affected each of us–and all of us–directly. People from different segments of society–not only students but relatively privileged university professors and the people who maintain the classrooms and laboratories they depend on, public school teachers and parents who both are burdened by a regressive tax system and need public institutions to educate their children–were starting to have a conversation directly with each other, and coming to realize that the growing crisis in institutions they all depend on in different ways has deeper causes, and may require significant social change if there are to be solutions that work for all.

    Nuclear disarmament work today stands in sharp contrast to energetic new movements brimming with potential–and also stands largely apart from them. Most people don’t think about nuclear weapons from one end of the year to another, and don’t perceive nuclear weapons as constituting a concrete threat to themselves or the people and places they love. Most of the grassroots disarmament organizations are gone. For most arms control and disarmament professionals, the notion of building a social movement, and beyond that a movement that addresses not only the causes of war and entrenched militarism, but that builds a common understanding of the causes of the injustices that afflict most of humanity, has largely receded into the past. Yet if nuclear disarmament work is to avoid irrelevance, much less make genuine progress in these turbulent times, the first priority must be helping to build movements looking for new ways towards justice, and by doing so saving our world.

    Beyond expert rationales for the current order of things: restoring our divided consciousness

    In 1930, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Robert Millikan wrote that “One may sleep in peace with the consciousness that the Creator has put some foolproof elements into his handiwork, and that man is powerless to do it any titanic damage.”

    This statement, by one who was a leading “expert” in his time, has been proven false not only by nuclear weapons, but by the devastating ecological effects of endless accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and today by the growing ability of human beings to manipulate the most basic building blocks of the natural world itself.These threats to our future are manifestations of a global society in which most resources and most of the earth itself is controlled by a tiny minority, with the choices which affect us all dressed up as inevitable and necessary by experts who work in their service.

    A common theme in all of these issues is that decisions are made at a great remove, both socially and geographically, from the places where the human and ecological impacts are felt. One of the great paradoxes of our time is that in a society that depends on the systematic analysis of cause and effect in order to control both nature and human beings, one of the main strategies for maintaining wealth and power is avoiding responsibility, whether moral or financial, for the effects of one’s actions. From the limits on liability for the BP blowout to the socialization of wealthy bankers and investors’ risk by the bank bailout to the endless PR spin employed to absolve every act of malfeasance by the powerful to the soldier fighting a push–button war, killing people he will never truly see, we have created a world that has systematically separated cause and effect. By doing so we have largely destroyed our collective moral consciousness.

    It is this same eliding of consequences that allows us, through our most powerful institutions, to prepare every day for our own annihilation, an end that becomes more likely the longer we allow it to go on.

    This separation of cause and effect also intensifies a phenomenon which is central to the modern order of things: the way people who work in large organizations split their consciousness, focusing only on the task at hand and on the use of their technical or professional skills, leaving at the door all other pieces of their humanity, the fact that they are mothers or fathers or sons or daughters or creatures with living bodies in a living world.

    This state of affairs constitutes both a challenge and an opportunity for nonviolent thought and political action. We need to find creative ways to bring this splitting to light, and make it difficult to sustain. By doing so, we may transform not only our opponents in a particular conflict, but ourselves as well. We too have been raised in this system, and fall back easily into our own ingrained training and habits, even if we are doing what we think of as work for social change.

    Our task is to build a politics that can give voice and decision making power to all those who affected by the decisions of the huge organizations that now dominate our lives, and by doing so democratize the economy, and with it decisions about technology choice. We need to build a social movement that brings these themes together, starting with people where they live, from the bottom up.

    References

    1. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, August 16, 1967

    2. Robert Millikan (Nobel 1923), “Alleged Sins of Science,” in Scribner’s Magazine, 87(2), 1930, pp. 119-30, quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 534.

  • Howard Zinn’s the Bomb

    The late Howard Zinn’s new book “The Bomb” is a brilliant little dissection of some of the central myths of our militarized society. Those who’ve read “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments,” by H.P. Albarelli Jr. know that this is a year for publishing the stories of horrible things that the United States has done to French towns. In that case, Albarelli, describes the CIA administering LSD to an entire town, with deadly results. In “The Bomb,” Zinn describes the U.S. military making its first use of napalm by dropping it all over another French town, burning anyone and anything it touched. Zinn was in one of the planes, taking part in this horrendous crime.

    In mid-April 1945, the war in Europe was essentially over. Everyone knew it was ending. There was no military reason (if that’s not an oxymoron) to attack the Germans stationed near Royan, France, much less to burn the French men, women, and children in the town to death. The British had already destroyed the town in January, similarly bombing it because of its vicinity to German troops, in what was widely called a tragic mistake. This tragic mistake was rationalized as an inevitable part of war, just as were the horrific firebombings that successfully reached German targets, just as was the later bombing of Royan with napalm. Zinn blames the Supreme Allied Command for seeking to add a “victory” in the final weeks of a war already won. He blames the local military commanders’ ambitions. He blames the American Air Force’s desire to test a new weapon. And he blames everyone involved — which must include himself — for “the most powerful motive of all: the habit of obedience, the universal teaching of all cultures, not to get out of line, not even to think about that which one has not been assigned to think about, the negative motive of not having either a reason or a will to intercede.”

    When Zinn returned from the war in Europe, he expected to be sent to the war in the Pacific, until he saw and rejoiced at seeing the news of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, 65 years ago this August. Only years later did Zinn come to understand the inexcusable crime of the greatest proportions that was the dropping of nuclear bombs in Japan, actions similar in some ways to the final bombing of Royan. The war with Japan was already over, the Japanese seeking peace and willing to surrender. Japan asked only that it be permitted to keep its emperor, a request that was later granted. But, like napalm, the nuclear bombs were weapons that needed testing. The second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, was a different sort of bomb that also needed testing. President Harry Truman wanted to demonstrate nuclear bombs to the world and especially to Russia. And he wanted to end the war with Japan before Russia became part of it. The horrific form of mass murder he employed was in no way justifiable.

    Zinn also goes back to dismantle the mythical reasons the United States was in the war to begin with. The United States, England, and France were imperial powers supporting each other’s international aggressions in places like the Philippines. They opposed the same from Germany and Japan, but not aggression itself. Most of America’s tin and rubber came from the Southwest Pacific. The United States made clear for years its lack of concern for the Jews being attacked in Germany. It also demonstrated its lack of opposition to racism through its treatment of African Americans and Japanese Americans. Franklin D. Roosevelt described fascist bombing campaigns over civilian areas as “inhuman barbarity” but then did the same on a much larger scale to German cities, which was followed up by the destruction on an unprecedented scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — actions that came after years of dehumanizing the Japanese. Zinn points out that “LIFE magazine showed a picture of a Japanese person burning to death and commented: ‘This is the only way.’” Aware that the war would end without any more bombing, and aware that U.S. prisoners of war would be killed by the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the U.S. military went ahead and dropped the bombs.

    Americans allowed these things to be done in their name, just as the Germans and Japanese allowed horrible crimes to be committed in their names. Zinn points out, with his trademark clarity, how the use of the word “we” blends governments together with peoples and serves to equate our own people with our military, while we demonize the people of other lands because of actions by their governments. “The Bomb” suggest a better way to think about such matters and firmly establishes that:

    • what the U.S. military is doing now, today, parallels the crimes of the past and shares their dishonorable motivations;
    • the bad wars have a lot in common with the so-called “good war,” about which there was little if anything good;
    • Howard Zinn did far more in his life for peace than for war, and more for peace than just about anybody else, certainly more than several Nobel Peace Prize winners.

  • Frank Kelly: An Advocate of Joy

    These remarks were delivered at Frank Kelly’s memorial service in Santa Barbara, California on July 16, 2010.

    We are here today to remember a good and decent man, who lived a long life with many notable achievements.  It is not so much what he accomplished, though, as how he lived that makes his life a powerful lesson and one worth celebrating.

    Frank was a very dear friend, the kind of friend that one is graced to have.  I first met Frank when Carolee and I came to Santa Barbara and I worked at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.  We shared the experience of being a part of that remarkable organization headed by Robert Hutchins.  That was 38 years ago.  

    Ten years later, in 1982, Frank and I would work together to found the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  Over the 28 years that the Foundation has existed, we were very close, conferring on our work on nearly a daily basis.  For many years before Barbara’s death, Frank and Barbara and Carolee and I shared our birthdays together.

    Frank was a unique individual who lived a unique life.  Here are some of the characteristics that impressed me about Frank:

    He was always generous with his smiles and his praise.

    He always managed to find and encourage the best in each person he knew.

    He believed that all of us are, in his special language, “glorious beings.”

    He recognized that each of us is a miracle and should be celebrated as such.

    He was optimistic that a better world was possible and could be achieved.  

    He believed that each of us deserves a seat at humanity’s table.

    He felt the world needed far more women as leaders at all levels of society, and he was as insistent as he was persistent in urging leadership roles for women.

    He was a loyal and devoted husband, father, father-in-law, grandfather and friend.  He was proud of his children and grandchildren and delighted by his new great-grandson.

    He was a sparkling storyteller and had a rich storehouse of memories to draw upon, ranging from his childhood memories of his father coming home from World War I, to his days at the Kansas City Star, to speechwriting for President Truman, to his work as the assistant to the Senate Majority Leader, and his close relationship to Robert Hutchins and many other luminaries of the 20th century.

    He loved music of all sorts, and had a special fondness for Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “It’s a Wonderful World.”  He also loved the special concerts that his son Stephen performed for him and was Stephen’s greatest fan.

    Frank had a deep spirituality – a spirituality rooted in our connections with each other, with the Earth, and with the infinite.  

    Most of all, Frank was an advocate of joy, and he loved these lines by William Blake, “He who kisses joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise.”  William Blake might well have envisioned Frank as he wrote those lines.

    Frank will live on in the hearts of those who admired and loved him and in the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s annual Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future.

    I hesitate to say farewell to Frank, as I believe his spirit will remain with us in our efforts to create a more peaceful and decent future for humanity.  If we can build some joy into our efforts, I think we can be assured that Frank will be smiling down on us.

  • Scenarios for Nuclear Catastrophe

    In a recent article that I wrote, “British Petroleum, Imagination and Nuclear Catastrophe,” I argued we should use the occasion of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to imagine scenarios in which a nuclear catastrophe could take place.  The reason for imagining such scenarios should be obvious: to keep them from occurring.  

    Here is a proposition: Continued offshore oil drilling runs the risk of future offshore oil leak catastrophes that will destroy large aquatic and shoreline habitats.  Applied to nuclear weapons, the proposition could be restated in this way: Continued reliance on nuclear weapons runs the risk of future nuclear catastrophes that will destroy cities, countries and civilization.

    In my article, I proposed four of many possible scenarios that could be envisioned.  These scenarios involved a terrorist bomb on a major city somewhere in the world; an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war; an accidental nuclear launch by Russia, leading to a nuclear exchange with the US; and a nuclear attack by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il on Japan and South Korea.  

    These scenarios elicited responses that I would like to share.  The first response, from South Korea, expressed the opinion that Kim Jong-Il would not make a preemptive nuclear attack.  The writer said, “I agree with your imagined scenarios except for the following: …Kim Jong-Il is not so irrational that he would attack Japan and South Korea for not receiving development assistance.  He and North Korean officials usually say that they would attack only in the case of being attacked….”  This may be true, but it remains difficult to predict which leaders will act rationally and which will not.  It seems certain, though, that all leaders will not act rationally at all times with regard to nuclear weapons, and that deterrence theory, at a minimum, requires rational decision makers.

    The second and third responses imagine other scenarios.  The second response focuses on Israel: “You forget one other horrible scenario: Israel decides to preemptively bomb Tehran and Isfahan, because they ‘fear for their own safety.’ Armed with nukes, and in the name of ‘Civil Defense,’ rogue Israel thumbs its nose at the world again and takes out parts of Iran….”  Would Israel initiate a nuclear attack under certain circumstances, such as a major threat from Arab countries?  The truth is that we do not know under what conditions Israel, or any other nuclear weapon state, would initiate such an attack.

    The third response, from South Africa, focuses on the possibility of a US initiated nuclear attack: “In your scenarios you do not imagine the US pressing the nuclear button.   The United States is beyond question the most aggressive nation in the world and remains among the most recalcitrant in signing peace and environmental protocols.  As a person who lives outside the United States, I feel most threatened by the US.  The US does not negotiate, at the heart of which is compromise for the greater good.   Narrow interests are pursued relentlessly – even to the detriment of US citizens.”

    The response continued, “I was appalled to receive by email photos of a US warship recently launched.   It was built from the scrap metal of the Twin Towers and named ‘Never Forget’ or some such title.   I don’t believe that honors the lives lost.  What would have honored them would be a ship custom built to deliver aid, medical services, etc. to disaster areas and developing countries.   I do believe citizens in the US, so many of whom are brought up on the myth that the US is always in the right, should recognize their own potential to be the ultimate aggressors in the use of nuclear weapons.  They use every other weapon of destruction – Agent Orange, cluster bombs, etc.  Why should they hold back on nuclear weapons?”

    Would the US initiate a nuclear attack?  The answer is the same for the US or any other nuclear weapon state: We don’t know.  What we do know is that the leaders of countries that possess nuclear weapons are essentially holding the world, including their own citizens, hostage to the potential catastrophic consequences of using these weapons.

    Deterrence can fail in many ways, some of which we cannot foresee, and it may be the unforeseeable scenarios that are most dangerous.  We don’t know what the trigger may be, only that we are playing with nuclear fire.  The Gulf of Mexico recovery from the British Petroleum oil spill may take decades.  For civilization to recover from nuclear war could take centuries and might not be possible.  The oil spill in the Gulf has provided us an opportunity to awaken to the nuclear dangers that confront us and to act.  The question remains: Will we seize this opportunity?