Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: President Obama

  • Afghanistan: War Is Not the Answer

    Statement of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

    President Obama’s recent decision to send 30,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan is part of a larger trend of escalating violence in a country renowned for being a graveyard of empires. After adding 21,000 US troops to Afghanistan in March 2009, the months of July, August and October 2009 were the deadliest months for US troops in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion. Continued attacks against civilians have stoked anger and resentment among the people of Afghanistan.

    The US invasion and occupation of Iraq have shown that true stability and democracy cannot be imposed through violence. Even with a US force of over 100,000 troops, Iraq remains an extremely dangerous place, with daily bombings, kidnappings and killings. Many people in Iraq still lack basic necessities such as electricity and clean drinking water. By some estimates, more than one million Iraqis have been killed in the war and more than four million have become refugees.

    The president’s decision to add nearly 50 percent more US troops to the occupation of Afghanistan will, together with troops from other NATO countries, bring total troop levels to around 150,000 – approximately the same number of troops deployed by the Soviet Union in their failed war in the 1980s.

    According to US intelligence agencies, there are fewer than 100 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and there are serious tensions between al Qaeda and the Taliban.  Even if the Taliban were to prevail in Afghanistan and offer al Qaeda a “safe haven,” it would be unlikely that al Qaeda would accept it, preferring instead to maintain the “invisibility” of a non-state network.

    Therefore, it is reasonable to ask the question, “Will the president’s decision to increase US troop levels in Afghanistan make the United States more secure?” For the following reasons, we believe this question must be answered in the negative.

    Sending more US troops to Afghanistan will lead to more US casualties. The war in Afghanistan has already claimed the lives of nearly 1,000 US troops and has severely impacted the lives of countless others through repeated deployments, serious injuries and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

    Sending more US troops to Afghanistan will create more casualties among the Afghan people. Civilian deaths in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion are estimated at between 12,000 and 32,000. More than 200,000 Afghan people have been displaced. Increased US troop numbers in Afghanistan are likely to result in increased civilian deaths, injuries and displacements.

    Sending more US troops to Afghanistan will breed more extremists. A US intelligence report in early 2009 showed that only one-tenth of enemy fighters in Afghanistan are ideologically-motivated Taliban; the vast majority are fighting against foreign occupiers or for personal economic gain. The continued war in Afghanistan will perpetuate conditions conducive to recruiting by al Qaeda and other extremist groups. Civilian casualties, indefinite detentions and destruction of property only create more extremists.

    Sending more US troops to Afghanistan will lead to increased financial burden. It is estimated that it will cost an additional $1 million per year for each individual troop sent to Afghanistan. According to the National Priorities Project, total US costs for the war in Afghanistan in 2010 are estimated at $325 billion. Especially at a time of high unemployment, economic hardship and a massive federal budget deficit in the US, this spending is not responsible.

    Sending more US troops to Afghanistan will weaken US military readiness. By adding more troops in Afghanistan, President Obama will stretch the US military even thinner, leaving fewer troops in reserve, causing more repeated tours of duty, and reducing our capacity and readiness to respond should other conflicts arise.

    Conclusion and Recommendations

    The military is the wrong tool for solving our problems in Afghanistan. It is akin to using a chainsaw for surgery rather than a scalpel. The most effective ways to deal with extremist groups, such as al Qaeda, are through international cooperation in intelligence gathering and law enforcement. A recent study by the RAND Corporation shows that only seven percent of terrorist groups were defeated by military force in the past 40 years.

    For the reasons set forth above, we urge Congress not to fund additional troops in Afghanistan. Instead, Congress should help in funding the rebuilding of Afghanistan’s infrastructure and support the Afghan people in building institutions of social justice such as schools, courts and health care clinics. Respect for the US in Afghanistan and around the world would increase significantly by providing even a small fraction of the resources currently being spent on the war in Afghanistan for these constructive purposes.

  • Obama’s Nuclear Challenge

    This article was originally published in The Nation

    “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” President Obama said at the open-air rally in Prague on April 5. With these words came a change in the global air, as if a window had been opened a crack in a dark room that had been sealed shut for decades. On only two previous occasions had an American president proposed the abolition of nuclear arms. The first was Truman’s proposal at the United Nations in 1946 to place all nuclear technology under international control and devote it entirely to peaceful purposes, and so to strangle the nuclear age in its cradle. Stalin’s Soviet Union, bent on developing the bomb, would not agree.

    The second was the summit meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, where President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev came within an ace of agreeing to full nuclear disarmament. Their bid foundered on Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which he would not give up and Gorbachev would not accept. Thereafter the pronuclear consensus was restored. Its chief assumption, embodied in the doctrine of deterrence, was that safety from nuclear weapons paradoxically depended on their continued presence. Unremitting readiness to carry out genocide and worse had somehow been accepted as an inescapable commitment of even the greatest civilizations.

    Obama’s words disrupted this collective suicidal trance. He placed his commitment in an appropriate context: Prague had been the scene of Czech protests against Soviet domination, and Obama saluted those “who helped bring down a nuclear-armed empire without firing a shot.” The reference was doubly fitting. In the first place, the popular movement broke the spell of omnipotence that had surrounded the totalitarian empire. Like the bomb, the Soviet Union had been shielded by a reputation of immovability. The resistance movements in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, using the “power of the powerless,” in the phrase of Václav Havel, gave the lie to this illusion. They revealed the possibility of “the impossible” and made it happen. Obama acknowledged the parallel with nuclear disarmament when he took note of those “who hear talk of a world without nuclear weapons and doubt whether it is worth setting a goal that seems impossible to achieve,” and, advising Czechs to remember the lessons of their Velvet Revolution, declared fatalism “a deadly adversary.”

    In the second place, it was that same resistance, together with Gorbachev’s perestroika, that by ending the cold war opened the clearest path to nuclear disarmament since 1946. Now that the rivalry that had been used to justify the threat of annihilation had been liquidated, might it be possible to eliminate the weapons that posed that threat? Might this “impossible” thing also be possible? The first three post-cold war presidents passed up the opportunity. Obama has seized it.

    Unfortunately, as soon as he announced the goal of abolition, he added that it would not “be achieved quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime.” With those words, the crack of the window seemed to narrow, the moral gloom thickened and the fatalism he had just renounced settled in again. Sighs of relief were almost audible among the upholders of the pronuclear consensus. As The Economist noted, “The world may never get to zero. But it would help make things a lot safer along the way if others act in concert. If North Korea and Iran can keep counting on the protection of China and Russia in their rule-breaking, progress will be all too slight.” In other words, a likely insincere commitment to abolition is to be a new talking point in stopping others from joining the nuclear club, which, for its part, will go on as before.

    A further sentence in Obama’s speech gave support to such views. Speaking of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the president said, “The basic bargain is sound: countries with nuclear weapons will move toward disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them.” But moving toward disarmament is not the same as disarming. It is one thing to say to the world, “We all must do without nuclear weapons,” and quite another to say, “You must do without nuclear weapons, and we will keep 1,500 of them for as long as we are all alive.” In the latter case, the abolition commitment would become one more layer of hypocrisy in a situation already overloaded with it. But after more than sixty years of deceptive promises, the countries that do without nuclear weapons will not accept a “bargain” that gives a new lease on life to a double standard they already reject.

    These fears are mitigated by the agenda of measures Obama announced as first steps toward abolition. A wish list of arms controllers of recent years, they include ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; negotiating a fissile material cutoff treaty; negotiating mutual cuts in nuclear warheads with Russia, perhaps to a level of 1,500 or 1,000; and fortifying the NPT. These proposals would be welcome in any context, but they take on added meaning when viewed as way stations on a journey to a nuclear-weapons-free world. Most interesting, perhaps, was Obama’s promise to host a Global Summit on Nuclear Security in the next year. Will it concentrate solely on nonproliferation or acknowledge the indispensable link between that goal and full nuclear disarmament? The answer, of course, will not depend on Obama alone. He has brought the nuclear dilemma back into public view. But his vision is a work in progress, a ground of contention on which all who desire disarmament are invited to exert themselves.

    Was Obama’s speech historic? Not yet. It was an invitation to participate in history. It will be historic if we make it so. Obama says he is prepared to postpone abolition until he has died. He is 47. I wish him long life. Let us free the world of nuclear weapons while he is still among us.

    Jonathan Schell is is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.

  • Can President Obama Change Nukes Policy?

    Originally published at truthout.org

    What should the world expect from the new US president on the nuclear front?

    The question may sound distant and largely disconnected from the current context, where the financial crisis looms as his administration’s first priority. No one can be blamed, however, for raising it, as nuclear weapons form one of the main issues on which Barack Obama differentiated himself clearly from his rivals – during the battle for the Democratic nomination as well as the war for the presidency.

    Obama did so dramatically on August 2, 2007, when confronted with a query about use of the ultimate weapon in the war on terror and against proliferation. He declared: “I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance.” He then added: “Involving civilians.”

    Obama then said, “There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.” That brought reactions bordering on ridicule. “It’s naive to say,” sneered a dismissive John McCain, “that we will never use nuclear weapons.” Hillary Clinton came out with a stronger-than-Republican rebuff: “”Presidents should be very careful at all times in discussing the use or non-use of nuclear weapons. Presidents since the Cold War have used nuclear deterrence to keep the peace. And I don’t believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons.”

    “Presidents,” she added for good measure, ” never take the nuclear option off the table.”

    As president now, will Obama keep the terrible option off the table? This and other questions of his nuclear outlook reflect more than ideal curiosity in regions on which the new president’s foreign policy focuses. In South Asia, one of such regions, the questions acquire added urgency.

    Before coming to the region with two nuclear-armed rivals, a little more about what Obama has let the world know so far about his mind on the weapons of mass destruction that provided only an excuse for war to his predecessor.

    In Obama’s inaugural address, the subject figured only in the sentence: “With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet.” He, however, had made clearer promises during the campaign.

    In a speech at DePaul University in Chicago in October 2007, he added his voice to an anti-nuke plan endorsed earlier by a bipartisan group of former government officials from the Cold War era, including Henry Kissinger. The group had wanted the US to start building a global consensus to reverse a reliance on nuclear weapons that had become “increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.” Obama set a goal of eliminating nuclear weapons in the world, adding that the US must greatly reduce its stockpile of nuclear arms as well.

    Speaking at Purdue University in Indiana in July 2008, he declared: “It’s time to send a clear message to the world: America seeks a world with no nuclear weapons.” He added: “As long as nuclear weapons exist, we’ll retain a strong deterrent. But we’ll make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy.”

    The promises compelled attention because of the contrast they presented to what the world had been hearing from the White House. As a summary by the New York-headquartered Natural Resources Defense Council put it years ago: “The Bush administration assumes that nuclear weapons will be part of US military forces at least for the next 50 years. Starting from this premise it is planning an extensive and expensive series of programs to sustain and modernize the existing force and to begin studies for a new ICBM (inter-continental ballistic missile) to be operational in 2020, a new SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile) and SSBM (surface-to-surface ballistic missile) in 2030, and a new heavy bomber in 2040, as well as new warheads for all of them.”

    Nuclear weapons were to continue to play a “critical role” because they possess “unique properties” that provide “credible military options” for holding at risk “a wide range of target types” important to a potential adversary’s threatened use of “weapons of mass destruction” or “large-scale conventional military force.” The neocon regime wanted a return of the US to nuclear testing, even as Bush promoted the idea of battlefield nukes like bunker-busters.

    Obama has never disowned the general declarations of his intent on nuclear disarmament, but has increasingly been couching it in anti-terrorist terms. A more detailed “foreign policy agenda” delineated on the White House web site cites terrorism as the top-priority target of his administration’s plan of action in this area.

    After recalling Obama’s record as a senator in taking congressional action to counter “the threat of a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon and the spread of nuclear weapons to dangerous regimes,” the agenda states: “Obama and (Vice President Joseph) Biden will secure all loose nuclear materials in the world within four years. While working to secure existing stockpiles of nuclear material, Obama and Biden will negotiate a verifiable global ban on the production of new nuclear weapons material. This will deny terrorists the ability to steal or buy loose nuclear materials.”

    The agenda is silent on US fears of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands, but these continue to be voiced. Threats of American efforts to “take out” Pakistan’s nuclear arms have been heard, from time to time, ever since the fall of the military regime of Pervez Musharraf, presumed somehow to have made these weapons pilferage-proof. Apprehensions in that regard have been revived after David Sanger’s article earlier this month, based on his book, “The Worst Pakistan Nightmare for Obama.”

    Pakistan’s army and its civilian government have hastened to assure the US of the safety and security of their nuclear weapons. The Pakistani media have made clear a public resentment, which Islamabad could not officially articulate, over the implications of what are seen as Washington-Pentagon insinuations. Indignant note is made of the fact that, while there is panic over Pakistan’s weapons, India’s nuclear arsenal is not seen as a serious problem at all.

    The second task listed in the agenda – strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – has an India link, too. The agenda, however, takes no note of the blow that, according to the world peace movement, the US-India nuclear deal has dealt the treaty distinguished for its increasing brittleness over the years.

    Instead, the agenda says: “Obama and Biden will crack down on nuclear proliferation by strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty so that countries like North Korea and Iran that break the rules will automatically face strong international sanctions.” To many, the formulation would seem to reflect the false priorities that have weakened the “world nuclear order” that the NPT allegedly represents.

    The only way to strengthen the treaty would seem to lie in serious and sincere action by the leading nuclear powers on Article VI of the NPT. The provision, introduced under international pressure, says: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

    The agenda, in fairness to its formulators, addresses this issue as well. Talking of the third task of the new administration on the nuclear weapons front, the document says: “Obama and Biden will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons, and pursue it. Obama and Biden will always maintain a strong deterrent as long as nuclear weapons exist. But they will take several steps down the long road toward eliminating nuclear weapons. They will stop the development of new nuclear weapons; work with Russia to take US and Russian ballistic missiles off hair trigger alert; seek dramatic reductions in US and Russian stockpiles of nuclear weapons and material; and set a goal to expand the US-Russian ban on intermediate-range missiles so that the agreement is global.”

    This, however, is easier said than done. A weighty Bush legacy of nuclear militarism is waiting to be lived down. Officially, the Obama administration is bound to an extent by the interim report of a bipartisan congressional commission, released as recently as last month, which talks about the US teetering “on the brink of losing the capability to maintain its nuclear weapons.”

    The new president cannot listen to this argument and make the nuclear leap he has promised. Daryl G. Kimball of the Arms Control Association offers a strikingly different counsel: “If Obama directs the Pentagon to conduct a congressionally mandated nuclear posture review on the basis of this ‘core deterrence’ mission, then Washington and Moscow could each slash their respective arsenals to 1,000 or fewer total warheads. This would open the way for Obama to fulfill his campaign pledge …”

    Obama faces a challenge to his drive for a change in the US nukes policy not only from the old policies he seeks to discard, but also from personalities whom he prefers to retain in the administration. Reports about a conflict of views on a crucial issue between him and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have not been officially rebutted so far. Gates continues to press for a reliable replacement warhead (RRW) program, while the president’s agenda (quoted above) asserts without ambiguity that the new administration “will stop the development of new nuclear weapons.”

    Obama has shown courage in acting for the closure of the Guantanamo torture chambers, in defiance of powerful defenders of “anti-terrorist” atrocities. Will he move forward towards nuclear disarmament in the face of inevitable opposition from the military-industrial complex?