Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: peace

  • Once Upon a Time Can Be Now: Rescuing Planet Earth and Restoring Paradise

    David KriegerFairy tales often begin with the words, “Once upon a time….”  For example, “Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess….”  In a fairy tale, the hero, perhaps a handsome prince, may kill the dragon and rescue the princess, and they “live happily ever after.”  I want to suggest a fairy tale in which there is a beautiful planet and the heroes and heroines who save it are us.  So, here is a fairy tale about saving a planet in distress.  Our challenge is to bring this fairy tale to life.


    Once upon a time there was a beautiful and pristine planet.  It was the third planet in a remote solar system in a vast galaxy of stars.  While it might have seemed like an ordinary planet, if anything, rather on the small side, it was far from ordinary.  It was, in fact, a very special planet, for it had just the right climate and temperature to support life.  On this planet there were oceans and continents and mountains and rivers, and they teemed with life.  There were broad plains with grasses that rippled in the winds; hillsides covered with wildflowers; trees that spread their branches and bore fruits.  And there were animals of every shape and kind: fish that swam, birds that flew, and animals that hopped and jumped and ran.  This planet had sunrises and sunsets and a night sky filled with twinkling stars.  Compared with the harsh, lifeless planets that filled the solar system, it was a paradise. 


    And into this paradise came a featherless bi-ped capable of knowing.  He called himself man, and he called the paradise he inhabited Earth.  He devised stories about his own creation, stories that helped to explain the mystery of being — the mystery of something emerging from nothing.  Man was clever and he created tools that gave him power over other creatures, even though he was not as strong or fast or agile as they were.  He created powerful gods in his own image and then had those imaginary creatures bestow upon him dominion over all that swam and flew and ran.  Man took charge of the planet.


    Man’s most recent creation story, the science-based creation story, is that the universe grew from a “Big Bang” some 15 billion years ago, and it has been expanding ever since.  Earth was created 4.5 billion years ago and a half-billion years later simple forms of life emerged on Earth.  Early forms of man in this creation story came into existence only a few million years ago and more modern forms of man only some 50,000 years ago.  Only in the past eight to ten thousand years have human civilizations emerged.


    While the science-based creation story gives a skeletal outline of the development of the universe, its large numbers are difficult to grasp.  It is helpful to think of them in terms of a very big 15,000-page book.  Each page of the book represents a million years in the history of the universe.  The “Big Bang” occurs at the top of page one.  It is not until page 10,500 that the Earth is created and not until page 11,000 that life begins on Earth.  It is not until page 14,997 that primitive forms of man come into being.  Assuming that each word on each page represents 1,000 years, it is only in the final ten words on the final page of the book that civilization begins.  Civilization reflects a larger-scale ordering of society, characterized by agriculture, hierarchy and specialization.  Civilization gives rise to larger and larger tribal loyalties, to competing social systems and to increasingly virulent warfare. 


    It is only within the last two or three words of the book that Isaiah, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Zoroaster, Jesus and other spiritual leaders walk the planet.  But, despite their lives and the moral lessons they teach, warfare becomes more prominent within and among human societies.  Man increases his skill in organizing to engage in the large-scale slaughter of other men.  Over the millennia, man develops ever more powerful weapons with which to kill his fellow man.  He advances in the technology of weaponry from stones to spears to arrows to swords to guns to modern artillery and bombs, and finally, to nuclear and then thermonuclear weapons. 


    In describing our time, the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, writes, “The planet had been parceled out among various countries, each one provided with loyalties, cherished memories, with a past undoubtedly heroic, with rights, with wrongs, with a particular mythology, with bronze forefathers, with anniversaries, with demagogues and symbols.  This arbitrary division was favorable for wars.”  Our time has been favorable for wars, but the development of our technologies of warfare and the resources we have devoted to war and its preparations have made wars unfavorable for us.


    It is not until the final punctuation mark on the final page of the 15,000-page book that the Nuclear Age begins with three explosions: a test explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, followed by the destruction of Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki.  In only seven or eight more years, man had created thermonuclear weapons, and two of the many “arbitrary divisions” of the planet that man calls countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, were engaged in a mad nuclear arms race.  It was in this period, the Nuclear Age, that man arrived at a new juncture in his history, one in which his weaponry had become powerful enough to destroy himself and most other forms of complex life on the planet.  In doing so, man had made himself a godlike creature, a god of savagery and destruction.  He now held his fate in his own hands. 


    The final punctuation mark in the 15,000-page book is now being determined.  It may be thought of as a question mark, and the question is: will man be able to summon the will and strength to control his most dangerous technologies and continue his own history, along with that of the remarkable planet on which he lives, on page 15,001?  It may instead be a dramatic exclamation point, another “Big Bang,” this one created by man himself, bringing a cataclysmic end to human life on the planet.
    In many ways, man has taken the beautiful and pristine planet that he inherited from the cosmos and undermined its sustainability.  Man’s powerful technologies combined with his greed threaten the climate and health of the planet.  His waste and pollution are poisoning the planet and its creatures.  Disparities in wealth have turned the planet into a hell for many of the poorest among us.  Man has not been a good trustee of the planet for future generations.  But the most urgent issue of sustainability confronting man is the threat posed by the nuclear arsenals he has created, an issue that has received very little public attention, particularly since the end of the Cold War some two decades ago. 
    The principal points that I want to make are these: first, we are destroying our paradise by our own actions; second, nuclear weapons are incompatible with a sustainable future; and third, the future is in our collective hands.  We must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.  We must also abolish war as a means of settling our conflicts.  By doing so, we would release vast amounts of capital and human creativity.
    At the height of the nuclear arms race in the mid-1980s, there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, primarily in the arsenals of the United States and Soviet Union.  These weapons were capable of destroying complex life on Earth many times over.  On many occasions, man has come close to a nuclear war – by accident, miscalculation or design – that could have ended the human future on the planet.  Perhaps the most serious of these occasions was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the US and former Soviet Union almost stumbled over the precipice.  The Nuclear Age has been characterized by its policies of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), with opposing sides locked in a life-and-death struggle that would be both suicidal (death of self) and omnicidal (death of all).


    Although the world’s nuclear arsenals have been reduced by over 50,000 nuclear weapons in the past 25 years, there are still slightly under 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world.  These remain largely in the arsenals of the US and Russia, but also in those of seven other countries: the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.  Two decades after the end of the Cold War, large numbers of nuclear weapons remain on high alert 24 hours a day, and there has been an unfortunate lack of political leadership for ending the nuclear weapons threat to humanity.


    Most of us are aware of the direct effects of nuclear weapons that result from blast, fire and radiation.  At Hiroshima, some 90,000 people died immediately from the US atomic bombing on August 6, 1945, some being vaporized and leaving shadows etched into stone walls behind where they had been at the time of the explosion.  By the end of 1945, the death toll in Hiroshima had risen to 145,000.  For the survivors of the atomic bombings, the suffering and trauma continues even until today.  Soon the survivors will all be gone, and there will be no first-hand witnesses to the horror of nuclear weapons.


    The indirect effects of nuclear weapons use, we now know from the studies of atmospheric scientists, would be even worse than the direct effects.  A regional war between India and Pakistan, for example, in which each side used 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons on the other side’s cities and industrial areas, would have devastating global effects.  The smoke from burning fires would rise into the stratosphere, blocking warming sunlight, lowering global temperatures to the lowest experienced in the last 1,000 years, and shortening growing seasons.  Hundreds of millions of people would likely perish in the resulting global famine. 


    These consequences, as horrendous as they are, would pale in comparison to those in a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, whose launch-ready, operational nuclear arsenals have a combined explosive power more than 500 times greater than those of India and Pakistan.  Such an exchange would result in global temperatures becoming colder than those experienced in the last Ice Age, some 18,000 years ago.  This radical climate change, along with the destruction of the ozone layer, would create conditions on Earth that would likely result in the extinction of most or all complex forms of life on the planet.


    This is the threat that we live with every moment of each day.  Could it happen?  Of course, it could.  We ignore it at our peril.  We cannot be naïve enough to believe that humans can create fool-proof systems.  To understand this, we need only recall the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, or the many close calls we have had with nuclear weapons, including accidents and false warnings of nuclear attacks.


    Not long ago, I was arrested for protesting the launch of a US Minuteman III missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base, not far from where I live in California.  The Minuteman III is a land-based, nuclear-armed missile.  There are 450 of them in silos in Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota.  They are launch-ready, first-strike weapons.  If there is a warning – including a false warning – of attack against the United States, there will be pressure for the US to use these weapons before they are destroyed in their silos.  The same is true of the Russian land-based, nuclear-armed missiles.  They will have the same pressure to use them before incoming missiles could destroy them in their silos.  The land-based, nuclear-armed missile forces of both sides should be thought of as Nuclear Doomsday Machines.  They are triggers for World War III, what would undoubtedly be a short and cataclysmic war.


    The US and Russian presidents would have only a few minutes, perhaps 12 minutes at the most, to evaluate a warning of attack and decide whether or not to launch their own missiles and initiate World War III.  This is an intolerable situation.  President Mikhail Gorbachev recognized this when he said, “It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason.”  This is sound advice.  We mortals, all of us, are not gods, and none of us should be trusted with nuclear weapons when the future of our planet, our species and other forms of life are in our hands.  All of us are threatened by the power of our nuclear arsenals and the all-too-real possibilities of nuclear proliferation, nuclear war and nuclear famine.


    When I began, I spoke about the paradise of our Earth, the only place we know of in the universe where there is life.  Our minimum responsibility, in return for living on this planet, is to pass the planet on intact and sustainable to the next generation.  Our technologies of warfare have made this far more challenging than in the past, but we must not fail in confronting the threats posed by nuclear weapons and war. 


    To end the urgent threats of nuclear proliferation, nuclear war and nuclear famine, we must abolish nuclear weapons.  This will require leadership from great states and from great individuals within those states.  Nuclear weapons are illegal under international law, immoral and costly.  Rather than being considered a source of prestige, they should be taboo, like cannibalism and slavery.  We should demand that all states begin negotiations immediately on a new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.  In the meantime, while this treaty is being negotiated, we should demand that all nuclear weapon states adopt policies of No Use of these weapons against non-nuclear weapon states and No First Use against other nuclear weapon states.  To support such policies and give them credence, nuclear weapon states should separate their warheads from delivery vehicles on land-based missiles, so there will not be temptation to use them first in the event of a false warning.  Finally, before the US proceeds with further deployment of missile defense installations in Europe, it should take seriously Russian security concerns and conduct a joint threat assessment with Russia.


    The abolition of nuclear weapons is our responsibility.  We should take care of it promptly, with the urgency it demands, and not allow this global threat to be passed on to our children and grandchildren.  Then we should dedicate ourselves to doing more than this minimum for survival and take steps to assure the restoration of Earth to being the paradise it was and could be again.  An international appeal for the 2012 RIO + 20 conference, initiated by the International Peace Bureau and the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility, points out these important linkages: “Without disarmament, there will be no adequate development; without development, there will be no justice, equality and peace.  We must give sustainability a chance.”


    In 1955, a group of scientists, led by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, issued the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which stated, “There lies before us, if we choose, continued progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom.  Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels?  We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.  If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”


    It is up to us to choose.  Let us choose peace and hope and a sustainable future.  May we show by our actions that we take seriously our roles as trustees of the Earth for our children and their children and all children of the future – that they may enjoy a peaceful and harmonious life on our planetary home. 

  • The Shame of Nations: A New Record is Set for Spending on War

    Lawrence Wittner


    This article was originally published by the History News Network.


    On April 17, 2012, as millions of Americans were filing their income tax returns, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. In case Americans were wondering where most of their tax money — and the tax money of other nations — went in the previous year, the answer from SIPRI was clear: to war and preparations for war.


    World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011 — an increase of $138 billion over the previous year.  The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion.


    Some news reports have emphasized that, from the standpoint of reducing reliance on armed might, this actually represents progress.  After all, the increase in “real” global military spending — that is, expenditures after corrections for inflation and exchange rates — was only 0.3 percent. And this contrasts with substantially larger increases in the preceding thirteen years.


    But why are military expenditures continuing to increase — indeed, why aren’t they substantially decreasing — given the governmental austerity measures of recent years? Amid the economic crisis that began in late 2008 (and which continues to the present day), most governments have been cutting back their spending dramatically on education, health care, housing, parks, and other vital social services. However, there have not been corresponding cuts in their military budgets.


    Americans, particularly, might seek to understand why in this context U.S. military spending has not been significantly decreased, instead of being raised by $13 billion — admittedly a “real dollar” decrease of 1.2 percent, but hardly one commensurate with Washington’s wholesale slashing of social spending. Yes, military expenditures by China and Russia increased in 2011.  And in “real” terms, too. But, even so, their military strength hardly rivals that of the United States.  Indeed, the United States spent about five times as much as China (the world’s #2 military power) and ten times as much as Russia (the world’s #3 military power) on its military forces during 2011. Furthermore, when U.S. allies like Britain, France, Germany, and Japan are factored in, it is clear that the vast bulk of world military expenditures are made by the United States and its military allies.


    This might account for the fact that the government of China, which accounts for only 8.2 percent of world military spending, believes that increasing its outlay on armaments is reasonable and desirable. Apparently, officials of many nations share that competitive feeling.


    Unfortunately, the military rivalry among nations — one that has endured for centuries — results in a great squandering of national resources. Many nations, in fact, devote most of their available income to funding their armed forces and their weaponry. In the United States, an estimated 58 percent of the U.S. government’s discretionary tax dollars go to war and preparations for war. “Almost every country with a military is on an insane path, spending more and more on missiles, aircraft, and guns,” remarked John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus. “These countries should be confronting the real threats of climate change, hunger, disease, and oppression, not wasting taxpayers’ money on their military.”


    Of course, defenders of military expenditures reply that military force actually protects people from war. But does it? If so, how does one explain the fact that the major military powers of the past century — the United States, Russia, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and China — have been almost constantly at war during that time? What is the explanation for the fact that the United States — today’s military giant — is currently engaged in at least two wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and appears to be on the verge of a third (with Iran)? Perhaps the maintenance of a vast military machine does not prevent war but, instead, encourages it.


    In short, huge military establishments can be quite counterproductive. Little wonder that they have been condemned repeatedly by great religious and ethical leaders. Even many government officials have decried war and preparations for war — although usually by nations other than their own.


    Thus, the release of the new study by SIPRI should not be a cause for celebration. Rather, it provides an appropriate occasion to contemplate the fact that, this past year, nations spent more money on the military than at any time in human history. Although this situation might still inspire joy in the hearts of government officials, top military officers, and defense contractors, people farther from the levers of military power might well conclude that it’s a hell of a way to run a world.

  • Earth Day

    David Krieger


    Vaya aquí para la versión española.


    We live in a vast universe made up of billions of galaxies, each of which is made up of billions of stars.  Our home is a small planet that revolves around a small sun in a remote galaxy.  It is just the right distance from the sun that it is not too hot and not too cold to support life.  It has air that is breathable, water that is drinkable, and topsoil suitable for growing crops.  In the immensity of space, it is a very small dot, what astrophysicist Carl Sagan referred to as a “pale blue dot.”  Our Earth is the only place we know of that harbors life.  It is precious beyond any riches that could be imagined. 


    One would think that any sane, self-reflecting creatures that lived on this planet would recognize its beauty and preciousness and would want to tend to it with care.  In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic book, The Little Prince, the prince says, “It’s a matter of discipline.  When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend to your planet.”  But that is an imaginary planet with an imaginary little prince.  On the real planet that supports life, the one we inhabit, there aren’t enough of us who exercise such discipline and tend to our planet with loving care.


    Think about how we have managed our planet.  We have allowed the planet to become divided into rich and poor, where a few people have billions of dollars and billions of people have few dollars.  While some live in greed, the majority live in need.  We have parceled the planet into entities we call countries and created borders that countries try to protect.  We have created military forces in these countries and given them enormous resources to prepare for war and to engage in war.  Annual global military expenditures now exceed $1.6 trillion, while hundreds of millions of humans live without clean water, adequate nutrition, medical care and education.


    We have eagerly exploited the planet’s resources with little concern for future generations or for the damage we cause to the environment.  Instead of using renewable energy from the sun to provide our energy needs, we exploit the Earth’s stores of oil and transport them across the globe.  We have turned much of the world into desert.  We have polluted the air we breathe and the water we drink.  In our excess, we have pushed the planet toward the point of no return in global warming, and then argued global warming as a reason to build more nuclear power plants.


    We keep relearning in tragic ways that we humans are fallible creatures.  That is the lesson of our recurrent oil spills.  It is also the lesson of the accidents at Chernobyl a quarter century ago and at Fukushima one year ago.  It is a lesson that we urgently need to learn about nuclear weapons – weapons we have come close to accidentally using on many occasions and have twice used intentionally. 


    Nuclear weapons kill directly by blast, fire and radiation.  The nuclear weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small in comparison with today’s thermonuclear weapons.  In recent years, we have learned some new things about nuclear war.  Atmospheric scientists have modeled a hypothetical nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each side uses 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons on the other side’s cities.  In addition to the direct effects of the weapons, there would be significant indirect effects on the environment.  Smoke from the burning cities would rise into the stratosphere and reduce warming sunlight for ten years, which would lower average surface temperatures, reduce growing seasons and lead to global famine that could kill hundreds of millions of people. 


    That would be the result of a small nuclear war, using less than one percent of the operationally deployed nuclear weapons on the planet.  A nuclear war between the US and Russia could lead to the extinction of most or all complex life on Earth, including human life.  As we celebrate Earth Day this year, 20 years after the end of the Cold War, both the US and Russia maintain hundreds of launch-ready, land-based inter-continental ballistic missiles on high-alert status, ready to be fired in moments.


    We who are alive today are the trustees of this planet for future generations.  We’re failing in our responsibility to pass it on intact.  We need a new Earth ethic that embraces our responsibility for fairness to each other and to the future.  We need new ways of educating that do not simply accept the status quo.  We need to trade in our patriotism for a global humatriotism.  We need a new approach to economics based on what is truly precious – life and the conditions that support it. 


    Earth Day will have its greatest value if it reminds us to care for our Earth and each other all the other days of the year, individually and through our public policy.  We need to inspire people throughout the world, young and old alike, with a vision of the beauty and wonder of the Earth that we can now enjoy, restore and preserve for future generations if we tend to our planet with the discipline of the little prince. 

  • Nuclear Weapons as Instruments of Peace?

    Richard FalkA few days ago I was a participant in a well-attended academic panel on ‘the decline of violence and warfare’ at the International Studies Association’s Annual Meeting held this year in San Diego, California. The two-part panel featured appraisal of the common argument of two prominent recent publications: Steven Pinker’s best-selling The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined and Joshua Goldstein’s well-researched, informative, and provocative Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Both books are disposed to rely upon quantitative data to back up their optimistic assessments of international and domestic political behavior, which if persuasive, offer humanity important reasons to be hopeful about the future. Much of their argument depends on an acceptance of their interpretation of battlefield deaths worldwide, which according to their assessments have declined dramatically in recent decades. But do battlefield deaths tell the whole story, or even the real story, about the role and dangers of political violence and war in our collective lives?


    My role was to be a member of the Goldstein half of the panel. Although I had never previously met Joshua Goldstein I was familiar with his work and reputation as a well regarded scholar in the field of international relations.  To offer my response in the few minutes available to me I relied on a metaphor that drew a distinction between a ‘picture’ and its ‘frame.’ I found the picture of war and warfare presented by Goldstein as both persuasive and illuminating, conveying in authoritative detail information about the good work being doing by UN peacekeeping forces in a variety of conflict settings around the world, as well as a careful crediting of peace movements with a variety of contributions to conflict resolution and war avoidance. Perhaps, the most enduringly valuable part of the book is its critical debunking of prevalent myths about the supposedly rising proportion of civilian casualties in recent wars and inflated reports of casualties and sexual violence in the Congo Wars of 1998-2003. These distortions, corrected by Goldstein, have led to a false public perception that wars and warfare are growing more indiscriminate and brutal in recent years, while the most reliable evidence points in the opposite direction.


    Goldstein is convincing in correcting such common mistakes about political violence and war in the contemporary world, but less so when it comes to the frame and framing of this picture that is conveyed by his title ‘winning the war on war’ and the arguments to this effect that is the centerpiece of his book, and accounts for the interest that it is arousing. For one thing the quantitative measures relied upon do not come to terms with the heightened qualitative risks of catastrophic warfare or the continued willingness of leading societies to anchor their security on credible threats to annihilate tens of millions of innocent persons, which if taking the form of a moderate scale nuclear exchange (less than 1% of the world’s stockpile of weapons) is likely to cause, according to reliable scientific analysis, what has been called ‘a nuclear famine’ resulting in a sharp drop in agricultural output that could last as long as ten years and could be brought about by the release of dense clouds of smoke blocking incoming sunlight.  <http://www.nucleardarkness.org/index2.php>


    Also on the panel were such influential international relations scholars as John Mearsheimer who shared with me the view that the evidence in Goldstein’s book did not establish that, as Mearsheimer put it, ‘war had been burned out of the system,’ or that even such a trend meaningfully could be inferred from recent experience. Mearsheimer widely known for his powerful realist critique of the Israeli Lobby (in collaboration with Stephen Walt) did make the important point that the United States suffers from ‘an addiction to war.’ Mearsheimer did not seem responsive to my insistence on the panel that part of this American addiction to war arose from role being played by entrenched domestic militarism a byproduct of the permanent war economy that disposed policy makers and politicians in Washington to treat most security issues as worthy of resolution only by considering the options offered by thinking within militarist box of violence and sanctions, a viewpoint utterly resistant to learning from past militarist failures (as in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran). In my view the war addiction is real, but can only be treated significantly if understood to be a consequence of this blinkering of policy choice by a militarized bureaucracy in nation’s capital that is daily reinforced by a compliant media and a misguided hard power realist worldview sustained by high paid private sector lobbyists and the lure of corporate profits, and continuously rationalized by well funded subsidized think tanks such as The Hoover Institution, The Heritage Foundation, and The American Enterprise Institute. Dwight Eisenhower in his presidential farewell speech famously drew attention to the problem that has grown far worse through the years when he warned the country about ‘the military-industrial complex’ back in 1961.


    What to me was most shocking about the panel was not its overstated claims that political violence was declining and war on the brink of disappearing, but the unqualified endorsement of nuclear weapons as deserving credit for keeping the peace during Cold War and beyond. Nuclear weapons were portrayed as if generally positive contributors to establishing a peaceful and just world, provided only that they do not fall into unwanted hands (which means ‘adversaries of the West,’ or more colorfully phrased by George W. Bush as ‘the axis of evil’) as a result of proliferation. In this sense, although not made explicit in the conversation, Obama’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons set forth at Prague on April 5, 2009 seems irresponsible from the perspective of achieving a less war-prone world. I had been previously aware of Mearsheimer’s support for this position in his hyper-realist account of how World War III was avoided in the period between 1945-1989, but I was not prepared for Goldstein and the well regarded peace researcher, Andrew Mack, blandly to endorse such a conclusion without taking note of the drawbacks of such ‘a nuclear peace.’ Goldstein in his book writes on p.42, “[n]uclear deterrence may in fact help to explain why World War III did not occur during the Cold War—certainly an important accomplishment.” Goldstein does insist that this role of nuclear weapons has problematic aspects associated with some risk of unintended or accidental use and cannot by itself explain other dimensions of the decline of political violence, which rests on a broader set of developments that are usefully depicted elsewhere in the book. These qualifications are welcome but do not offset a seeming willingness to agree that nuclear weapons seemed partly responsible for the avoidance of World War III or the liberal internationalist view, perhaps most fully articulated by Joseph Nye, that an arms control approach is a sufficient indication that the threat posed by the possession and deployment of nuclear weaponry is being responsibly addressed. [Nye, Nuclear Ethics (New York: Free Press, 1986)] 


    Steven Pinker in his book takes a more nuanced position on nuclear weapons, arguing that if it were indeed correct to credit nuclear weapons with the avoidance of World War III, there would be grounds for serious concern. He correctly asserts that such a structure of peace would be “a fool’s paradise, because an accident, a miscommunication, or an air force general obsessed with precious bodily fluids could set off an apocalypse.”  Pinker goes on to conclude that “[t]hankfully, a closer look suggests that the threat of nuclear annihilation deserves little credit for the Long Peace.” (p.268) Instead, Pinker persuasively emphasizes the degree to which World War III was discouraged by memories of the devastation experienced in World War II combined with the realization that advances in conventional weaponry would make a major war among leading states far more deadly than any past war even if no nuclear weapons were used.


    Pinker also believes that a ‘nuclear taboo’ developed after World War II to inhibit recourse to nuclear weapons in all but the most extreme situations, and that this is the primary explanation of why the weapons were not used in a variety of combat settings during the 67 years that have passed since a single atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. But Pinker does not raise deeply disturbing questions about the continued possession and threat to use such weaponry that is retained by a few of the world’s states. Or if the taboo was so strong, why this weaponry remains on hair trigger alert more than 20 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and why on several occasions a threat to use nuclear weapons was used to discourage an adversary from taking certain actions. (see for instance, Steven Starr, “On the overwhelming urgency of de-alerting US & Russian missiles, http://ifyoulovethisplanet.org/?p=3358) And it the taboo was so valued, why did the United States fight so hard, it turns out unsuccessfully, to avoid having the International Court of Justice pronounce on the legality of nuclear weapons? (see ICJ Advisory Opinion, 8 July 1996; < http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/95/7495.pdf>) And why has the United States, along with some of the other nuclear weapons states, refused to declare ‘a no first use policy.’ The taboo exists, to be sure, but it is conditional and has been contested in times of international crisis, and its strength rests on the costs associated with any further use of nuclear weapons, including creating a precedent that might work against future interests.


    Most surprising than these comments on how the presence of nuclear weapons dissuaded the United States and the Soviet Union from going to war, was the failure of my co-panelists to surround their endorsement of the war-avoiding presence of nuclear weapons with moral and prudential qualifiers. At minimum, they might have acknowledged the costs and risks of tying strategic peace so closely to threatened mass devastation and civilizational, and perhaps species, catastrophe, a realization given sardonic recognition in the Cold War by the widely used acronym MAD (mutually assured destruction). The questions put by the audience also avoided this zone of acute moral and prudential insensitivity, revealing the limits of rational intelligence in addressing this most formidable challenge if social and political construction of a humane world order was recognized as a shared goal of decent people. It is unimaginable to reach any plateau of global justice without acting with resolve to rid the world of nuclear weaponry; the geopolitical ploy of shifting attention from disarmament to proliferation does not address the moral depravity of relying on genocidal capabilities and threats to uphold vital strategic interests of a West-centric world (Chinese nuclear weapons, and even those few possessed by North Korea, although dangerous and morally objectionable, at least seem acquired solely for defensive and deterrent purposes).


    I doubt very much that such a discussion of the decline of war and political violence could take place anywhere in the world other than North America, and possibly Western Europe and Japan. Of course, this does not by itself invalidate its central message, but it does raise questions about what is included and what is excluded in an Americans only debate (Mack is an Australian). Aside from the U.S. being addicted to war I heard no references in the course of the panel and discussion to the new hierarchies in the world being resurrected by indirect forms of violence and intervention after the collapse of colonialism, or of structural violence that shortens life by poverty, disease, and human insecurity. I cannot help but wonder whether some subtle corruption has seeped into the academy over the years, especially at elite universities whose faculty received invitations to work as prestigious consultants by the Washington security establishment, or in extreme cases, were hosts to lucrative arrangements that included giving weapons labs a university home and many faculty members a salary surge. Princeton, where I taught for 40 years, was in many respects during the Cold War an academic extension of the military-industrial complex, with humanists advising the CIA, a dean recruiting on behalf of the CIA, a branch of the Institute for Defense Analysis on campus doing secret contract work on counterinsurgency warfare, and a variety of activities grouped under the anodyne heading of ‘security studies’ being sponsored by outside financing. Perhaps, such connections did not spillover into the classroom or induce self-censorship in writing and lecturing, but this is difficult to assess.


    The significance of this professional discussion of nuclear weaponry in 2012, that is, long after the militarized atmosphere of the Cold War period has happily passed from the scene, can be summarized: To witness otherwise perceptive and morally motivated scholars succumbing to the demons of nuclearism is a bad omen; for me this nuclearist complacency is an unmistakable sign of cultural decadence that can only bring on disaster for the society, the species, and the world at some indeterminate future point. We cannot count on our geopolitical luck lasting forever! And we Americans, cannot possibly retain the dubious advantages of targeting the entire world with these weapons of mass destruction without experiencing the effects of a profound spiritual decline, which throughout human history, has always been the prelude to political decline, if not collapse. David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and I explore this range of issues in our recently published book, The Path to Zero: Dialogues on Nuclear Dangers (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012).

  • Nuclear Zero: Getting to the Finish Line

    This article was originally published by Truthout.


    David KriegerAlmost five decades ago, I first visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It was 18 years after the atomic bombings flattened the cities, and the cities had returned to a kind of normalcy.  At the memorial museums, though, a very different perspective on nuclear weapons was presented than that taught in American schools.  It was the perspective from below the bombs – that of the victims – not the technological perspective of having created and used the bombs.


    Nuclear weapons are not simply a technological achievement, as the West has tended to portray them.  They kill indiscriminately – children, women and men.  They are not weapons of war; they are tools of mass annihilation.  No matter what we call them, they are not truly weapons, but instruments of unbridled mass destruction.  Their threat or use is illegal under international law.  Surely, their possession, like chemical or biological weapons, should be as well.  They are immoral, as has been concluded by all the world’s great religions.  And they have cost us dearly, in financial and scientific resources and in compromises of the soul.


    Three decades ago, in 1982, we founded the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  Its vision is a just and peaceful world, free of nuclear weapons.  The Foundation’s mission is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders.  So we educate, advocate and empower – that’s what we do.  We speak out.  We are a voice of conscience.  We advocate for sane policies and for leadership to achieve a world without nuclear dangers.  Our goal is to educate and engage millions of people to move the world to nuclear disarmament and peace.


    We challenge bad theory, such as the theory of nuclear deterrence, a theory that justifies reliance on nuclear weapons, but has many faults.  For nuclear deterrence to work successfully, leaders of nuclear-armed states must be rational at all times and under all circumstances, particularly under conditions of stress when they are least likely to be rational.  Also, nuclear deterrence cannot deter those who have no territory to retaliate against or who are suicidal.  Thus, nuclear deterrence has no possibility of success against terrorist organizations.  To see one of many ways that deterrence can fail, I encourage you to watch the 1964 movie, Fail-Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet, based upon the 1962 novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler.


    The Foundation also challenges bad nuclear policies, including those that tolerate a two-tier structure of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots.”  We believe that the ultimate consequence of this two-tier structure will be nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war.  We also advocate for nuclear policies that reduce risks and move us toward a world without nuclear weapons, policies such as security assurances to non-nuclear weapon states of: no first use of nuclear weapons; no launch on warning of nuclear attack; lowering the alert status of nuclear weapons; a comprehensive test ban treaty; and a fissile material cut-off treaty.  These are all elements of the critical goal of nuclear weapons abolition and must be viewed in that context.


    Scientists tell us that even a small nuclear war with an exchange of a hundred Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons, destroying cities and sending smoke into the stratosphere, could result in blocking sunlight and lowering the earth’s temperature, leading to massive crop failures and famine, resulting in some one billion deaths.  This would be the kind of nuclear war that could occur in South Asia between India and Pakistan.  A larger-scale nuclear war, fought with a few hundred thermonuclear weapons, the kind that could occur between the US and Russia, could destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human species and most other forms of complex life on the planet.  We all share a responsibility to assure there are no small- or large-scale nuclear wars, but as long as nuclear weapons exist in any substantial numbers, the possibility of nuclear war also exists.


    In October 1962, the world held its collective breath as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded.  The world was poised on the brink of a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR.  John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev managed to navigate those dangerous currents, but many of their advisors were pushing them toward nuclear war.  Decisions on all sides were made with only partial knowledge, which could have resulted in disaster.  Robert Kennedy’s eye-witness account of the crisis, Thirteen Days, is sobering reading.


    In 1982, the year the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was created, there was considerable concern in the world about nuclear dangers.  There were more than 60,000 nuclear weapons, nearly all in the arsenals of the US and USSR.  More than one million people gathered in Central Park in New York calling for a nuclear freeze.  Of course, they were right to do so.  The nuclear arms race was out of control, and the leaders of the US and USSR were not talking to each other.  An uncontrollable nuclear arms race coupled with a failure to communicate were and are a recipe for disaster.


    By 1986, the nuclear arms race reached its apogee with over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, nearly all in the arsenals of the US and USSR.  But by this time Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power in the USSR and was talking about abolishing nuclear weapons by the year 2000.  Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, who shared Gorbachev’s view about nuclear weapons, came heartbreakingly close to agreeing to abolish their nuclear arsenals at a summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986.  Their attempt to find their way to zero nuclear weapons foundered on the issue of the Strategic Defense Initiative, now commonly referred to as missile defense.  Reagan wanted it; Gorbachev didn’t.


    So, in 1986 there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world.  Since then, we have made progress in substantially reducing nuclear arsenals to the current number of under 20,000 worldwide, having shed some 50,000 nuclear weapons.  Of the 8,500 nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, about 3,500 are awaiting dismantlement and fewer than 2,000 are deployed, about the same number deployed in Russia.  The US and Russia have agreed that they will each reduce their deployed strategic weapons to 1,550 by the year 2017.  Neither country has conducted an atmospheric or underground nuclear weapon test since 1992 (other than underground subcritical nuclear tests in which the nuclear material does not reach the criticality necessary for a nuclear chain reaction). 


    We have made progress.  We are now on relatively positive terms with Russia, since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Through solid US negotiating, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus agreed to give up the nuclear arsenals that the former Soviet Union had left on their territories and to give these weapons over to Russia for dismantlement. 


    A significant event occurred in 1996 when US Secretary of Defense William Perry met with the Russian and Ukrainian Defense Ministers at a former missile base in Ukraine to plant sunflowers.  Secretary Perry said on the occasion, “Sunflowers in the soil instead of missiles will ensure peace for future generations.”  We adopted the sunflower as a symbol of a nuclear weapons-free world.  The sunflower symbolizes everything that a nuclear-armed missile is not, being natural, nutritious, healthy, beautiful, grounded in the earth and powered by the sun.


    We have come a long way, but we haven’t reached the finish line, which is a world without nuclear weapons.  The issue we face now is to educate decision makers and the public that the dangers of nuclear weapons have not gone away.  There are still many flash points of nuclear danger in the world: India-Pakistan, North Korea, the continued possession of nuclear weapons by the UK and France, the possession of nuclear weapons by Israel and the incentive for nuclear proliferation this creates in the Middle East, and the relationship of the nuclear energy fuel cycle to nuclear proliferation.


    The greatest problem related to nuclear weapons is not that Iran might develop such weapons.  It is that the countries with nuclear weapons are not taking seriously enough their obligations to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity and achieve nuclear disarmament.  Nuclear weapons do not make their possessors more secure.  When a country has nuclear weapons or seeks to acquire them, that country will also be a target of nuclear weapons.  This goes for both the US and Iran, and for all other countries with nuclear weapons or seeking to develop them.  Nuclear weapons turn cities and countries into targets for mass annihilation.


    What shall we do to advance to zero?  In the spirit of Gorbachev and Reagan, the US and Russia must lead the way. They still possess over 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world.  It was recently revealed that President Obama has requested a study of reductions of deployed strategic nuclear weapons to three levels: 1000 to 1,100 weapons; 700 to 800 weapons; and 300 to 400 weapons.  This is significant.  It is worth advocating for US leadership to reduce the US nuclear arsenal to the lower level, to 300 nuclear weapons, as a next step.  But, of course, this would not be the desired end result.  First, it is not low enough; it is not zero.  It still would be more than enough to destroy civilization and potentially cause the extinction of complex life on the planet.  Second, it is unilateral; it must be bilateral and moving toward multilateral.


    At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we have never called for unilateral nuclear disarmament.  Going down to 300 deployed strategic nuclear weapons would be a significant reduction, but it should be a joint endeavor with Russia. To get Russia to join us in this next step will require the US to move its missile defense installations away from the Russian border, so that Russia does not feel threatened by these defenses, particularly at lower levels of offensive weapons.  US officials tell Russia not to worry about these missile defense installations, but the Russians are wary.  It is easy to understand this, if one imagines the Russians placing missile defense installations on the Canadian border and telling the US not to worry.  Missile defenses, if they are needed, must be a joint project, just as reductions in the numbers of offensive nuclear weapons must be a joint project.


    The US and Russia must cooperate on continuing to pare down their nuclear arsenals for their own security and for global security.  At the level of 300 deployed strategic nuclear weapons each, they would then be in a position of rough parity with the other nuclear weapon states and in a position to effectively negotiate a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.  The number that matters most in the nuclear disarmament arena is zero. It is the most secure and stable number of nuclear weapons.  It must be achieved carefully and in phases, but it must be achieved for the benefit of our children, grandchildren and all future generations.

  • Renewable Energy Will Bring Peace on Earth

    The drums of war are beating once again as we read of preparations and rehearsals for a US or Israeli military strike against Iran to “take out” its nascent bomb making capability, as Iran asserts its legal right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium from its nuclear reactors for “peaceful” nuclear power. The planned transformation of the imperial US military into a “global strike force”, seeking “full spectrum dominance”, its targeted assassination program, now in eight countries, waged by the US Chair Force, impersonally raining  down deadly drone attacks from their computers on unwary “terrorists” and innocent civilians as well, without benefit of trial, evidence, charges—even the Nazis got a trial at Nuremberg—the abhorrent willingness to wage illegal preemptive wars– we are reaping the grim whirlwind of these policies.  Iran is relying on the Faustian bargain of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which enables it to develop what is ostensibly described as “peaceful” nuclear technology which  gives them the capacity and materials they need to build bombs of their own as a deterrent against US threats.

    The NPT, signed in 1970 contained a promise by the then five nuclear weapons states—the US, Russia, UK, France and China—to give up their nuclear weapons in return for a promise received from all the other nations in the world not to acquire nuclear weapons.  To sweeten the deal, the treaty promised all nations an “inalienable right” to so-called “peaceful” nuclear power. Only India, Pakistan and Israel refused to sign and they used the technology and materials created through the use of their “peaceful” nuclear power to acquire nuclear arsenals, together with North Korea which had signed and them left the treaty to develop its own nuclear bombs.  Now Iran has begun to legally enrich its uranium which could easily enable it to produce bomb-grade material if it steps up its enrichment process.

    Under the guise of “peaceful nuclear power”, other countries, such as South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Libya were also well on their way to developing nuclear bombs, which they later abandoned. Former IAEA Director, Mohammed ElBaradei remarked, “We just cannot continue business as usual that every country can build its own factories for separating plutonium or enriching uranium. Then we are really talking about 30, 40 countries sitting on the fence with a nuclear weapons capability that could be converted into a nuclear weapon in a matter of months.” (1)

    Fukishima was the greatest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind.  The massive tsunami crippled the cooling systems of the reactor complex, with three exposed nuclear reactors and four fuel storage pools all in desperate need of being cooled, as to this day they continue to spew their poisons into the ground, air and water, in an unprecedented meltdown of three nuclear reactors and the exposure of four storage building with irradiated nuclear fuel pools—much graver than the accident at Chernobyl which involved only one nuclear reactor.  But even without a catastrophic meltdown like Fukushima,  Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island, nuclear energy produces toxic environmental devastation at every step along the way in the nuclear fuel chain– from the  lethal radioactive legacy produced by mining uranium ore, mostly on indigenous lands, to the polluted aftermath from the processing of uranium ore into fuel for what must be the most expensive method ever derived for boiling water to make electricity, to the vast tons of irradiated waste, despoiling our planet in every community where nuclear reactors are located–leaching their poisons into the air, water, and soil—and added to all this is perhaps the most terrifying consequences produced by nuclear power. 

    Every nuclear reactor is a bomb factory, producing the deadly material needed to make nuclear weapons.   That is how all the current nuclear weapons states developed their bombs.  And that is how the nuclear wannabes, like Iran and Japan keep their options open by mastering the technology to manufacture nuclear weapons material.  Meanwhile, more than 30 countries, eager to join the old boys advanced technology club are trying to acquire nuclear power including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Guinea, Vietnam and Bangladesh. (2)

    There are now 440 “peaceful” reactors in 31 countries (3)  — all producing deadly bomb materials with 272 research reactors in 56 countries, some producing highly enriched uranium.(4)  The signers of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) were well aware that by having a nuclear reactor, a nation had been given the keys to a bomb factory and would need to be included in any effort to ban nuclear tests, regardless of whether they proclaimed any intention to develop weapons. And US CIA Director, George Tenet, said, “The difference between producing low-enriched uranium and weapons-capable high-enriched uranium is only a matter of time and intent, not technology.” (5)  The current flurry of negotiations and initiatives to try to control the production of the civilian nuclear fuel cycle in one central place simply will not fly. It would be just another discriminatory aspect of the NPT, creating yet another class of haves and have-nots under the treaty, as was done with those permitted to have nuclear weapons and those who are not.

    There are nearly 200 million kilograms of reactor wastes in the world—with only 5 kilograms needed to make one nuclear bomb. The US has just funded Georgia with $8 billion to build two new reactors, the first new ones in the US since the Three Mile Island catastrophe, and China is planning to build 30 new reactors with 32 more under construction around the planet–to churn out more toxic poisons; on tap for bomb-making, with no known solution to safely containing the tons of nuclear waste that will be generated over the unimaginable 250,000 years it will continue to threaten life on earth. (6)  New projects are underway to mine uranium on every continent (7), mostly on indigenous lands, where first peoples have suffered inordinately from radiation poisoning.(8)

    Even without a tragic accident like Fukushima, numerous studies show that in communities with nuclear reactors operating “normally” there are higher incidences of cancer, leukemias and birth defects. How could this be allowed to happen? There is a huge amount of misinformation and lack of information deliberately propagated by industry and industry dominated institutions.   The World Health Organization has a collusive agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which, while it performs a useful service in verifying nuclear disarmament measures, was also established through the UN in 1957 “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy”.

    The IAEA has been instrumental in covering up the disastrous health effects of the Chernobyl tragedy, understating the number of deaths by attributing only 50 deaths directly to the accident. This was a whitewash of health studies performed by Russia and the Ukraine.  Those studies have been reported in 2011, in a NY Academy of Sciences Report estimating that nearly 1 million people died as a result of the Chernobyl catastrophe.(9) This cover-up was no doubt due to the highly unethical agreement between the IAEA and the World Health Organization, which provides that if either of the organizations initiates any program or activity in which the other has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult with the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement. Thus our scientists and researchers at the WHO are required to have their work vetted by the industry’s champion for “peaceful” nuclear technology, the IAEA.

    For example, WHO abandoned its original 1961 agenda for research on the basic human health implications of food irradiation. It ceded to the IAEA, the ultimate power of researching the safety of irradiated foods. The IAEA is leading a global campaign to further the legalization, commercialization and consumer acceptance of irradiated foods. “We must confer with experts in the various fields of advertising and psychology to put the public at ease,” one IAEA report states, also recommending that the process “should not be required on the label.” (10)

    Now there is a Fukushima cover-up.   We read numerous stories in the press about the lack of information or the actual misinformation that is being fed to the Japanese people.  Further, there is a global radiation monitoring network, established by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) to detect any radiation from nations that might be doing nuclear tests clandestinely.   The CTBTO has released that data to governments, scientists, and various UN agencies such as the UNDP, UNODA, and to the countries who are members of the treaty.   We know the Fukushima radiation is traveling around the planet, and has even entered the southern hemisphere now, but there are no public reports available to the public as to where the radiation is falling. In the US, we read from time to time of radiation affecting food in various hot spots all over the continent, but astonishingly, our Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it will stop reporting on the radiation emitting from the Fukushima catastrophe. (11) The LCNP is bringing a FOIA action to pry the data out from our government and make it public.

    The Good News

    In light of the tragedy of Fukushima, the world has taken a time-out on going full speed ahead with nuclear power.  Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Japan have announced their intention to phase out nuclear power.  Japan, laboring under the catastrophic consequences shut down all but one of its 56 nuclear reactors has yet to experience a black out as the people have been fiercely conserving energy and developing substitutes to avoid power outages.

    •    Kuwait pulled out of a contract to build 4 reactors.
    •    Venezuelan -froze all nuclear development projects .
    •    Mexico-dropped plans to build 10 reactors. (12)

    Every 30 minutes, enough of the sun’s energy reaches the earth’s surface to meet global energy demand for an entire year.  Wind can satisfy the world’s electricity needs 40 times over, and meet all global energy demands five times over.  The geothermal energy stored in the top six miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times the energy of the world’s known oil and gas resources. Tidal, wave and small hydropower, can also provide vast stores of energy everywhere on earth, abundant and free for every person on our planet, rich and poor alike.  From water, broken down by solar or wind-powered electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen, we can make and store hydrogen fuel in cells to be used when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.   When hydrogen fuel is burned, it recombines with oxygen and produces water vapor, pure enough to drink, with no contamination added to the planet.  Iceland plans to be completely sustainable by 2050, using hydrogen in its vehicles, trains, busses and ships, made from geothermal and marine energy.(13)

    New research and reports are affirming the possibilities for shifting the global energy paradigm.  Scientific American reported a plan in 2009 to power 100% of the planet by 2030 with only solar, wind and water renewables, calling for millions of wind turbines, water machines and solar installations to accomplish that task.  The authors assert that “the scale is not an insurmountable hurdle; society has achieved massive transformations before”, reminding us that “[d]uring World War II, the U.S retooled automobile factories to produce 300,000 aircraft and other countries produced 486,000 more”.  Their scenario for 2030 contemplates, in part, building 3.8 million windmills to provide 51% of the world’s energy demand which would take up less than 50 square kilometers (smaller than Manhattan). They reassure us that even though the number seems enormous, the world manufactures 73 million cars and lights trucks every year. 

    The authors review the policies that would need to be in place to make the energy transition, such as taxes on fossil fuels, or at least the elimination of existing subsidies for fossil and nuclear energy to level the playing field, and an intelligently expanded grid to ensure rapid deployment of clean energy sources.(14)

    The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) also issued a Report in 2010, 100% Renewable Energy, which outlined a scenario for relying on sustainable energy that, unlike the Scientific American plan, included biofuels as renewable energy.  The WWF Director for Global Energy Policy, Stephan Singer, took issue with another report issued this year from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which predicted that the world could meet 80% of its energy needs from renewables by 2050. Singer cited the WWF study that looked at a scenario for going to 100% renewables by 2050.(15)

    The Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century(REN), released their Renewables Global Status Report in July, 2011.(16)  Despite countervailing factors like the continuing economic recession, incentive cuts for implementing sustainable energy measures, and low natural-gas prices, there was much encouraging news to report for 2010: 

    •    Existing solar water and space heating capacity increased by 16%
    •    Global solar photovoltaic (PV) production and markets doubled from 2009.
    •    Germany installed more PV than the entire world in 2009; PV markets in Japan and the US doubled
    •    At least 119 countries had enacted renewable national policies, compared to 55 countries in 2005
    •    Investment was $211 billion in renewables, compared to $160 billion in 2009, five times that in 2005
    •    Investments in developing countries surpassed developed nations for the first time

    In 2009 the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) was launched and now has 187 member states.(17) Previously, the world had only the International Atomic Energy Agency to address issues of nuclear power, and the 28 member International Energy Agency, established during the 1973 oil crisis to address the disruptions of the global oil supply.  IRENA’s mission is to empower developing countries with the ability to access the free energy of the sun, wind, marine, and geothermal source. Since Irene is the Greek word for peace, this new institution is especially well named.

    We already have the technology to harness the bounty of the earth. It is clearly not beyond our financial means, as argued by the corporate supporters of toxic fuel industries working against the momentum to move to a green energy economy.  Industry has been able to influence government policy to continue to subsidize polluting fossil, nuclear, and industrial biomass industries at much higher levels than funds made available to clean safe, sun, wind, geothermal and hydropower.  The International Energy Agency estimates indicate that fossil-fuel consumption subsidies worldwide amounted to $409 billion in 2010, up from $300 billion in 2009 which was six times more than the annual subsidies for biofuels, wind power and solar energy.  And the IEA figure doesn’t include the $50 billion a year dollar estimated costs for military infrastructure and naval operations operating during peacetime, on guard duty for the oil tankers plying the seas with their noxious cargo.(18) A report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, The Gift That Keeps on Taking, estimates that the US nuclear industry has received hundreds of billions of dollars over the past 50 years from taxpayers for every aspect of the nuclear chain, including liability insurance to cover catastrophic losses without which industry would never have even built a single nuclear power plant.(19)

    Yet despite these encouraging reports and facts on the ground, the corporate dominated media is still beating the drums for continued reliance on fossil, nuclear and industrial biomass fuels.  It is obvious that they will do all they can to block the development of green energy because they will lose their cash cows.   Once the infrastructure is in, they can’t sell the sun, or the wind or the tides the way they can peddle coal, gas, oil, uranium, and biomass.  We mustn’t buy into the propaganda that clean safe energy is decades away or too costly. We need to be vigilant in providing the ample evidence in its favor to counter the corporate forces arguing that it’s not ready, it’s years away, its’ too expensive—arguments made by companies in the business of producing dirty fuel.  Here’s what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to say about similar forces in 1936:
    We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.(20)

    While it is inspiring to know of the many initiatives, both private and public, that have the capacity to reorder our energy economy in a safer new millennium, there are enormous forces we must overcome.  We are at a time which the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, describes as”the great turning”.  In shifting the energy paradigm we would essentially be turning away from “the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization”, foregoing a failed economic model which “ measures its performance in terms of ever-increasing corporate profits–in other words by how fast materials can be extracted from Earth and turned into consumer products, weapons, and waste.”(21)  Relying on the inexhaustible abundance of the sun, wind, tides, and heat of the earth for our energy needs, freely available to all, will diminish the competitive, industrial, consumer society that is threatening our planetary survival.  By ending our dependence on the old structures, beginning with the compelling urgency to transform the way we meet our energy needs, we may finally be able to put an end to war as well.

    Endnotes

    1. Agence France Press, Feb. 23, 2005
    2. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf102.html
    3. http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htmm
    4. http://www.rertr.anl.gov/RERTR25/PDF/Ritchie.pdf 
    5. http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2004/tenet_testimony_03092004.html
    6. http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm 
    7. http://www.wise-uranium.org/indexu.html
    8. http://www.sric.org/uraniumsummit/
    9. http://www.nyas.org/publications/annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1
    10. http://www.citizen.org/documents/Bad%20Taste%20-%202-pager%20-%20PDF.pdf
    11. http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/05/09-0
    12. http://progressive.org/fukushima_nuclear_industry.html
    13. See generally, A Sustainable Energy Future is Possible Now, www.abolition2000.org
    14. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030
    15. http://www.worldwildlife.org/climate/energy-report.html
    16. http://www.ren21.net/REN21Activities/Publications/GlobalStatusReport/GSR2011/tabid/56142/Default.aspx
    17. http://www.irena.org/Menu/Index.aspx?mnu=Cat&PriMenuID=46&CatID=67
    18. Winning the Oil Endgame Fact Sheet, Rocky Mountain Institute.
    19. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-subsidies-report.html
    20. http://millercenter.virginia.edu/scripps/digitalarchive/speeches/spe_1936_1031_roosevelt
    21. http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/great-turning

  • Iran in the Crosshairs Again

    This article was originally published by Red Pepper.

    Here we go again with the Iran hysteria. It is tempting to think this time will be just like previous periods of sabre rattling against Iran. But there are significant new dangers. The Arab Spring, Israel’s position, changes in the regional and global balance of forces, and national election campaigns, all point to this round of anti-Iranian hysteria posing potentially graver risks than five or six years ago.
     
    We have seen all this before. The US ratchets up its rhetoric, Israel threatens a military attack, escalating sanctions bite harder on the Iranian people, Iran refuses to back down on uranium enrichment. But at the same time, top US military and intelligence officials actually admit Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, is not building a nuclear weapon, and has not decided whether to even begin a building process.
     
    In 2004 Israel’s prime minister denounced the international community for not doing enough to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In 2005 the Israeli military was reported to ‘be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran’. In 2006 the US House Armed Services Committee issued a report drafted by one congressional staffer (an aide to hard-line pro-war John Bolton, then US ambassador to the UN), claiming that Iran was enriching uranium to weapons-grade 90 per cent. That same year a different Israeli prime minister publicly threatened a military strike against Iran. In 2008, George W Bush visited Israel to reassure them that ‘all options’ remained on the table.
     
    The earlier crisis saw a very similar gap between the demonisation, sanctions, threats of military strikes against Iran, and the seemingly contradictory recognition by US, Israeli, United Nations and other military and intelligence officials that Iran actually did not possess nuclear weapons, a nuclear weapons programme, or even a decision to try to develop nuclear weapons.
     
    The 2005 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) determined that even if Iran decided it wanted to make a nuclear weapon, it was unlikely before five to ten years, and that producing enough fissile material would be impossible even in five years unless Iran achieved ‘more rapid and successful progress’ than it had so far. By 2007, a new NIE had pulled back even further, asserting ‘with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme … Tehran had not started its nuclear weapons programme as of mid-2007’. The NIE even admitted ‘we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons’. That made the dire threats against Iran sound pretty lame. So maybe it wasn’t surprising that Newsweek magazine described how, ‘in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document’.
     
    The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA – the UN’s nuclear watchdog) issued report after report indicating it could find no evidence that Iran had diverted enriched uranium to a weapons programme. The UN inspection agency harshly rejected the House committee report, calling some of its claims about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons activities incorrect, and others ‘outrageous and dishonest’. And outside of the Bush White House, which was spearheading much of the hysteria, members of Congress, the neo-con think tanks, hysterical talk show hosts, and much of the mainstream media went ballistic.
     
    Then and now

    All of that sounds very familiar right now. Military and intelligence leaders in Israel and the US once again admit that Iran does not have nukes. (Israel of course does, but no one talks about that.) Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta asked and answered his own Iran question: ‘Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.’ Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr. admitted the US does not even know ‘if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons’. The latest 2011 NIE makes clear there is no new evidence to challenge the 2007 conclusions; Iran still does not have a nuclear weapons programme in operation.
     
    According to the Independent, ‘almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel’s military and security establishment is worried about a premature attack on Iran and apprehensive about the possible repercussions.’ Former head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said ‘it is quite clear that much if not all of the IDF leadership do not support military action at this point.’
     
    But despite all the military and intelligence experts, the threat of war still looms. Republican candidates pound the lecterns promising that ‘when I’m president…’ Iran will accept international inspectors – as if the IAEA had not maintained an inspection team inside Iran for many years now. We hear overheated rumours of Iranian clerics promising nuclear weapons to their people – as if Iran’s leaders had not actually issued fatwas against nuclear weapons, something that would be very difficult to reverse.
     
    Some strategic issues are indeed at stake, but the current anti-Iran mobilisation is primarily political. It doesn’t reflect actual US or Israeli military or intelligence threat assessments, but rather political conditions pushing politicians, here and in Israel, to escalate the fear factor about Iranian weapons (however non-existent) and the urgency for attacking Iran (however illegal). And the danger, of course, is that this kind of rhetoric can box leaders in, making them believe they cannot back down from their belligerent words.
     
    Israel at the centre

    One of the main differences from the propaganda run-up to the Iraq war is the consistent centrality of Israel and its supporters, particularly AIPAC in the US, in this push for war against Iran. Israel certainly jumped aboard the attack-Iraq bandwagon when it was clear that war was indeed inevitable, but US strategic concerns regarding oil and the expansion of US military power were first and primary. Even back then, Israel recognised Iran as a far greater threat than Iraq. And now, Israelis using that alleged threat to pressure US policymakers and shape US policy – in dangerous ways. During this campaign cycle, Obama is under the greatest pressure he has ever faced, and likely ever will face, to defend the Israeli position unequivocally, and to pledge US military support for any Israeli action, however illegal, dangerous, and threatening to US interests.
     
    Iran simply is not, as former CIA analyst and presidential adviser Bruce Reidel makes clear, ‘an existential threat’ to Israel. Even a theoretical future nuclear-armed Iran, if it ever chose that trajectory, would not be a threat to the existence of Israel, but would be a threat to Israel’s longstanding nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. That is the real threat motivating Israel’s attack-Iran-now campaign. Further, as long as top US political officials, from the White House to Congress, are competing to see who can be more supportive of Israel in its stand-off with Iran, no one in Washington will even consider pressure on Israel to end its violations of international law and human rights regarding its occupation and apartheid policies towards Palestinians. Israel gets a pass.
     
    Israel is more isolated in the region than ever before. The US-backed neighbouring dictatorships Israel once counted on as allies are being challenged by the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Egypt’s Mubarak was overthrown, the king of Jordan faces growing pressure at home, and the threats to Syria’s regime mean that Israel could face massive instability on its northern border – something Bashar al-Assad and his father largely staved off since Israel occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967.
     
    Syria’s two struggles in one

    The calamity underway in Syria is also directly linked to the Iran crisis. There are two struggles going on in Syria, and unfortunately one may destroy the potential of the other. First was Syria’s home-grown popular uprising against a brutal government, inspired by and organically tied to the other risings of the Arab Spring, and like them calling first for massive reform and soon for the overthrow of the regime. Syria is a relatively wealthy and diverse country, in which a large middle class, especially in Damascus and Aleppo, had prospered under the regime, despite its political repression. As a result, unlike some other regional uprisings, Syria’s opposition was challenging a regime which still held some public support and legitimacy.
     
    The regime’s drastic military assault on largely non-violent protests led some sectors of the opposition to take up arms, in tandem with growing numbers of military defectors, which of course meant waging their democratic struggle in the terrain in which the regime remains strongest: military force. The government’s security forces killed thousands, injuring and arresting thousands more, and in recent weeks even the longstanding support for Assad in Damascus and Aleppo began to waver. Simultaneously, attacks against government forces increased, and the internal struggle has taken on more and more the character of a civil war.
     
    The further complication in Syria, and its link to Iran, is that it has simultaneously become a regional and global struggle. Syria is Iran’s most significant partner in the Middle East, so key countries that support Israel’s anti-Iran mobilisation have turned against Syria, looking to weaken Iran by undermining its closest ally. Perhaps because the Assad regimes have kept the occupied Golan Heights and the Israeli-Syrian border relatively quiet, Israel itself has not been the major public face in the regionalisation of the Syrian crisis. But clearly Saudi Arabia is fighting with Iran in Syria for influence in the region. The Arab League, whose Syria decision-making remains dominated by the Saudis and their allied Gulf petro-states (such as Qatar and the UAE), is using the Syria crisis to challenge Iran’s rising influence in Arab countries from Iraq to Lebanon. And of course the US, France and other Western powers have jumped on the very real human rights crisis in Syria to try to further weaken the regime there – in the interest again of undermining Iran’s key ally far more than out of concern for the Syrian people.
     
    Diminishing US power

    Facing economic crisis, military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the loss or weakening of key client states in the Arab world, the US is weaker and less influential in the Middle East. But maintaining control of oil markets and US strategic capacity are still key regional goals for the US, which means that military power remains central. The nature of that military engagement is changing – away from large-scale deployments of ground troops in favour of rapidly expanding fleets of armed drones, special forces, and growing reliance on naval forces, navy bases and sea-based weapons.
     
    Thus the US backs Saudi intervention in Bahrain to insure the US Fifth Fleet maintains its Bahraini base; Washington’s escalating sanctions give the West greater leverage in control of oil markets; the Iranian rhetorical threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (only in desperation since it would prevent Iran from exporting its own oil) is used to justify expansion of the US naval presence in the region. Along with the possibility of losing Syria as a major military purchaser and regional ally, concerns about those US strategic moves played a large part of Russia’s veto of the UN resolution on Syria.
     
    In Iran, the pressure is high and the sanctions are really starting to bite, with much greater impact felt by the Iranian population, rather than the regime in Tehran. The assassination of Iranian nuclear experts, particularly the most recent murder of a young scientist which was greeted by Israeli officials with undisguised glee and barely-disguised triumph, are more likely aimed at provoking an Iranian response than actually undermining Iran’s nuclear capacity. So far, Iran has resisted the bait. But if Israel makes good on its threat of a military strike – despite the virtually unanimous opposition of its own military and intelligence leadership – there is little reason to imagine that Iran would respond only with words. The US and Israel are not the only countries whose national leaders face looming contests; Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and its president face huge political challenges as well.
     
    The consequences of a strike against Iran would be grave – from attacks on Israeli and/or US military targets, to going after US forces in Iran’s neighbours Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait, to attacks on the Pentagon’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, to mining the Strait of Hormuz … and beyond. An attack by the US, a nuclear weapons state, on a non-nuclear weapons state such as Iran, would be a direct violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran might kick out the UN nuclear inspectors. The hardest of Iran’s hard-line leaders would almost certainly consolidate ever greater power – both at home and in the Arab countries, and the calls to move towards greater nuclearisation, perhaps even to build a nuclear weapon, would rise inside Iran. Indeed, the Arab Spring’s secular, citizenship-based mobilisations would likely lose further influence to Iran – threatening to turn that movement into something closer to an ‘Islamic Spring’.
     
    Nuclear weapons-free zone

    At the end of the day the crisis can only be solved through negotiations, not threats and force. Immediately, that means demanding that the White House engage in serious, not deliberately time-constrained negotiations to end the current crisis – perhaps based on the successful Turkish-Brazilian initiative that the US scuttled last year. That means that Congress must reverse its current position to allow the White House to use diplomacy – rather than continuing to pass laws that strip the executive branch of its ability to put the carrot of ending sanctions on the table in any negotiations. And it means an Iran policy based on the real conclusions of US intelligence and military officials, that Iran does not have and is not building a nuclear weapon, rather than relying on lies about non-existent nuclear weapons, like the WMD lies that drove the US to war in Iraq.
     
    In the medium and longer term, we must put the urgent need for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East back on the table and on top of our agenda. Such a multi-country move would insure Iran would never build a nuclear weapon, that Israel would give up its existing 200 to 300 high-density nuclear bombs and the submarine-based nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and that the US would keep its nuclear weapons out of its Middle East bases and off its ships in the region’s seas. Otherwise, we face the possibility of the current predicament repeating itself in an endless loop of Groundhog Day-style nuclear crises, each one more threatening than the last.

  • Afghanistan: The War Turns Pathological – Withdraw!

    Richard Falk


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


    The latest occupation crime in Afghanistan is a shooting spree on March 11 by a lone American soldier in the village of Balandi in the Panjwai District of Kandahar Province of Afghanistan. 16 Afghan civilians, including women and children, were shot in their homes in the middle of the night without any pretense of combat activity in the area. Such an atrocity is one more expression of a pathological reaction by one soldier to an incomprehensible military reality that seems to be driving crazy American military personnel on the ground in Afghanistan. The main criminal here is not the shooter, but the political leader who insists on continuing a mission in face of the evidence that it is turning its own citizens into pathological killers.


    American soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters, Koran burning, and countryside patrols whose members were convicted by an American military tribunal of killing Afghan civilians for sport or routinely invading the privacy of Afghan homes in the middle of the night: whatever the U.S. military commanders in Kabul might sincerely say in regret and Washington might repeat by way of formal apology has become essentially irrelevant.


    These so-called ‘incidents’ or ‘aberrations’ are nothing of the sort. These happenings are pathological reactions of men and women caught up in a death trap not of their making, an alien environment that collides lethally with their sense of normalcy and decency. Besides the desecration of foreign lands and their cultural identities, American political leaders have unforgivably for more than a decade placed young American’s in intolerable situations of risk, uncertainty, and enmity to wage essentially meaningless wars. Also signaling a kind of cultural implosion are recent studies documenting historically high suicide rates among the lower ranks of the American military.


    Senseless and morbid wars produce senseless and morbid behavior. Afghanistan, as Vietnam 40 years earlier, has become an atrocity-generating killing field where the ‘enemy’ is frequently indistinguishable from the ‘friend,’ and the battlefield is everywhere and nowhere. In Vietnam the White House finally speeded up the American exit when it became evident that soldiers were murdering their own officers, a pattern exhibiting ultimate alienation that became so widespread it give birth to a new word ‘fragging.’


    Whatever the defensive pretext in the immediacy of the post-9/11 attacks, the Afghanistan War was misconceived from its inception, although deceptively so. (to my lasting regret I supported the war initially as an instance of self-defense validated by the credible fear of future attacks emanating from Afghanistan) Air warfare was relied upon in 2002 to decimate the leadership ranks of Al Qaeda, but instead its top political and military commanders slipped across the border. Regime change in Kabul, with a leader flown in from Washington to help coordinate the foreign occupation of his country, reverted to an old counterinsurgency formula that had failed over and over again, but with the militarist mindset prevailing in the U.S. Government, failure was once again reinterpreted as an opportunity to do it right the next time! Despite the efficiency of the radical innovative tactic of target killing by drones, the latest form of state terror in Afghanistan yields an outcome that is no different from earlier defeats.


    What more needs to be said? It is long past time for the United States and its NATO allies to withdraw with all deliberate speed from Afghanistan rather than proceed on its present course: negotiating a long-term ‘memorandum of understanding’ that transfers the formalities of the occupation to the Afghans while leaving private American military contractors—mercenaries of the 21st century—as the outlaw governance structure of this war torn country after most combat forces withdraw by the end of 2014, although incredibly Washington and Kabul, despite the devastation and futility, are presently negotiating a ten-year arrangement to maintain an American military presence in the country, a dynamic that might be labeled ‘re-colonization by consent,’ a geopolitical malady of the early 21st century.


    As in Iraq, what has been ‘achieved’ in Afghanistan is the very opposite of the goals set by Pentagon planners and State Department diplomacy: the country is decimated rather than reconstructed, the regional balance shifts in favor of Iran, of Islamic extremism, and the United States is ever more widely feared and resented, solidifying its geopolitical role as the great malefactor of our era.


    America seems incapable of grasping the pathologies it has inflicted on its own citizenry, let alone the physical and psychological wreckage it leaves behind in the countries it attacks and occupies. The disgusting 2004 pictures of American soldiers getting their kicks from torturing and humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib should have made clear once and for all to the leaders and the public that it was time to bring American troops home, and keep them there if we cared for their welfare.  Instead punishments were inflicted on these hapless young citizens who were both perpetrators and victims, and their commanders resumed their militarist misadventures as if nothing had happened except an unwelcome ‘leak’ (Donald Rumsfeld said as much) What this pattern of descretation exhibits is not only a criminal indifference to the wellbeing of ‘others’ but a shameful disregard of the welfare of our collective selves. The current bellicose Republican presidential candidates calling for attacks on Iran amounts to taking another giant step along the road that is taking American over the cliff. And the Obama presidency is only a half step behind, counseling patience, but itself indulging war-mongering, whether for its own sake or on behalf of Israel is unclear.


    President Obama recently was quoted as saying of Afghanistan “now is the time for us to transition.”  No, it isn’t. “Now is the time to leave.”  And not only for the sake of the Afghan people, and surely for that, but also for the benefit of the American people Obama was elected to serve. 

  • War Is Not Inevitable

    David KriegerThere have not always been wars; and there need not always be wars.  Before the onset of civilization, there may have been tribal skirmishes but there was not organized warfare between competing military forces. 


    It was not until agriculture allowed for societal specialization, hierarchy and the generation of a warrior class loyal to a military or political leader or social system that wars began in earnest.  Agriculture required defense of boundaries and crops.  Such defense required the specialization of a warrior class organized into military forces.  Such forces required organization and a willing youthful pool of potential soldiers.  But legitimate purposes of defense can also be turned to offensive uses.  Leaders throughout history have been adept at justifying aggressive war in terms of defense. 


    War is a byproduct of civilization, and it is made more likely by having distinct competing social entities, such as city-states or today’s nation-states.  In the 20th century, wars became global or nearly so.  In World War I, soldiers mostly slaughtered other soldiers.  In World War II, however, with the development of modern air warfare, cities and civilians became targets of warfare.  Some 20 million people were killed in WWI and some 50 million in WWII. 


    The technology of warfare has increased in sophistication and lethality.  WWII ended with the destruction of two unprotected Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by two US atomic bombs, one dropped on each city.  This opened a new era, the Nuclear Age, in which it became possible to destroy civilization and complex life, including human life, on the planet.  By our own cleverness, we humans have created instruments capable of destroying ourselves.  The creation of nuclear weapons has made the world too dangerous for warfare. 


    Warfare requires a high level of social organization, but peace requires an even higher level of social organization.  The United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force between nations except under very limited conditions of self-defense or when the Security Council authorizes the use of force.  Of course, this prohibition against the use of force has not been very successful, largely because the major powers have relied upon the law of force rather than the force of law. 


    We have created a situation in which either warfare or humanity is obsolete.  We humans can choose.  We can choose to put an end to warfare, or we can continue to run the risk of warfare putting an end to us.  This is the way that Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein put it in a 1955 statement calling for an end to warfare due to the power of thermonuclear weapons: “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war.”


    But people must face this alternative.  Peace is an imperative of the Nuclear Age.  It is both a right and responsibility.  The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can get on with the necessary task of abolishing nuclear weapons and building a warless world.  In doing so, we will free up vast resources that can be used to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals to end poverty, improve health, protect the environment and better the lives of people everywhere.


    Vaya aquí para la versión española.

  • War Over

    David KriegerIt was decided in Washington by someone
    wearing a suit and tie, perhaps suspenders,
    perhaps a bowtie.

    The war was declared over and thus
    it was — for us.  We pulled out our tired troops
    from one of the countries where we had been warring,

    leaving behind plenty of bullets and bombs
    for our proxies.  Despite our declaration of “war over”
    the war didn’t end at that certain moment,

    but went on without us while we sent our soldiers
    to fight in another, similarly senseless, war
    in another country.

    Other parties to the war kept fighting without us.
    In the mayhem that continued, we were hardly missed,
    even though we had set it all in motion years before.

    By the old rules, a country is supposed to declare war
    before it begins, but those are the old rules.
    By the new rules, made up as we go, we declare

    an end to war when we are through with it.  If only
    we could mesh the old and new, and the people, in chorus,
    would demand “war over” before it had begun.