Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: proliferation

  • A High-Stakes Nuclear Gamble

    Imagine a world with 20 or more nuclear weapons states. This was President Kennedy’s dark vision in 1963. Were it to come to pass, the risk that terrorists could buy or steal nuclear bombs would rise significantly. Yet President Bush’s recent proposal to provide nuclear energy assistance to India is a dangerous gamble that makes such an outcome more likely.

    It could unravel the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which, though imperfect, has helped limit the number of countries able to make nuclear weapons. Congress should reject the proposal and require renegotiation to limit the Indian nuclear weapons program.

    India’s nuclear history reveals why the proposed deal would weaken U.S. national security.

    In 1974, India exploded a secret nuclear device using plutonium from a Canadian-supplied reactor containing U.S. heavy water. Both the reactor and the heavy water were sold to India under agreements with a “peaceful use” requirement, which India violated.

    In 1978, Congress enacted the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act. That required countries such as India who were not among the five nations recognized as nuclear weapons states under the nonproliferation treaty, and that wanted American nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, to submit to “safeguards,” meaning inspections of all their nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency. India refused, and the United States ended all nuclear assistance to the country from that day forward.

    Now, Bush has put forward a proposal that caves in utterly to India. It would not only allow India to keep its bombs, it would permit it to use all its own nuclear material for bomb making, while using nuclear fuel the United States would supply for its civilian power program. If India receives this favor, can Israel and Pakistan be far behind?

    Such a radical proposal should be viewed within the context of the current negotiations with Iran and North Korea, two countries that signed the nonproliferation treaty but have been caught violating safeguards. Failure to stop them from producing nuclear weapons would be a serious blow to global stability.

    Iran and North Korea are being offered reactors and guaranteed nuclear fuel supplies for peaceful uses in return for a permanent shutdown of facilities for enriching uranium or separating plutonium, both of which have peaceful applications but enable the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Whether either will ultimately accept is unclear.

    So let’s compare the deals offered India and Iran:

    India: Can build as many nuclear weapons as it wishes with its own nuclear supplies. Iran: Cannot build any nuclear weapons with its own or anyone else’s supplies.

    India: Can build and operate un-safeguarded facilities for producing and stockpiling unlimited amounts of fissile material for its weapons program. Iran: Cannot build enrichment or plutonium separation facilities, even if safeguarded and even though the nonproliferation treaty does not prohibit such activities.

    India: Is asked to maintain a voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing. Iran: Cannot make or explode nuclear devices under any circumstances.

    India: Must divide its nuclear facilities into “civilian” and “military,” with voluntary IAEA safeguards applying only to its civilian program. Iran: Must have the most stringent safeguards on all its nuclear facilities.

    This double standard favoring India is an example of America’s willingness to wash away the nuclear sins of its “friends” to achieve other foreign policy goals. Pakistan is another example; it has received F-16s, which can deliver its nuclear weapons, despite having violated U.S. nonproliferation laws and spread nuclear weapons technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea via the Abdul Qadeer Khan network.

    What is the message we’re sending? How will these double standards persuade the Iranians to give up their right to produce advanced nuclear materials? How could signatories of the nonproliferation treaty not conclude that it has been seriously devalued when India — which refused to sign it in the first place, broke its contracts with the United States and Canada and developed nuclear weapons — is to be given virtually unconditional nuclear assistance?

    Some nations may decide that if they withdraw from the treaty, build nuclear weapons and wait long enough while avoiding antagonizing the United States, they will eventually get all the nuclear help they want.

    Why then is the Bush administration risking undermining the treaty?

    It is no secret that it views China as a growing strategic rival and sees India as a counterweight. It is therefore interested in helping India build up its economic and military capability. If the deal goes through, Pentagon officials reportedly expect India to purchase as much as $5 billion in U.S. conventional military equipment, some of which would be helpful in monitoring Chinese military movements and submarines.

    During the 2004 presidential race, both Bush and Sen. John Kerry stated that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was the most serious threat to U.S. national security. But giving nuclear assistance to India undercuts the rationale for telling other nations not to supply suspected proliferators such as Iran.

    Moreover, both China and Pakistan will be motivated to accelerate their own weapons programs and their mutual nuclear cooperation. Pakistani officials will not be more cooperative in the stalled investigation of Khan’s activities. Adding the risk to the nonproliferation treaty to this poisonous mix makes the president’s proposal a marked retreat from half a century of American leadership in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

    LEONARD WEISS was the chief architect of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978.

    Originally published by the Los Angeles Times.

  • Why Nations Go Nuclear

    Understanding the reasons why a country chooses to go nuclear are complex, variable and speculative, but I would offer as a hypothesis four principal, though often overlapping factors: fear, security, enhancing the country’s bully potential or countering another country’s bully potential, and prestige. North Korea seems to be pioneering a fifth reason: to use the weapons as a bargaining chip to gain security guarantees and financial concessions. Each country that chooses to go nuclear will certainly reflect some or all of these reasons in their decision, although they may be in different combinations or proportions for different states. The reasons that the current nuclear weapons states went nuclear provide insights into these dynamics.

    Existing Nuclear Weapons States

    The first country to develop nuclear weapons was the United States, initiating the world’s first nuclear weapons program in anticipation of US involvement in World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt had been warned by Albert Einstein that a possibility existed for the Germans to develop nuclear weapons. Roosevelt and his advisors were motivated by fear that the German scientists would succeed in their quest for nuclear weapons, and that US nuclear weapons would be necessary to assure the security of the United States and the Allied powers by deterring the Germans from using theirs with impunity.

    Germany never succeeded in developing nuclear weapons and was defeated two months prior to the testing of the first US nuclear weapon. The United States quickly found another use for its nuclear arms, using the bombs against two cities in a nearly defeated Japan. Evidence suggests that this militarily questionable act was also intended to keep the Soviets from playing a larger role in the defeat and occupation of Japan and generally to send a warning message to the Soviet Union. Thus, while fear and security may have been the initial impetus for the US developing nuclear weapons, their use was subsequently overtly justified as saving US and Allied lives and bringing the war in the Pacific to a faster conclusion. At the same time, the US was flexing its muscles before the world, and demonstrating the bully potential of these weapons.

    The next country to develop nuclear weapons was the Soviet Union. Although the US and Soviet Union were allies in World War II, there were early signs that this relationship would not hold in the post-WWII period. The US use of nuclear weapons at the end of the war, when combined with the fact that the US kept the project secret from the Soviet Union, must have created the fear for Soviet leadership that the US would use its new weapons to dominate them. While many US political leaders thought that it might take decades for the Soviet Union to go nuclear, it actually took them only four years. Driven by fear of US domination, they sought security in the deterrence potential of the weapons, while at the same time adding to their prestige and bestowing upon themselves the bully potential of the weapons.

    Despite sharing in the Allied victory in World War II, both Britain and France emerged from the war with less power and prestige than they had going into the war. Britain, as a wartime ally of the US, had played a role in the development of the bomb in the US Manhattan Project, and thus its scientists were privy to the secrets of creating nuclear weapons. First Britain and then France went ahead with developing their own nuclear arms. Both countries could have chosen to remain under the US nuclear umbrella, but both chose instead to develop their own nuclear arsenals. Their reasoning was said to be based on the fear that a US leader would not be willing to sacrifice New York in an exchange with the Soviet Union in order to retaliate against a Soviet attack against London or Paris. Thus, both Britain and France, chose to go nuclear out of fear and a lack of trust in placing their security in the hands of the US. At the same time, they bolstered their waning prestige in the world, and increased their bully power against their remaining colonies and other weaker states.

    China, the final permanent member of the UN Security Council, chose also to go nuclear, fearing that without nuclear weapons its security was threatened by both the US and Soviet Union and that it would remain subject to their bully potential. China announced from the onset of its nuclear status that it did not intend to develop more than a minimum deterrent force and that it would not use nuclear weapons first. It sought only a small but sufficient nuclear retaliatory force to prevent the US or Soviet Union from using nuclear weapons against it. Fear and security appeared to be the driving force in China’s decision to go nuclear, although it enhanced its international prestige in the process and also gave itself some increase in bully power on a regional level.

    These five states – the US, Soviet Union (now Russia), UK, France and China – were the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the five states that were named as nuclear weapons states in the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). While other states joined this treaty as non-nuclear weapons states and agreed not to develop or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons, the nuclear weapons states promised, among other things, to engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament. The International Court of Justice later ruled that these states were obligated by the NPT “to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

    Today the NPT has become nearly universal. Only four states are outside the treaty structure: Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. The first three never joined the treaty, and the latter withdrew from the treaty in 2003. Israel’s official position is the ambiguous statement that it will never be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, but it is widely understood that Israel possesses some 100 to 200 nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery. Israel has had a troubled existence and has engaged in many wars with its neighbors, all of which it has won with its high-tech military forces. Israel’s decision to go nuclear may be best understood as a desire to enhance its security by implicitly threatening ultimate recourse against hostile neighboring countries, and by reducing or eliminating the bully power that the US or Russia might seek to use to alter Israeli policies. However, by going nuclear, Israel has raised the fear level of its neighbors and their desire to enhance their security, potentially by going nuclear themselves.

    India held the position for many years that it was willing to remain a non-nuclear weapons state, but not in a world where some states continue to possess and refuse to give up their nuclear arms. Indian leaders have used the term “nuclear apartheid” to describe the two-tier structure of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots.” India is thought to have initially secretly tested a nuclear device in 1974. It openly tested nuclear weapons in 1998. While fear and security may have played some role in India’s decision to go nuclear, particularly vis-à-vis China, there was a sense that India was motivated to a large degree by prestige. The country seemed to go wild with celebration in 1998 when India conducted its open nuclear weapons tests, as though this were validation of its emergence into “great power” status.

    India also had some potential to use its nuclear arms to bully Pakistan in their dispute over Kashmir, but this possibility was erased immediately when Pakistan followed India in publicly testing its own nuclear arms. For Pakistan, reasons for going nuclear certainly included fear of India, the desire to enhance its security, and prestige. The people of Pakistan, like those of India, exploded in celebration upon its successful nuclear weapons tests in 1998. A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s bomb, is a national hero in Pakistan, despite being the mastermind of a major international black market nuclear proliferation scheme.

    The final country that claims to have gone nuclear is North Korea. This country again fits the pattern of developing nuclear weapons out of fear of attack, principally by the US, and thus to enhance its security. In the case of North Korea, there is the added element of creating these weapons as a bargaining chip to gain security assurances from the US and also development aid. The long-standing six-party negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear arms point to North Korea’s desire to trade its nuclear arms capability for nuclear energy plants and US security assurances. Thus, for North Korea, prestige and bully potential seem less significant than security promises and development aid.

    Why Nations Do Not Go Nuclear

    There are currently 191 member states of the United Nations. Of these, only nine have chosen to go nuclear. Thus, the overwhelming majority of states in the international system have chosen not to go nuclear. Why nations go nuclear needs to be weighed against why nations do not go nuclear. Among the reasons why nations choose not to go nuclear are the following:

    1. Technological capability. Many nations, particularly poorer nations, lack the technological capability to develop nuclear arms. While this leaves out many states, there are at least 44 states with nuclear reactors on their territory, suggesting potential technological capability and access to nuclear materials for bomb production.
    2. Security Alliances. Alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) provide a nuclear umbrella for member states, and thus act as a disincentive for an alliance member to go nuclear.
    3. Non-Proliferation Treaty. The NPT is the centerpiece of nuclear arms control and disarmament efforts. In joining the treaty, non-nuclear weapons states agree not to develop or acquire nuclear arms. There is, however, a reciprocal pledge by the nuclear weapons states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals, and the failure of the nuclear weapons states to fulfill this obligation may be eroding viability of the treaty.
    4. Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone (NWFZ) Agreements. Such regional agreements now cover the entire southern hemisphere of the planet. Such agreements now exist for Antarctica, Latin America and the Caribbean, the South Pacific, Africa and Southeast Asia.
    5. Perception of Negative Consequences. National leaders may perceive that they would suffer negative consequences by going nuclear, such as a loss of economic support, including development aid, disruption of alliances, and becoming targets of other states’ nuclear arsenals.
    6. National Self-Image. Some states may not have as goals being nuclear weapons states, preferring to provide leadership toward a nuclear weapons-free world.

    Incentives and Disincentives to Going Nuclear

    Among the principal incentives for a state to go nuclear are threats by a current nuclear weapons state or a regional security environment that is uncertain. When the US president named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” he provided incentive for them to develop nuclear arms. These incentives were enhanced by the leaked 2001 US Nuclear Posture Review that called for developing contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against seven states (Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria), five of which were non-nuclear weapons states (although North Korea subsequently chose to go nuclear).

    Four of these states ( Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria) are in the Middle East, one of the most dangerous security environments in the world and an area in which one nuclear weapons state currently exists ( Israel). Since the US Nuclear Posture Review came out, Iraq was attacked and invaded by the US and its “Coalition of the Willing,” and Libya has chosen on its own to give up its nuclear weapons program. Iran and Syria, however, are still viewed as possible regional candidates to develop nuclear weapons, as is Egypt. Like India and Pakistan, these states may choose to go nuclear rather than continue to live with the unbalance and uncertainty of implied and overt threats to their security by the US and Israel.

    The greatest disincentives to these states going nuclear would be to establish a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone in the Middle East or, more broadly, a Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone, combined with credible pledges by the US and other nuclear weapons states to provide security assurances to non-nuclear weapons states. It seems clear that so long as Israel remains the sole state in the Middle East with nuclear weapons, there will be strong incentives for other states to seek nuclear weapons as an equalizer, much as the Soviet Union sought to do against the US or Pakistan sought to do against India.

    Several states have come into possession of nuclear weapons and chosen to give them up. South Africa clandestinely developed a small nuclear arsenal when it felt beleaguered due to its policy of Apartheid. When South Africa chose to give up its policy and practice of Apartheid, it also made the decision to give up its nuclear arsenal. Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus inherited nuclear weapons upon the break up of the Soviet Union, and all chose to turn these weapons over to Russia for dismantlement. This was accomplished with incentives and security assurances from the US and Russia. Argentina and Brazil were two countries that were moving toward developing nuclear weapons, but were dissuaded from doing so by regional security arrangements and gave up their programs. These examples all show that the development or acquisition of nuclear arsenals can be reversed.

    Unraveling the Nuclear Knot

    What is now needed are disincentives that would unravel the current knot of nuclear weapons states. The greatest disincentive to continue to possess nuclear weapons may be the possibility that other states will also continue to retain their weapons, leading to nuclear weapons or the materials to create them falling into the hands of terrorists. The possibility of a terrorist group in possession of nuclear weapons should give even the most powerful country in the world, the United States, incentive to seek the global elimination of nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible and to bring the materials to make such weapons under strict international control.

    Russia has suggested many times that it is prepared to further reduce its nuclear arsenal by agreement with the United States to under 1,500 nuclear weapons. Thus far, the US has not indicated an interest in reducing the number of its deployed strategic weapons to under 1,700 to 2,200 weapons. Further, the US has failed to accept its obligation to move forward on the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to at the 2000 NPT Review Conference. Under the Bush administration the leadership for progress in achieving nuclear disarmament has been severely lacking.

    It would seem that only the United States, due to its military and economic power, has the capability and convening power to bring together the nuclear weapons states and lead them in creating a Nuclear Weapons Convention that would set forth obligations for phased nuclear disarmament with adequate provisions for verification and international control. We can only hope that such leadership will be forthcoming before nuclear weapons proliferate to other countries and are again used.

    Although the United States may be needed for the actual implementation of a Nuclear Weapons Convention, the world cannot wait for the US to take action on this issue, particularly knowing of the Bush administration’s hostility to fulfilling its obligations under Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the steps set forth in the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament in the Final Document of the 2000 NPT Review Conference. While US initiative remains dormant, other states must fill this void with innovative collective measures to move ahead with a Nuclear Weapons Convention. This idea has been most seriously embraced by civil society groups, such as the Abolition 2000 Global Network and the Mayors for Peace Emergency Campaign to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons by the year 2020.

    With the failure of the 2005 NPT Review Conference to make any progress and the failure of the 2005 High-Level Summit meeting at the United Nations to reach any agreement on nuclear disarmament issues, both due to US opposition, the world stands at a deadlock on nuclear disarmament issues. The United Nations Conference on Disarmament has not addressed nuclear disarmament issues for eight years, also largely due to US opposition.

    There are only two possibilities to change this situation. The first is the awakening of the American people to put pressure on their government to cease being an obstacle to nuclear disarmament efforts and start being a leader in these efforts. The second is for the international community to unite in putting pressure on the US from outside. At this point in time, neither of these possibilities appears promising, and thus we drift toward nuclear the “unparalleled catastrophes” that Einstein warned would occur unless we can change our thinking.

    David Krieger is the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort to abolish nuclear weapons. This paper was prepared for The Istanbul Workshop on Nuclear Dangers in the Middle East, 17-21 November 2005.

  • At the Unholy Altar of Nuclear Weapons

    This year marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the 35th anniversary of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was supposed to lead to a nuclear-weapons-free world. Both anniversaries remind us of the stark dangers nuclear weapons still pose to the world.

     

    It is a moment of intense diplomatic challenge for Canada, a country at the centre of the debate over the future of nuclear weapons. That debate will take place at the NPT Review conference May 2-27 at the United Nations.

     

    In recent years, Iran, Libya and North Korea have pursued illegal nuclear programs with the assistance of a secret Pakistani network.

     

    A high-level U.N. panel recently warned: “We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the Non-Proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.” It is truly shocking that the public seems oblivious to the 34,000 nuclear weapons still in existence, most of them with an explosive power several times greater than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

     

    The NPT was obtained through a bargain, with the nuclear-weapons states agreeing to negotiate the elimination of their nuclear weapons and share nuclear technology for peaceful purposes in return for the non-nuclear states shunning the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

     

    Adherence to that bargain enabled the indefinite extension of the treaty in 1995 and the achievement of an “unequivocal undertaking” in 2000 toward elimination through a program of 13 Practical Steps.

     

    Now the United States is rejecting the commitments of 2000 and premising its aggressive diplomacy on the assertion that the problem of the NPT lies not in the nuclear-weapons states’ own actions, but in the lack of compliance by states such as North Korea and Iran.

     

    Brazil has put the issue in a nutshell: “One cannot worship at the altar of nuclear weapons and raise heresy charges against those who want to join the sect.”

     

    The whole international community, nuclear and non-nuclear alike, is concerned about proliferation and wants strong action taken to ensure that Iran and North Korea do not become nuclear weapons states.

     

    But the new attempt by Washington to gloss over the discriminatory aspects of the NPT, which are now becoming permanent, has caused the patience of the members of the non-aligned movement to snap.

     

    They see a two-class world of nuclear haves and have-nots becoming a permanent feature of the global landscape. They see the U.S. researching the development of a new, “usable” nuclear weapon and NATO, an expanding military alliance, clinging to the doctrine that nuclear weapons are “essential.”

     

    Compounding the nuclear risk is the threat of nuclear terrorism, which is growing day by day. It is estimated that 40 countries have the knowledge to produce nuclear weapons and the existence of an extensive illicit market for nuclear items shows the inadequacy of the present export control system.

     

    The task awaiting the 2005 review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty is to convince the nuclear-weapons states that the only hope of stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons is to address nuclear disarmament sincerely.

     

    This is precisely the stance taken by foreign ministers of the New Agenda Coalition (Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden), who recently wrote:

     

    “Nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament are two sides of the same coin and both must be energetically pursued.”

     

    The New Agenda, which showed impressive leadership at the 2000 NPT review in negotiating the 13 Practical Steps with the nuclear weapons states, is now clearly reaching out to other middle-power states to build up what might be called the “moderate middle” in the nuclear weapons debate.

     

    Eight NATO states — Belgium, Canada, Germany, Lithuania, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway and Turkey — voted for the New Agenda resolution at the U.N. in 2004, an action that effectively built a bridge between NATO and the New Agenda. The new “bridge” shows that a group of centrist states may be in position to produce a positive outcome for the 2005 NPT review.

     

    Here is where Canada can shine.

     

    In 2002 and 2003, Canada was the only NATO nation to vote for the New Agenda resolution. That was an act of courage, for Canada likes the “good company” of its alliance partners when it takes progressive steps. But the action was rewarded in 2004 when seven other NATO states joined Canada.

     

    I recently held meetings with the governments of some of these key countries — Germany, Norway, The Netherlands and Belgium — to discuss how to make a success of the NPT review conference. These countries look to Canada, as an important centrist state, to maintain its leadership position in upholding the integrity of the disarmament and non-proliferation goals of the NPT.

     

    When I was in Europe, news came of the Canadian government’s decision not to join in the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defence system.

     

    This move won the unanimous admiration of the officials I talked to. Clearly, they would like to work with Canada in proposing workable solutions to the NPT crisis.

     

    For Canada, working in a collegial manner with other centrist states is much easier to do than the action it boldly took in confronting the U.S. alone on missile defence.

     

    In the present political climate, no “grand solution” is possible. Rather, a set of incremental steps could be achieved if the moderate middle states use their influence to convince the U.S. that it is in American interests to protect the NPT’s ability to curb would-be nuclear proliferators.

     

    These steps include: the start of negotiations for a ban on the production of fissile materials; the striking of a new committee at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva to deal with nuclear disarmament questions; the U.S. and Russia taking their strategic nuclear weapons off “alert” status, and beefing up the ability of the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that nuclear fuels for civilian purposes are not diverted to nuclear weapons.

     

    This is a modest program. Many nuclear weapons abolitionists will not be satisfied with it, for it falls far short of negotiations for a Nuclear Weapons Convention.

     

    The world is a long way from obtaining such a treaty, which would need a strong verification system to ensure the safe elimination of all nuclear weapons. But the interim program would at least save the NPT.

     

    By working diligently and diplomatically with key NATO states and the progressive New Agenda states, Canada can live up to its own values of making the world safe from the spread of nuclear weapons.

     

    Douglas Roche is the former Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament and Senator Emeritus in Alberta. He is chairman of the Middle Powers Initiative.

    Originally published by the Toronto Star.

  • Erosion of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

    I recently participated in a meeting on the Future of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, sponsored by the Middle Powers Initiative at The Carter Center in Atlanta. The Middle Powers Initiative is a coalition of eight international civil society organizations, two of which have received the Nobel Peace Prize. I represented the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at the meeting, one of the founding organizations. In addition to civil society representatives such as myself, the meeting hosted diplomats from many countries. Among the participants were Marian Hobbs, New Zealand’s Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control; Senator Douglas Roche of Canada, chair of the Middle Powers Initiative; Nobuyasu Abe, United Nations Under-Secretary General for Disarmament Affairs; Ambassador Sergio de Queiroz Duarte, Brazilian Ambassador and President-Designate of the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference; former US Ambassador Robert Grey Jr.; and Ambassador Rajab M. Sukayri of the Jordanian Foreign Ministry.

    The participants in the consultation were mindful of the recent United Nations Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The Report, issued in December 2004, indicated that “the nuclear non-proliferation regime is now at risk because of lack of compliance with existing commitments, withdrawal or threats of withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to escape those commitments, a changing international security environment and the diffusion of technology.” The Report found, “We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.”

    The Report further found that “if a simple nuclear device were detonated in a major city, the number of deaths would range from tens of thousands to more than one million. The shock to international commerce, employment and travel would amount to at least one trillion dollars. Such an attack could have further, far-reaching implications for international security, democratic governance and civil rights.” It was against this background of concern that the Atlanta meeting took place. Ambassador Duarte, who will preside over the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, said, “What we have to contend with at the 2005 Review Conference is a persistent and serious situation of erosion of confidence in the mechanisms of the NPT and on the ability of the instrument to survive the tests it has been put through.”

    Among the major issues that were discussed were the need for the Non-Proliferation Treaty to become universal by bringing in the three nuclear weapons states that are not parties to the treaty (Israel, India and Pakistan) and bringing back North Korea; for the nuclear weapons states parties to the treaty to fulfill their obligations for good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament; for more effective safeguarding of nuclear materials and inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency; and for some effective method of sanctions for violating the Treaty’s provisions.

    Former President Jimmy Carter, who spoke at the meeting, pointed out, “Prospects for this year’s discussions are not encouraging. I have heard that the [Preparatory Committee] for the forthcoming Non-Proliferation Treaty talks have so far failed even to achieve an agenda because of the deep divisions between the nuclear powers who seek to stop proliferation without meeting their own disarmament commitments, and the Non-Aligned Movement, whose demands include firm disarmament commitments and considerations of the Israeli arsenal.”

    President Carter also pointed to the contradictions in US nuclear policy. “The United States claims to be upholding Article VI,” he said, referring to the disarmament provision of the Treaty, “but yet asserts a security strategy of testing and developing new weapons [such as] Star Wars and the earth penetrating ‘bunker buster,’ and has threatened first use, even against non-nuclear states, in case of ‘surprising military developments’ and ‘unexpected contingencies.’”

    President Carter referred to another of the contradictions in the approach to nuclear non-proliferation in addressing the issue of Iran and the Middle East: “While the international community is justified in exerting strong pressure on Iran to comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, there is no public effort or comment in the United States or Europe calling for Israel to comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty or submit to any other restraints. At the same time, we fail to acknowledge what a powerful incentive this is to Iran, Syria, Egypt, and other states to join the nuclear community.”

    There was a general sense at the meeting that the non-proliferation regime, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty that is its centerpiece, is eroding, and that some measure of success at the May 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference is critical to the future of this regime. Right now the United States is choosing not to recognize the progress made at previous NPT Review Conferences on nuclear disarmament obligations. The Bush administration doesn’t want to be bound by promises made at the 1995 and 2000 NPT Review Conferences, promises that committed the nuclear weapons states to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, to make nuclear disarmament transparent and irreversible, and to an “unequivocal undertaking” to achieve complete nuclear disarmament.

    The US position is throwing the prospects for the 2005 Review Conference into disarray. There was a general sense at the meeting that unless the nuclear weapons states, including the United States, stand by their previous commitments, the prospects for assuring future efforts to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation are dim. This is where we stand three months prior to the beginning of the 2005 Review Conference.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), and a member of the International Steering Committee of the Middle Powers Initiative.

  • ElBaradei Says N.Korea Nuke Crisis Getting Worse

    The crisis caused by North Korea’s refusal to abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions is deepening and needs to be resolved as soon as possible, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Wednesday.

    “This has been a pending issue for 12 years, and frankly it is getting worse,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei told Reuters in an interview.

    “We need to address the whole question and bring it to a resolution,” he said. “I would certainly hope that by the end of the year we should be there.”

    Communist North Korea has been locked in a stand-off with its neighbors and the United States over its nuclear program since 2002. Pyongyang has refused to return to six-country talks on dismantling its nuclear programs unless Washington drops what the North says is a “hostile policy.”

    ElBaradei said he hoped 2005 would see a return of IAEA inspectors to North Korea to conduct rigorous inspections that would provide guarantees to the world that all North Korean nuclear facilities and activities are under U.N. safeguards.

    The IAEA team was expelled on Dec. 31, 2002 and has not been allowed to return. Since that time, North Korea has produced enough plutonium for half a dozen nuclear weapons, the IAEA and a number of security think-tanks estimate.

    “I would like to see the six-party talks restarted as early as possible,” ElBaradei said.

    “I’d like to see by the end of the year a package agreement that takes care of the nuclear activities in North Korea and makes sure it is all under irreversible verification, that their security concerns are taken care and their humanitarian needs addressed.”

    The participants in the six-party talks are the United States, China, Russia, Japan and North and South Korea.

    The United States listed North Korea, Iran and pre-war Iraq as an “axis of evil” determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

    Washington has also accused Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian atomic energy program. But ElBaradei said it was North Korea, not Iran, that posed the greatest nuclear threat to the world.

    “I hope we can start to move on the Korean issue, which is the number one proliferation threat we are facing,” he said.

    Asked if the fact North Korea is widely believed to possess several nuclear weapons changed anything, ElBaradei said it did not.

    “It makes it more urgent, but it doesn’t change things. South Africa had nuclear weapons and they dismantled their program. So it’s an issue we are capable of dealing with once there’s an agreement,” he said.

    Originally publisehd by Reuters, Vienna

  • In Search of Security: Finding An Alternative To Nuclear Deterrence

    According to the President just elected, nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism represent the single most important threat to US and global security.

    I wrote that sentence three weeks ago, well before the election results were known, and yet I knew it would be true – because it was one of the key issues on which Senator Kerry and President Bush – and, for that matter, most other world leaders – agreed.

    That said, fundamental differences of opinion remain on how to deal with this ever growing menace to our survival. Should we opt for diplomacy or for preemption? What are the relative merits of collective versus unilateral action? Is it more effective to pursue a policy of containment or one based on inclusiveness?

    These are not new questions, by any measure. But they have taken on renewed urgency as nations struggle, both regionally and globally, to cope with an extended array of conflicts, highly sophisticated forms of terrorism, and a growing threat of weapons of mass destruction.

    The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) remains the global anchor for humanity’s efforts to curb nuclear proliferation and move towards nuclear disarmament. There is no doubt that the implementation of the NPT continues to provide important security benefits – by providing assurance that, in the great majority of non-nuclear-weapon States, nuclear energy is not being misused for weapon purposes. The NPT is also the only binding agreement in which all five of the nuclear-weapon States have committed themselves to move forward towards nuclear disarmament.

    Still, for all of us who have been intimately associated with the implementation of the Treaty for over three decades, it is clear that recent events have placed the NPT and the regime supporting it under unprecedented stress, exposing some of its inherent limitations and pointing to areas that need to be adjusted. Today I would like to discuss some of the lessons that can be taken from recent experience, and a number of possible ways for moving forward.

    The Iraq Experience: What Can We Learn?

    Of all the recent actions to address nuclear proliferation and other security concerns, the most dramatic have taken place in Iraq. Naturally, it remains too early to judge the final outcome of the Iraq War, but I believe there are some insights to be gained already from the events that led up to the war and those that have transpired since.

    The first point to be made is that the inspections were working. The nuclear inspection process – while requiring time and patience – can be effective even when the country under inspection is providing less than active cooperation. When international inspectors are provided adequate authority, aided by all available information, backed by a credible compliance mechanism, and supported by international consensus, the verification system works. The report recently issued by the Iraq Survey Group confirmed the conclusions the IAEA was providing to the United Nations Security Council before the war – when we said we had found no evidence to suggest that Iraq had reconstituted any element of its former nuclear weapon programme.

    But inspections are only of value when the results are accepted in good faith and taken into account in future action. Unfortunately, the Iraq inspection process was not given the time required, nor were its findings given due recognition. It is true that the record and mode of behaviour of Saddam Hussein´s regime did not inspire much confidence; but it is also true that we had not seen any clear and present danger involving weapons of mass destruction, after months of intrusive inspection.

    The second point to be made is that we need to exercise maximum restraint before resorting to military force. In 1841, the US Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, characterized preemptive military action as being justified only when the prospect of an attack made clear that “the necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” Naturally, times have changed, but the exhortation for restraint expressed in those words remains valid. The Iraq experience should tell us that unless extreme conditions exist to justify preemptive action against a suspected weapons of mass destruction programme, diplomacy in all its forms, including maximum pressure, coupled with credible verification, should be the primary avenue of choice. In my view, loosely defining what justifies pre-emptive action by individual nations could become an invitation for all countries to use force in a garden variety of situations, and render a severe setback to the UN Charter effort to limit the use of force to cases of self-defence of the type Webster described, and to enforcement actions authorized by the Security Council. And in this context, I should recall Henry Kissinger´s remark: “It is not in the American national interest to establish preemption as a universal principle available to every nation.”

    The third point to be made is that no one gains when we are divided on crucial issues such as the use of force. Like the international community as a whole, the Security Council was deeply divided in its views in the run-up to the Iraq War – and, after years of collective decisions on Iraq, the Council’s role and authority was set aside by the decision of the Coalition to take military action. But one lesson has been made very clear by the Iraq experience: when the international community and the Security Council are divided on matters of war and peace, everyone loses. The Coalition lost in credibility in some people’s eyes by proceeding to use force without the endorsement of the Security Council. The United Nations lost in credibility as the body driving the action against Iraq on behalf of international legitimacy, and as a result has come to be perceived in some quarters – particularly by many in Iraq – as an adjunct of the Coalition force, and not as an independent and impartial institution. And perhaps it is the Iraqi people who have lost the most; after years of suffering under a brutal dictatorship, and after enduring the hardships brought on through an extended period of sanctions, they have had still more misery brought on by the ravages of war and the unforeseen and extended period of insurgency and civil disorder.

    Other Lessons From Recent Verification Experience

    Of course, the Iraq experience is the most glaring recent case relevant to nuclear proliferation and security, but unfortunately not the only one. The IAEA´s efforts to verify undeclared nuclear programmes in Iran, Libya and the Democratic People´s Republic of Korea have also provided considerable insights and a number of lessons.

    The first lesson is that, for nuclear verification to be successful, IAEA inspectors must have adequate authority. The “any time, any place” authority granted by the Security Council in the case of Iraq was extraordinary, and it is not likely that countries would voluntarily grant the IAEA such blanket rights of inspection. Moreover, the IAEA´s authority under the NPT is limited to verifying that nuclear material has not been diverted for non-peaceful uses – and we have no clear-cut mandate to search for weaponization activities, per se, unless we have reason to believe that nuclear material has actually been diverted to those activities.

    Nonetheless, within the NPT framework, adequate authority can be achieved in those countries that accept the so-called “additional protocol” as a supplement to their NPT safeguards agreement. The additional protocol provides the Agency with significant additional authority with regard to both information and physical access. As illustrated by the IAEA’s experience in Iraq before the first Gulf War, without the authority provided by the protocol, our ability to verify nuclear activities is mostly limited to the nuclear material already declared – with little authority to verify the absence of undeclared, or clandestine, nuclear material or activities. By contrast, our recent efforts in Iran and elsewhere have made clear how much can be uncovered when the protocol is applied.

    The second lesson is that international efforts to limit the spread of technology through the use of export controls have left much to be desired. The most disturbing insight to emerge from our work in Iran and Libya has been the revelation of an extensive illicit market for the supply of nuclear items. The relative ease with which a multinational illicit network could be set up and operated demonstrates the inadequacy of the present export control system. The fact that so many companies and individuals could be involved (more than two dozen, by last count) – and that, in most cases, this could occur apparently without the knowledge of their own governments – points to the shortcomings of national systems for oversight of sensitive equipment and technology. It also points to the limitations of existing international cooperation on export controls, which relies on informal arrangements, does not include many countries with growing industrial capacity, and does not include sufficient sharing of export information with the IAEA.

    But more importantly, it is time to change our assumptions regarding the inaccessibility of nuclear technology. In a modern society characterized by electronic information exchange, interlinked financial systems, and global trade, the control of access to nuclear weapons technology has grown increasingly difficult. The technical barriers to mastering the essential steps of uranium enrichment – and to designing weapons – have eroded over time. Much of the hardware in question is “dual use”, and the sheer diversity of technology has made it much more difficult to control or even track procurement and sales.

    The only reasonable conclusion is that the control of technology is not, in itself, a sufficient barrier against further proliferation. For an increasing number of countries with a highly developed industrial infrastructure – and in some cases access to high enriched uranium or plutonium – the international community must rely primarily on a continuing perception of security as the basis for the adherence of these countries to their non-proliferation commitments. And security perceptions can rapidly change.

    In fact, a country might choose to hedge its options by developing a civilian nuclear fuel cycle – legally permissible under the NPT – not only because of its civilian use but also because of the “latent nuclear deterrent” value that such a programme could have, both intrinsically and in terms of the signal it sends to neighboring and other countries. The unspoken security posture could be summarized as follows: “We have no nuclear weapons programme today, because we do not see the need for one. But we should be prepared to launch one, should our security perception change. And for this, we should have the required capacity to produce the fissile material, as well as the other technologies that would enable us to produce a weapon in a matter of months.” Obviously, the narrow margin of security this situation affords is worrisome.

    The third lesson, as amply illustrated by the North Korean situation, is that the international community cannot afford not to act in a timely manner in cases of non-compliance, and before available options are narrowed. Beginning in the mid-1980s, North Korea took seven years to fulfill its obligations under the NPT to conclude a safeguards agreement with the Agency. In 1992, shortly after this agreement was concluded and the IAEA began inspections, we sounded the alarm that North Korea had not reported its total production of plutonium. From that time forward, despite the Agreed Framework concluded with the United States, North Korea has been in continuous non-compliance with its NPT obligations, and has not allowed the IAEA to fully verify its nuclear programme. At the end of 2002, North Korea capped that non-compliance by ordering IAEA inspectors out of the country, dismantling the monitoring cameras, breaking IAEA seals and, a few weeks later, declaring its withdrawal from the NPT.

    Naturally, all of these actions were promptly reported by the Agency to the Security Council – but with little to no response. This lack of timely action may have complicated finding a solution, and may have conveyed the message that breaking the non-proliferation norms with impunity is a doable proposition – or worse, that acquiring a nuclear deterrent will bring with it a special treatment.

    Lesson four: insecurity breeds proliferation. It is instructive that nearly all nuclear proliferation concerns arise in regions of longstanding tension. In other words, nuclear proliferation is a symptom , and these symptoms will continue to persist and worsen as long as we leave unaddressed the underlying causes of insecurity and instability – such as chronic disputes which continue to fester, the persistent lack of good governance and basic freedoms, a growing divide between rich and poor, and newly perceived schisms based on ethnic or religious differences.

    It is in this context that I have begun to stress not only the value but also the limitations of the IAEA´s role. While the Agency can use verification effectively to bring to closure questions of compliance with legal and technical requirements, the long term value of these efforts can only be realized to the extent that they are reinforced by all other components of the non-proliferation regime, and followed by the necessary political dialogue among concerned States to address underlying issues of insecurity, and to build confidence and trust. I should note that verification, supported by diplomacy, has been an important part of the success so far in Iran and Libya, and in that sense I can only hope that the continuation of the six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear programme will yield results that will include, inter alia, full IAEA verification.

    Exploiting the Window of Opportunity

    Clearly, the world has changed. The key features of the international security landscape have been altered significantly over the past two decades. Whatever value the concept of nuclear deterrence may have served during the Cold War, as the volatile currency on which the standoff between two superpowers was balanced, they have now become the ultimate “elephant in the parlor”. For the five countries recognized as nuclear-weapon States under the NPT, their nuclear arsenals are increasingly becoming either a focal point for resentment or cynicism among the nuclear “have-nots”, or, worse, a model for emulation for States that wish to pursue clandestine WMD programmes, hoping that this will bring them security and status.

    It is the height of irony that, in today´s security environment, the only actors who presumably would find the world’s most powerful weapons useful – and would deploy them without hesitation – would be an extremist group. A nuclear deterrent is absolutely ineffective against such groups; they have no cities that can be bombed in response, nor are they focused on self-preservation. But even as we take urgent measures to protect against nuclear terrorism, we remain sluggish and unconvinced about the need to rapidly rid ourselves of nuclear weapons.

    Why? The answer, in my view, is that the international community has not been successful to date in creating a viable alternative to the doctrine of nuclear deterrence as the basis for international security. Nuclear weapons will not go away until a reliable collective security framework exists to fill the vacuum. The aftermath of the Cold War should have served as the logical lead-in to such an effort. The resulting changes to the international security landscape have been obvious; it is only that we have not acted to adapt to these changes.

    If there is any silver lining to this dark cloud, it is that the window of opportunity is still open. The efforts to counteract Iraq´s phantom weapons of mass destruction, to unveil a clandestine nuclear weapon programmes in Libya, to understand the extent and nature of Iran´s undeclared nuclear programme, to bring North Korea back to the NPT regime and dismantle any nuclear programme they may have, and to prevent nuclear terrorism have all brought worldwide attention to bear on issues of nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear security. That energy is ours to harness. If we are ever to build a global security culture based on human solidarity and shared human values – a collective security framework that will serve the interests of all countries equally, and make reliance on nuclear weapons obsolete – the time is now.

    The Responsibility For Action

    The question remains, how? Whose responsibility is it to create this collective security framework? Is this an initiative for policy makers? The UN Security Council? The scientific community?

    The answer, of course, is that it will take all of us. Progress must be made on all fronts – political, scientific and societal. We must all take the responsibility for action.

    Sidney Drell comes to this problem as a physicist, and I come to it as a lawyer and diplomat, but we have arrived at the same basic conclusion: that reliance on nuclear weapons is a recipe for self-destruction. I find it encouraging that people from all sectors of society have been coming forward with proposals on how to address the challenges of nuclear proliferation and nuclear arms control.

    In my view, this could be the beginning of a much needed discussion on security – and we should do all we can to stimulate this dialogue, move it forward, and keep it in public focus. I would like to spend my remaining minutes outlining what I see as the types of actions that must be taken.

    Creating the Framework: the Political and Policy Front

    Let me first turn to the political and policy front. In this area, leadership must be focused on restoring and strengthening the credibility of multilateral approaches to resolving conflicts and threats to international security – conflicts and threats ranging from preserving the environment to ensuring respect for human rights, working for sustainable development, and controlling weapons of mass destruction – which, in our globalized world, can only be resolved through a collective and multilateral approach, in which competing interests and powers can be contained and harmonized. The system of collective security hoped for in the United Nations Charter has never been made fully functional and effective. This must be our starting point.

    For some years now, efforts to achieve Security Council reform have been mostly focused on the question of whether additional countries should be given a permanent seat. In my view, such a change would be helpful in making the Council more representative of today’s global realities, and in removing the current correlation – in that the same five countries recognized under the NPT as nuclear weapon States hold the five permanent seats on the Security Council.

    But more importantly, for the Security Council to take the leadership role for which it was designed, its reform must be focused on more than issues of membership. The Council must be able and ready to engage swiftly and decisively in both preventive diplomacy and enforcement measures, with the tools and methods in place necessary to cope with existing and emerging threats to international peace and security. This should include mechanisms for preventive diplomacy to settle emerging disputes within and among nations. The genocide in Rwanda and the appalling situation in Darfur, where 10 000 people are dying every month, are two prime examples of the lack of early and decisive intervention by the Security Council.

    The Security Council should also have, at the ready, “smart” sanctions that can target a government without adding misery to its helpless citizens, as we have seen in Iraq. The Council should have adequate forces to intervene in the foreseeable range of situations – from maintaining law and order, to monitoring borders, to combating aggression. And yes – in my view, the Security Council should be able to authorize collective pre-emptive military action when the imminence and gravity of the threat merit such action.

    Increasing the effectiveness and relevance of the Security Council is an essential step towards a functional system for collective security. Such a system is the only alternative to the reliance that some nations, including nuclear weapon States and their allies, now place on nuclear deterrence – in a “good guys versus bad guys” approach that inevitably leaves some nations seeking to achieve parity. A functional system for collective security is the only alternative to the current hodge-podge of approaches to addressing security issues – ranging from inaction or late action on the part of the international community, to unilateral and “self-help” solutions on the part of individual States or groups of States.

    With a viable system of collective security in place, policy makers and political leaders may find it easier to make progress on the nuclear arms control front, such as bringing into force the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and negotiating an internationally verifiable Fissile Material (Cut-Off) Treaty.

    In my view, every effort should be made, starting at the 2005 NPT Review Conference and continuing in other venues, to agree on benchmarks for non-proliferation and disarmament. These benchmarks should include: urging all States to bring the additional protocol to IAEA safeguards agreements into force; tightening and formalizing the controls over the export of nuclear materials and technology; working towards multilateral control over the sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle – enrichment, reprocessing, and the management and disposal of spent fuel; and ensuring that States cannot withdraw from the NPT without clear consequences, including prompt review and appropriate action by the Security Council. The international community should also work rapidly to reduce the stockpiles of high enriched uranium and plutonium around the globe, and to strengthen the protection of existing nuclear material and facilities.

    An essential benchmark will be that a concrete roadmap for verified, irreversible nuclear disarmament, complete with a timetable, and involving not only the NPT nuclear weapon States but also India, Pakistan and Israel, is at last put in place.

    Just over a month ago, the foreign ministers of Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden spoke out jointly, saying: “Nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament are two sides of the same coin, and both must be energetically pursued.” Thirty years after the enactment of the NPT, with the Cold War ended and over 30 000 nuclear weapons still available for use, it should be understandable that many non-nuclear-weapon States are no longer willing to accept as credible the commitment of nuclear-weapon States to their NPT disarmament obligations.

    In my view, we have come to a fork in the road: either there must be a demonstrated commitment to move toward nuclear disarmament, or we should resign ourselves to the fact that other countries will pursue a more dangerous parity through proliferation. The difficulty of achieving our ultimate objective – the elimination of all nuclear weapons – should by no means be underestimated. But at the same time, it should not be used as a pretext for failing to start the process of drastic reductions in existing nuclear arsenals, and simultaneously to explore the development of collective response mechanisms that will be needed against any future clandestine nuclear proliferation efforts.

    The Scientific Front: Roles for Researchers and Inventors

    I would also like to emphasize the role of scientists in advancing non-proliferation and disarmament objectives, and the responsibility for action that lies with the scientific community. Science brought us the atom bomb. And if we are to rid ourselves of nuclear weapons, we will need an equally intensive effort on the part of scientific researchers – to develop innovative tools for nuclear verification and mechanisms for reducing the proliferation potential of nuclear material and technology.

    In the area of nuclear verification, for example, advances in environmental sampling and analysis techniques are enabling IAEA inspectors to determine, with far greater precision, the nature and origin of individual particles of uranium – and thereby to help us detect undeclared activities. Satellite imagery technology and advanced information analysis techniques have also broadened the range of inspection capabilities. And in the long run, science may be able to develop additional innovative ways and means to neutralize the impact of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

    The Responsibility of Concerned Citizens

    The proliferation of nuclear weapons – “The Gravest Danger” , in the words of Sidney Drell and James Goodby – is a legacy we all share, and ultimately, every concerned citizen also shares the responsibility for action. In countries ranging from the most powerful to some of the least developed, the voice of the citizen is increasingly a force in the political debate. It is vital that we engage individuals from all sectors of society in a public dialogue on international security – to remind them of the continued danger of nuclear war, to explain to them possible alternatives, and to offer avenues for involvement. We must continue to develop and refine proposals for action, to bring them to the attention of governments and opinion leaders, and to promote public discourse on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament that will become too forceful to be ignored.

    And here I am pleased to recognize the important role played by CISAC as a force in the field of international security and cooperation. Your efforts to develop proposals that aim to move us away from a reliance on nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence has never been more urgent or more relevant.

    Conclusion

    For centuries, perhaps for millennia, security strategies have been based on boundaries: city walls, border patrols, and the use of racial and religious groupings or other categories to separate friend from foe. Those strategies no longer work. The global community has become interdependent, with the constant movement of people, ideas and goods. Many aspects of modern life – global warming, Internet communication, the global marketplace, and yes, the war on terrorism – point to the fact that the human race has walked through a door that cannot be re-entered.

    Yet with all the strides we have made to connect on many levels, we continue to think disconnectedly on others. We think globally in terms of trade, but we continue to think locally in terms of security. We cherish our connectivity on the Web, but turn away from solidarity in matters of extreme poverty. James Morris, Executive Director of the World Food Programme, recently pointed out, “There are about 800 million hungry people in the world today, about half of them children” – yet the governments of the world spent $900 billion on armaments last year. Could it be that our priorities are skewed?

    This is a mindset we must change. In this century, in this generation, we must develop a new approach to security capable of transcending borders – an inclusive approach that is centred on the value of every human life. The sooner we can make that transition, the sooner we will achieve our goal of a planet with peace and justice as its hallmark.

    by IAEA Director General Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei

  • Nuclear Proliferation: One Cheer for Kerry

    George Bush and John Kerry both agreed during their first debate in Miami on September 30th that nuclear proliferation is the single greatest threat to American national security.  They are undoubtedly correct. The late U.S. Senator Alan Cranston liked to say that if a single nuclear warhead detonates a single time in a single city in the world, all other issues will become instantly trivial by comparison.

    On the small nuclear questions Kerry is far superior to Bush. But on the big nuclear question, Kerry might as well be Bush. Because neither Bush nor Kerry have come close to challenging the single greatest stimulant to nuclear proliferation: The nuclear double standard. Our nation’s nuclear narcissism. America’s nuclear hypocrisy.

    “Nuclear proliferation,” said Kerry immediately when asked by Miami debate moderator Jim Lehrer to describe the greatest security threat facing the United States. Nuclear proliferation.” “I agree with my opponent,” said Bush moments later, “that the biggest threat facing this country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network.”

    These declarations were accompanied by many comments about the present or potential nuclear capabilities of Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Russia, and unspecified “terrorist enemies.” But though both candidates said a great deal about the frightful dangers stemming from nuclear weapons in the hands of others, neither said a single word about the 10,455 operational nuclear warheads currently in the hands of ourselves.

    NORTH KOREA: ROGUE STATE OR THREATENED STATE?

    On the question of North Korea’s nascent nuclear arsenal, the candidates during the first two debates engaged in a dispute so arcane that it almost seemed like a Saturday Night Live parody. Their argument about the costs and benefits of bilateral vs. multilateral negotiations (Bush favors the latter, Kerry favors both) was undoubtedly above the heads of at least 99% of the viewers, and likely swayed not a single swing state voter. Neither candidate came close to addressing the underlying issue: the motivation behind Kim Jong-Il’s quest for a nuclear arsenal.

    Consider the view from Pyongyang. America maintains a breathtaking military superiority over their country (or any country) in both the nuclear and conventional realms. George Bush announces a doctrine of launching unilateral, illegal, preventive wars against any nation his Administration subjectively determines might become a threat sometime down the road. He singles out three countries as constituting an “axis of evil,” (and gratuitously reiterated that characterization at the second debate in St. Louis.) He actually starts a war against one of the three — decapitating its regime, killing the supreme leader’s sons, and driving the leader himself into a pathetic hole in the ground.

    Given this track record, is it wholly unreasonable for North Korean decisionmakers to worry that the United States intends to invade their country, decapitate their government, and drive their leaders into a spider hole of their own? And is it wholly irrational for them to seek to acquire the one tool that could conceivably deter the awesome power that America can wield over them – a couple of atomic bombs?

    THE PRECARIOUS NUCLEAR DOUBLE STANDARD

    The basic predicament, from the perspective of other countries, cannot be expressed more simply: Why can we have them when they can’t? How come the United States and a handful of countries can have thousands of nuclear warheads, but other countries can’t have even one? What’s the principle? What’s the argument? It is never said. To the rest of the world this is sanctimonious and self-righteous, and appears based on the condescending notion that some are responsible enough to be “trusted” with these weapons, while others are not.

    President Bush himself, perhaps unwittingly, has managed to expose and illuminate this conceit of cultural superiority. “We owe it to our children,” he said in August of 2002, “to free the world from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of those who hate freedom.” Well that pretty much settles it, doesn’t it? Nuclear weapons in the hands of those who “hate freedom” are impermissible; nuclear arsenals in the hands of the Lovers of Freedom are, apparently, just fine with us. And just who will determine who “hates freedom” so much they must be denied the nuclear prize? Why the Freedom Lovers, of course, in whose hands nuclear weapons already presently reside.

    The trouble with that is that it’s not going to be entirely up to us. When we insist that nuclear weapons are vital to our security, other countries are bound to conclude that nuclear weapons will enhance their security as well. “There is an irrefutable truth about nuclear weapons,” says Ambassador Richard Butler of Australia, who spent much of the 1990s searching for nuclear weapons in Iraq. “As long as any one state has them, others will seek to acquire them.” Far from preventing nuclear proliferation, our nuclear arsenal is in fact the greatest provocation for it.

    This is especially true when the original Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is understood in its original context. The NPT of 1970 was not just a framework to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. It was, instead, a grand bargain — where the great many “nuclear have-nots” agreed to forever forego nuclear weapons, while the few “nuclear haves” agreed eventually to get rid of theirs. The World Court concluded unanimously in 1996 that the NPT and other international legal precedents had created “an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.” Moreover, the United States recommitted itself to the grand bargain at the 30-year NPT Review Conference in the spring of 2000, where the NPT’s nuclear signatories pledged “an unequivocal undertaking … to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.”

    If anything seems certain about the political landscape in the decades to come, it is that the nuclear status quo cannot last. We can seriously commit ourselves to fewer nuclear weapons and fewer nuclear states, or we can resign ourselves to more and more nuclear weapons floating around the world and more and more nuclear states. Stay the course, and we’ll likely witness a presidential debate 20 or 30 years hence where candidate Lindsay Lohan argues with candidate Hilary Duff — about how to deal with a world of 20 or 30 nuclear states. Continue down the same road, and our reward will be a vice presidential debate between candidates Mary-Kate Olsen and Lil’ Romeo — where each of them lectures Brazil or South Korea or Egypt or Indonesia or Japan about going nuclear, but neither says a word – any more than did Bush and Kerry — about the United States remaining nuclear.

    THE FALLACY OF BEAN COUNTING

    One thing the peace and disarmament left must begin to challenge is the notion that bean counting makes any meaningful difference on the fundamentals of nuclear security. Under the Moscow Treaty of 2002, the Bush Administration has committed to reduce our active nuclear inventory to 2200 operational warheads by the year 2012. But the Moscow Treaty is probably the emptiest disarmament agreement ever signed. It’s bad enough that the warheads and missiles we have agreed to decommission will simply be put into storage – likely available for redeployment within a matter of days. (As the Italian commentator Bruno Marolo put it: “A subtle distinction is now emerging between deployed nuclear weapons and set-aside weapons, piled up in a cellar so they can age like a good wine for the next generation.”) It’s bad enough too that the treaty allows for immediate withdrawal without cause – meaning that we could move some 8000 warheads into storage between now and 2012, and then immediately redeploy them the day after the treaty expires, as if it had never existed at all.

    But suppose that we do in fact actually destroy about 80% of our present nuclear arsenal, and do indeed retain only about 2200 warheads by the year 2012. What would this do to reduce the actual dangers posed by nuclear weapons? In what way exactly would 2200 warheads instead of 10,455 diminish the possibility that some simmering international impasse will spin out of control, and result – like the Cuban missile crisis nearly did — in global thermonuclear war?  What does bean counting do to eliminate the unfathomable danger of accidental atomic apocalypse (as opposed to dealerting the thousands of missiles we still incomprehensibly maintain on hair-trigger, poised to be launched with less than five minutes notice)? How does our stated intention to reduce our nuclear inventory to 2200 by 2012 make North Korea or Iran feel safer today (or, for that matter, in 2012)?

    Perhaps most importantly, how does simply cutting numbers reduce the risk that some malevolent creature will someday smuggle a nuclear warhead into the heart of an American city, and commit the greatest act of mass murder in all of human history? What could 10,455, 2200, or a single American nuclear warhead have done to stop Mohammed Atta – a non-state actor with nothing to deter and nothing to lose?

    Our nuclear bombers and missiles and submarines were not only irrelevant to Mohammed Atta, they make a nuclear Mohammed Atta more likely to eventually emerge. Why? Because our nuclear weapons make other nuclear weapons all around the world more likely to eventually emerge, and more likely to eventually fall into the wrong hands. And because – let’s face it – it’s not impossible to suppose that someone might steal or bribe their way into getting their hands on one of ours someday. Even an extraordinarily unlikely event, over a long enough period of time, becomes virtually inevitable.

    If an American city is someday obliterated by a 15-megaton nuclear device, it will matter little to the dead whether the offending warhead came from a stockpile of 10,455 or 2200. John Kerry, however, has said nothing to indicate that he would reopen negotiations on the basic outlines of the Moscow Treaty – even though he undoubtedly envisions 2012 as the final full year of his presidency.

    THE KERRY ADVANTAGE

    There is little doubt that John Kerry would be a far better president on nuclear issues than George Bush. It’s hard to argue for any higher priority than securing nuclear materials and warheads in Russia – the remains of the USSR’s 4 ½ decades of preparations for global thermonuclear war. Kerry seems to understand this, and his pledge during the Miami debate to complete the destruction of 600 tons of fissile material in Russia before his first term is out should be unequivocally applauded. Bush, on the other hand, is spending fully 12 times as much on new nuclear weapon research than on efforts to secure and dispose of loose nuclear materials worldwide.

    Kerry was a staunch supporter of the nuclear freeze movement which blossomed after Ronald Reagan’s saber-rattling and victorious presidential campaign in 1980. The freeze, in fact, was one of the central planks of Kerry’s initial and victorious run for the U.S. Senate in 1984. George Bush opposes ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, while John Kerry has consistently supported it. Kerry has promised to toughen export controls, strengthen law enforcement, and work through the United Nations to make trade in WMD technologies an international crime.

    And while Kerry has not categorically rejected missile defenses, it is clear that he is much less enthusiastic about them than Bush. The Administration apparently intends to declare the first elements of its ballistic missile defense operational before the end of this year. It was Bush, of course, who unilaterally withdrew the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, a move that Kerry declared would “welcome an arms race that will make us more vulnerable, not less.”

    Perhaps most significantly, Kerry has directly challenged Bush’s plan to build a brand new nuclear weapon: the “Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.”  This bomb, a good five times the size of the Hiroshima device, is being designed to burrow deep into the earth to seek out and destroy subterranean command complexes. Unlike traditional nuclear weapons that detonate above ground, this one would likely cast hundreds of tons of radioactive rocks and dirt and dust high into the sky, likely exposing thousands to slow and agonizing deaths from radioactive fallout.

    So much for Republicans calling themselves the party that is “prolife.”

    “Right now the president is spending hundreds of millions of dollars  to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons,” said Kerry in the Miami debate. “You talk about mixed messages. We’re telling other people, ‘You can’t have nuclear weapons,’ but we’re pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using. Not this president. I’m going to shut that program down.”

    This is certainly a good thing, and something the left should unapologetically applaud. But it is one thing for John Kerry to oppose the development of new types of nuclear weapons, another altogether to put the thousands we already possess on the table. Kerry needs to understand that the “mixed message” on nuclear weapons isn’t just about the new weapons that the Bush Administration has begun to pursue. For decades now, the United States has said to other countries, “We need them, but you don’t. They’re good for us, but no good for you. We can have them, but you can’t. ” What kind of message does that send?

    THE NUCLEAR SWORD OF DAMOCLES

    Earlier this year IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei delivered a blistering speech that squarely placed the blame for his difficulties stemming nuclear proliferation on the nuclear double standard. The time has come, he said, to “abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue nuclear weapons but morally acceptable for others to rely on them.”

    Nuclear weapons pollute the psyche with the arrogance of insuperable power. They create delusions of domination. With their calculations of mass casualties, they dehumanize our adversaries … and consequently ourselves. And in the age of American hyperpower, they provide American decisionmakers with very few additional policy options or political/military benefits.

    This is why Ambassador Paul H. Nitze, one of the great hard-line cold warriors who died this month at 97, concluded toward the end of his life that our atomic arsenal is “a threat mostly to ourselves,” that he “can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the U.S. to use nuclear weapons,” and that “the simplest and most direct answer to the problem of nuclear weapons has always been their complete elimination.”

    As we stand poised, perhaps, to elect a second JFK to the presidency on November 2nd, Kerry himself would do well to recall the words of the first, spoken in his first address before the UN General Assembly in 1961: “Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or madness. These weapons of war must be abolished — before they abolish us.”

    As the decades of the 21st Century march forward, it will become apparent that only two nuclear options will present themselves to humanity. One choice is a world of a dozen, two dozen, five dozen nuclear weapon states – and god knows how many nuclear non-state actors (i.e., terrorists). The other choice is to figure out how we can at least begin to move toward a world of zero nuclear states and zero nuclear weapons. But the notion that a handful of states can forever maintain a nuclear oligarchy, and forever frustrate the nuclear yearnings of others, is nothing but a forlorn fantasy.

    It would make an enormous difference if an American president would simply state, unambiguously, that abolition is our ultimate objective. That moving to 2200 warheads by 2012 is part of a longer-term plan, or even simply an aspiration, to eventually move to zero. That when we demand that Iran and North Korea forego their own nuclear aspirations, we assure them that the double standard is not something we expect them forever to endure.

    But when’s the last time you heard any American president, Democrat or Republican, say anything like that?

    ” If you expect to be part of the world of nations,” said President Bush during the Miami debate, “get rid of your nuclear programs.” He directed that sentence explicitly at the mullahs who rule Iran. But if he wants them to actually listen, it wouldn’t hurt for us to begin to direct it at ourselves.

    Tad Daley, who served as chief deputy to the late Senator Alan Cranston (D-Cal, 1969-1993) after he retired from the Senate, was Issues and Policy Director for the presidential campaign of Congressman Dennis Kucinich.  He is now Senior Policy Advisor for Progressive Democrats of America,www.pdamerica.org.

  • Why Shouldn’t Iran Seek Nuclear Weapons?

    It now seems difficult to dispute that the Iranian government is developing nuclear weapons, lying about it, and intent on continuing both come hell or high water. Why? Because the temptation for Iran to develop a nuclear arsenal of its own — driven by the contradictions of George Bush’s foreign and nuclear policies — is simply too seductive to resist.

    On Friday, June 18th, the IAEA strongly rebuked Tehran , saying: ” Iran ‘s cooperation has not been as full, timely, and proactive as it should have been.” The next day Iran ‘s top nuclear official, Hassan Rowhani, objected bitterly to the IAEA’s statement, reiterated his insistence that Tehran ‘s nuclear program is intended to generate electricity rather than warheads, and said that Tehran now would resume some of the nuclear activities it had previously suspended.

    In addition, the chair of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Ala’eddin Borujerdi, said the same day that the Majlis might now reject the Additional Protocol to the NPT, which allows unannounced and unfettered inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities. Under both international and Iranian law, the Additional Protocol cannot take effect without Majlis approval.

    Then, on Monday, June 21st, in a development difficult to believe wholly unrelated, Iran seized 3 British naval vessels and 8 British sailors — after Britain , along with France and Germany , had spearheaded the IAEA censure.

    Consider the outside world as viewed from Tehran . George Bush delivers his 2002 State of the Union address, and of all the countries in the world he singles out three as constituting an “axis of evil.” He announces his intent to instigate unilateral preemptive war against any nation that his Administration subjectively determines to be a potential threat. Defying almost universal world opinion, he actually commences such a war against one of those three — decapitating its regime, killing the supreme leader’s sons, and driving that leader himself into a pathetic hole in the ground. And he surrounds Iran on all four sides with bristling American military power — Iraq to the west, Afghanistan to the east, sprawling new American bases in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia to the north, and the unchallengeable U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf to the south.

    Iran , of course, cannot hope to take on the United States in any kind of direct military confrontation. But it can aspire to deter what must seem to them to be a quite real threat, someday, of American military aggression. How? By developing the capability to inflict unacceptable catastrophic damage on American interests or military forces abroad, on the American fleet in the Persian Gulf , or even on the American homeland itself. And by holding out even the mere possibility that it would respond to any American assault by employing that capability immediately, before it became too late, following the traditional military maxim of “use em or lose em.”

    There is, of course, only one thing that can provide Iran with that kind of deterrent capability. Hint: it’s not nuclear electricity.

    It is probably the case that for Tehran the perceived danger of a U.S. invasion is lower today than it might have been in 2002 or 2003. It is difficult to envision any U.S. president in the foreseeable future launching another unilateral preemptive first strike in the wake of the fiasco in Iraq . Imagine the political firestorm — even after a Bush reelection — if the Administration began contemplating another preemptive war, this time on Iran .

    But Tehran has no reason to believe that that shift in geostrategic dynamics has become permanent. It has resulted, after all, from external circumstances rather than from an internal American change of heart (or regime). On the contrary, it probably provides the mullahs with all the more reason to press ahead, in order to obtain the Great Deterrent before the Great Satan has a chance to regroup and refocus.

    Looming over Iran ‘s immediate perception of American threat is the nuclear double standard that so many other nations so resent. George Bush insists that selected other countries have no right to possess nuclear weapons, while at the same time making abundantly clear that we intend to retain thousands in perpetuity. To the rest of the world this is sanctimonious and self-righteous, suggesting that in our view we can be “trusted” with these weapons while others cannot. Such a position is factually questionable. It is morally indefensible. And it is utterly politically unsustainable.

    On Monday, June 21st, IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei delivered a blistering speech blaming this posture for much of his difficulty stemming nuclear proliferation in Iran and elsewhere. The time has come, he said, to “abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue nuclear weapons but morally acceptable for others to rely on them.”

    This is especially true when the original Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is understood in its original context. The NPT was not just a framework to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. It was, instead, a grand bargain — where the great many “nuclear have-nots” agreed to forego nuclear weapons while the few “nuclear haves” agreed eventually to get rid of theirs. Moreover, the United States recommitted itself to this covenant at the 30-year NPT Review Conference in spring 2000, where the NPT’s nuclear signatories pledged “an unequivocal undertaking . to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.”

    But the Bush Administration, rather than moving toward total elimination, is instead pursuing perpetual possession. Its Strangelovian nuclear war fighting posture contains plans for bunker busting “mini-nukes” — an oxymoron if there ever was one. (Just this June 15th the U.S. Senate — in a move probably not unnoticed in Tehran — endorsed new funding to study the development of such weapons.) It broadens the scope of military scenarios in which the U.S. might actually initiate a nuclear first-strike. It envisions new generations of strategic nuclear missiles in 2020, 2030, and 2040! Yet it says not one word about any “unequivocal undertaking” toward abolition.

    It is not just Tehran that, in all likelihood, is violating the NPT by pursuing a nuclear weapon capability. It is also Washington that is violating the NPT — by insisting on retaining our own nuclear weapon capability apparently for time everlasting.

    Earlier this month the Bush Administration announced plans to reduce our active nuclear inventory to no more than 2200 by 2012 (though thousands more would still be maintained “in reserve”). This would place us in compliance with the Moscow Treaty of 2002. But it would do almost nothing to reduce the actual dangers posed by nuclear weapons today. How does simple bean counting reduce the risk of nuclear terror, or a fatal nuclear miscalculation in a hot political crisis, or accidental atomic apocalypse? (Nuclear weapons, after all, are the prototypical example of the adage: “it only takes just one.”) Why don’t the Moscow Treaty or the latest plan say anywhere that these reductions are part of a larger vision, to be followed by further steps toward zero? How does an intention to reduce our nuclear inventory to 2200 by 2012 make Iran feel safer today (or, for that matter, in 2012)?

    Sadly for both the principles of the Democratic Party and the prospects for nuclear non-proliferation, Senator John Kerry has also conspicuously failed to question the nuclear status quo. He did release a plan to safeguard nuclear materials and reduce the risk of nuclear terror on June 1st, calling it his “number one security goal.” But while his plan said a great deal about nuclear weapons and nuclear materials in the hands of “shadowy figures,” it said very little about those in the hands of ourselves.

    Kerry did condemn Bush’s mini-nuke initiative. But it is one thing to oppose the development of new types of nuclear weapons, another to put the thousands we already possess on the table. Candidate Kerry may have grand plans to reduce the threat of nuclear terror. But he apparently has no plans to confront what can only be called America ‘s nuclear hypocrisy.

    The paradox of such an American nuclear posture is that the one country most insistent about retaining its nuclear weapons is the one country that needs them the least. The paramount geostrategic reality of the early 21st Century is America ‘s unchallengeable conventional military superiority over any conceivable combination of adversaries. Iran needs nuclear weapons to be able to inflict unacceptable catastrophic damage on a potential aggressor — and thereby hopefully deter any potential aggression. But Washington , unlike anyone else, can inflict unacceptable catastrophic damage on any country in the world with our conventional capabilities alone. If any country can deter any attack and repel any enemy without resorting to an atomic arsenal, it is us.

    Our nuclear weapons, in fact, are worse than useless for the real threats to Americans at the dawn of the 21st Century. Our armies and air forces didn’t protect us on 9/11. Our 13 aircraft carrier battle groups (no other country has even one) didn’t protect us on 9/11. And the thing that protected us the least on 9/11 was our bloated nuclear stockpile, our arsenal of the apocalypse. What could a single nuclear warhead have done to stop Mohammed Atta, or to have apprehended him, or even to have deterred him? How can all our nuclear bombers and missiles and submarines put together prevent some odious creature from smuggling a single nuclear warhead into an American city, and committing the greatest act of mass murder in all of human history?

    Nuclear weapons pollute the psyche with the arrogance of insuperable power. They create delusions of domination. With their calculations of mass casualties, they dehumanize our adversaries … and consequently ourselves. And in the age of American hyperpower, they provide American decisionmakers with very few additional policy options or political/military benefits. Yet their costs and risks approach the infinite.

    As Jonathan Schell has persuasively argued, the great irony of the Bush era is that both the Iraq war specifically and the preemption doctrine generally were supposed to be directed at curtailing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Instead, in all likelihood, they have exacerbated — in both frequency and intensity — the quest by others to acquire them. Isaac Newton’s laws of action and reaction do not apply solely to billiard balls. George Bush’s greatest historical legacy may be the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy.

    It is difficult not to conclude that the foreign policies and nuclear weapons policies of the Bush Administration, far from reducing the WMD danger, are instead leading us on a downward spiral toward immediate nuclear proliferation and eventual nuclear disaster. The only long-term choice is between a world of many dozen nuclear weapon states — where the detonation of a nuclear warhead in some great city of the world will become only a matter of time — or a world of zero nuclear weapon states. The United States can state unambiguously that we intend to walk down an irreversible path toward the light of a nuclear weapon free world. Or we can expect Iran and many others to join us on the road to a darker destination.

    Tad Daley served as National Issues Director for the presidential campaign of Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

  • Kerry Pledges To Give Nuclear Terrorism His Top Priority

    Kerry Pledges To Give Nuclear Terrorism His Top Priority

    In his speech, “New Strategies to Meet New Threats,” delivered in West Palm Beach, Florida on June 1, 2004, John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for President, referred to the possibility of nuclear terrorism as “the greatest threat we face today,” and offered a program to eliminate this threat based on US leadership. Kerry promised to prevent nuclear weapons or materials to create them from falling into the hands of al Qaeda or other extremist organizations. “As President,” he pledged, “my number one security goal will be to prevent the terrorists from gaining weapons of mass murder, and ensure that hostile states disarm.”

    Kerry recognizes that the US cannot accomplish this task by itself and pledged to build and repair coalitions. “We can’t eliminate this threat on our own,” he stated. “We must fight this enemy in the same way we fought in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, by building and leading strong alliances.”

    In order to confront nuclear terrorism, Kerry offered a four-step plan. His first step called for safeguarding all bomb-making materials worldwide. He called for an approach that would “treat all nuclear materials needed for bombs as if they were bombs,” and pledged to secure all potential bomb material in the former Soviet Union within his first term as president. “For a fraction of what we have already spent in Iraq ,” he pointed out, “we can ensure that every nuclear weapon, and every pound of potential bomb material will be secured and accounted for.”

    Kerry’s second step called for US leadership to verifiably ban the creation of new materials for creating nuclear weapons, including production of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium. He pointed out that there is strong international support for such a ban, but that the Bush Administration has been “endlessly reviewing the need for such a policy.”

    Kerry’s third step called for reducing excess stocks of nuclear materials and weapons. He recognized the importance of the US adopting policies consistent with what we are asking other countries to do. He asked rhetorically, “If America is asking the world to join our country in a shared mission to reduce this nuclear threat, then why would the world listen to us if our own words do not match our deeds?” In line with this commitment, Kerry promised that as president, he would “stop this administration’s program to develop a whole new generation of bunker-busting nuclear bombs.” He called the bunker-buster “a weapon we don’t need,” one that “undermines our credibility in persuading other nations.”

    The fourth step in Kerry’s plan called for ending the nuclear weapons programs in other countries, such as North Korea and Iran . He called for strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, strengthening enforcement and verification through the International Atomic Energy Agency, and tightening export controls to assure no future black market activities in nuclear materials.

    In order to accomplish these goals, Kerry pledged to appoint a National Coordinator for Nuclear Terrorism and Counter-Proliferation to work with him “to marshal every effort and every ally, to combat an incalculable danger.” Kerry made clear that “preventing nuclear terrorism is our most urgent priority to provide for America ‘s long term security.”

    President Bush has also called for steps to prevent nuclear terrorism, but in a number of respects Kerry’s position on nuclear terrorism is stronger than that of the current administration. First, and most important, Kerry pledges to end the double standard of calling on others not to develop nuclear weapons while the US moves forward with research on new nuclear weapons, such as the bunker buster. Research on the bunker buster, as well as on lower yield, more usable nuclear weapons, has been an important aspect of the Bush Administration’s nuclear policy.

    Second, Kerry pledges to gain control of the nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union at a far more rapid rate than that of the Bush Administration. Third, Kerry promises to appoint a Nuclear Terrorism Coordinator to work with him in the White House in overseeing this effort. Finally, Kerry calls for taking prompt action on a verifiable ban on the creation of new fissile materials for nuclear weapons, a step long supported by the international community and nearly all US allies, but never before acted upon by the US .

    Both Bush and Kerry have called for strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but only in relation to preventing nuclear materials from civilian nuclear reactors from being converted to nuclear weapons. Neither Bush nor Kerry has set forth a plan to fulfill US obligations for nuclear disarmament under Article VI of the treaty. This is a major omission since the nuclear disarmament requirement of the treaty is a foundational element, and without US leadership to achieve this obligation it may be impossible to prevent nuclear terrorism.

    “We must lead this effort not just for our own safety,” Kerry stated, “but for the good of the world.” Kerry is certainly right that the world now needs US leadership on this critical issue. This leadership must include a dramatic reduction in the size of nuclear arsenals on the way to their total elimination, as agreed to by the parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in order to prevent the nuclear warheads from being available to terrorist organizations.

    If any leader of the United States is truly serious about preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, he must realize that nuclear disarmament is an essential element of the equation. Kerry posited the equation: “No material. No bomb. No terrorism.” That equation must be expanded to include: “No material. No bombs – period. Not in anyone’s hands.”

    There are no good or safe hands in which to place nuclear weapons. In the end, to eliminate the threat of nuclear terrorism will require more than attempting to prevent nuclear proliferation; it will require the elimination of all nuclear weapons, a goal agreed to by the United States, United Kingdom and former Soviet Union in 1968 when they signed on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org)

  • Ballistic Missile Defense will Diminish Our Security

    Ballistic missile defense is a fraud on the American people. Those who promote missile defense promise something they cannot deliver — security from a nuclear attack. The truth is that deployment of missile defenses will make the United States and the rest of the world even less secure than they are today.

    Will a national missile defense work if deployed? It is very doubtful. We know that most tests of the system have failed, and that these failures have occurred when the testers knew in advance when a missile would be launched, from where it would be launched, and where it would be aimed. Given all this information, one would think it would be relatively easy to have successful tests. In a real world situation, none of this information would be available in advance.

    Additionally, in the real world an attacker would plan for the defensive system and release decoys along with the real warheads in order to confuse and confound the defensive system. This would make it even more difficult for a national missile defense system to be successful.

    The biggest problem with a national missile defense, however, is that potential “rogue” state attackers those the system is designed to protect against probably wouldn’t consider attacking the United States with ballistic missiles. It would be foolish for them to do so since a missile attack comes with a return address and the US would be able to respond with overwhelming force.

    If a “rogue” state wanted to attack the United States with a weapon of mass destruction, it would be far easier and safer for that country to deliver the weapon by means of ship, van or backpack. By attacking in this way, there would be no return address for the US to retaliate against. This would also be the most likely means by which terrorists could attack American cities.

    In addition to being ineffective to protect the US against potential “rogue” state attackers, missile defenses are threatening to Russia and China. These countries believe that deployment of missile defenses, even if ineffective, will put the US in the position to initiate a first-strike attack against them and then use the defensive system to knock down any of their missiles that survived the US attack.

    US deployment of missile defenses will further increase tensions with Russia and China and make an accidental nuclear war more likely. At one point, US officials even suggested to the Russians that they could assure themselves against a US attack by keeping Russian missiles on hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched on warning. This is very dangerous. US defense officials should be working with Russians to take all nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert. Failure to do so is irresponsible at best.

    US deployment of a National Missile Defense will throw more than 35 years of arms control efforts into disarray. It will violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and undermine the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties. It will be destabilizing to global security, and make the world a more dangerous place. That is why most countries, including US allies, are not enthusiastic about US plans for ballistic missile defenses.

    In sum, US ballistic missile defenses would be ineffective, destabilizing and dangerous. And yet, the US government appears willing to spend another $100 billion or perhaps even much more to deploy such systems. One can only wonder at this “spend now, think later” approach to national security.

    The alternative solution to increasing national and global security is US leadership toward a nuclear weapons free world. As recently as May 2000, the US, along with other nuclear weapons states, promised an “unequivocal undertaking…to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” We call for the US to take this promise seriously and to convene at the earliest possible time a meeting of all nuclear weapons states to move forward together in fulfilling their promises by developing an agreed-upon plan for the phased and verified elimination of all nuclear weapons from the planet.

    *David Krieger, an attorney and political scientist, is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.