Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

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Overcoming Geopolitical Obstacles to Nuclear Zero by Richard Falk

This is the transcript of a talk given by Richard Falk at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse” on October 24, 2016. The audio of this talk is available here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

Let me say what others have said, that it’s a great privilege to be part of this symposium and this group. And I want to start by reinforcing a couple of things that Rich put before us. I think it’s not only a geopolitical moment generated by a resurgent nationalism, but it’s also a kind of perverse political moment, in which autocrats are being elected to lead most of the critical governments in the world. And we’re living in an age of what I’ve sometimes called the ‘popular autocrat’. Not only are they elected to actually diminish democracy, but they remain popular after they do that. The most extreme example is in the Philippines, where a really quite openly fascist leader, who takes pride in executing people without any foundation is wildly popular in the country. But it’s true in India, in Japan, in China, as in Russia, Turkey, Eastern Europe, and more and more countries, and we have the Trump phenomenon and Brexit, they’re all out in that domain, which is also characterized by elites being out of touch with the feelings of the people of their own societies.

The Trump phenomenon is an illustration, but it happens in many other places in the world in a similar way, where the people that think, well, who are the political class, to use that terminology, really don’t understand what is animating their own citizenry. And that contributes, I think, to this toxic interaction between an anti-democratic mood that is re-embracing the Westphalian idea of territorial sovereign states. And of course, that mood of nationalism for a geopolitical actor like the United States is closely tied to militarism. And militarism, of course, is closely tied to nuclearism. And so, we’re in a context, which seems to be extremely averse to the goals of this foundation and of this symposium. And I think, the dialectical challenge to that interpretation was, I think, highlighted by the presentations we had just before lunch, which suggest that if we don’t effectively challenge the nuclear complacency, we’re on a course of species suicide.

In other words that… And what makes this so daunting is, as I think, Steven made very vividly clear, is that we do have the scientific basis for a rational adjustment to these threats. We have an elite and a politically dominant climate that resists that kind of message, because it challenges the prevailing paradigm for how security is to be achieved, and why we need to rethink what we mean by strategic stability. I was stimulated in that direction by Hans’ presentation this morning to feel that, if we really take these threats seriously, strategic stability means something very, very different than what it means in the Beltway, and in other governing circles around the world.

So, on the one level, you have the challenge of the unacknowledged apocalyptic consequences of an outbreak of nuclear war. And that is coupled with the realization that there are several geopolitical contexts of encounter that could easily escalate into a hot war, and in a hot war, easily cross the nuclear threshold. And it’s significant in this, in a sort of symbolic sense, that President Obama was pressed, you probably recall, recently to endorse a no-first-use pledge. And he rejected that, which I think was an opportunity on his part to re-establish the nuclear taboo, which I think is being undermined by these geopolitical developments. And the fact that he was under the kind of governmental and military industrial complex pressures that didn’t allow him to do that, or led him to believe that he shouldn’t do that, is indicative, it seems to me, of the adverse climate that exists within the US government and is shared to a significant degree by what we know about the other nuclear governmental elites.

An additional problem that I have, and it may be provocative for some of us here, is I have for quite a long time felt that there’s a tension between the sort of world view and stability that the arms control community seeks to achieve, and the transformative vision that those that endorse nuclear abolition or nuclear zero seek to achieve. They’re not compatible, and yet they’re treated as if they’re compatible. And the reason they’re not compatible is that the more success one has within the arms control paradigm, the less necessity there seems to be to take the risks of altering that paradigm. So if you can stabilize… And I think the existing leaderships in the most countries have adopted this managerial consensus, it’s given an academic gloss by scholars like Joseph Nye and Graham Allison, that this is the best you can do. And the best you can do is a combination of pursuing stabilizing measures, plus a geopolitical enforcement of the non-proliferation regime.

That’s a very important element in this managerial worldview. And it’s not enforcing the Treaty, because the Treaty, of course, as we all know, has a disarmament provision. But in the geopolitical understanding of non-proliferation, that Article X is excluded, it’s basically seen as irrelevant. And so, what this geopolitical regime involves is first of all the prevention of any political actors who are seen as hostile to the broad international status quo from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Israel is the most famous exemption, and someone referred earlier to India and Pakistan also. They were for various reasons not seen as hostile. Iran, on the other hand, the West is ready to go to war to prevent acquisition of nuclear weapons, even though, as Noam mentioned, I think last night, they don’t pose any kind of threat beyond trying to establish deterrents for themselves. That’s really if they were to acquire nuclear weapons, that would be their role in that. So that the managerials’ status quo involves the geopolitical enforcement of the NPT, possession and continuous development, modernization of the arsenals at a level where they are not too expensive and they don’t have too great risks of accidents or unwanted access, and also a realization that having nuclear weapons gives you a certain status, psycho-political status within the world system.

And it’s not coincidental, I suppose, that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council were the first five countries to acquire nuclear weapons. So there’s a kind of correlation in the political consciousness between international status and having this kind of weaponry of mass destruction. So it comes back to this question of; what can one do given this understanding of the existing situation, which on its face seems discouraging, to awaken enough of the public to create political traction to challenge nuclear complacency. How do you gain that political traction? And I think two critical audiences are youth, and somehow trying to penetrate the media. And the media, broadly conceived, is including film, and tv and radio. But somehow, which is difficult to do, because the media in particular has become corporatized and in its own way deferential to the managerial consensus. So it would be, it’s not an easy thing to do.

The final point that I would try to make is that the US has a double or triple distinctive relationship to these, to this challenge. First of all, as Obama pointed out at Prague, it’s the only country ever to have used these weapons, and it has sustained a position of technological dominance in relation to the weaponry ever since 1945.

Secondly, it is the main architect of a global militarized global security system that includes foreign military bases, navies in every ocean, the militarization of space and the oceans. So the US, we’re not living in a unipolar world, but there is a kind of control over the global security structure that no other country is in a position to challenge except… And even then in a very precarious way the regional dominance, in other words, China wants to have a kind of parity within its region. And that’s seen as provocative from the perspective of this global security system.

And the same thing Russia’s… Part of the reason Russia is perceived now as being provocative is, it wants to play a role similar to what it did during the Cold War in the Middle East. And that’s, again, a threat to this globalization of the American domination project and the American-led security system. So then in that sense it seems to me one needs to revitalize the language of the preamble of the UN Charter as if we meant it. This time as if we meant to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, and that relates to this idea that you can isolate nuclear weaponry from this larger context of a militarized security structure.

And therefore, what Jackie was saying this morning about the need to take into our understanding the linkages to conventional weaponry, and the vulnerability that many countries will feel toward American conventional superiority is something that is, I think, part of what any kind of awakening process involves. But underneath all of this is what do we do to awaken first of all the American public sufficiently to gain political traction to challenge nuclear complacency.

October 24, 2016
The State of the Nuclear Danger by Steven Starr

This is the transcript of a talk given by Steven Starr at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse” on October 24, 2016. The audio of this talk is available here. A PowerPoint presentation to go along with this talk is here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

David mentioned earlier that, he asked about why do we have this adherence to deterrence, and I believe one of the requirements for that is essentially the avoidance or even the outright rejection of the existential threat posed by nuclear arsenals. In other words, how can you threaten to use nuclear weapons if you would acknowledge that the use of these weapons could lead to the destruction of the human race or at least civilization? So my talk today focuses on what as I see as a confirmation of that rejection here in the United States, which is the rejection by US leadership of the nuclear winter studies.

I want to talk about the studies first, because I think I want to underline how important they are. Ten years ago, the world’s leading climatologists chose to re-investigate the long-term environmental impacts of nuclear war. The peer reviewed studies that I have listed in the slide are considered to be the most authoritative type of scientific research. It’s subjected to criticism by the international scientific community before its final publication in scholarly journals. During this criticism period, there were no serious errors found in the studies. Working at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers, and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA, these scientists use state-of-the-art computer modeling to evaluate the consequences of a range of possible nuclear conflicts. It began with a hypothetical war in Southeast Asia, in which a total of 100 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs were exploded in the cities of India and Pakistan. In order to give you an idea of what a Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb can do, please consider these images of Hiroshima before and after the use of an atomic bomb. These bombs had an explosive power of 15,000 tons of TNT.

The detonation of such an atomic bomb will instantly ignite fires over a surface area of three to five square miles. The scientists calculated that the blast, fire, and radiation from a war fought with 100 atomic bombs could produce as many fatalities as World War II. However, the long-term environmental effects of the war could significantly disrupt the global weather for at least a decade, which could lead to, or would lead, likely lead to a vast global famine. This slide was… Each click is one day the smoke spread in the burning cities of India and Pakistan, the scientists predicted this would cause 3 to 4 million tons of black carbon soot from the nuclear firestorms to rise quickly above cloud level into the stratosphere, where it could not be rained out. The smoke would circle the earth in less than two weeks, would form a global stratospheric smoke layer that would remain for more than a decade. The smoke would absorb warming sunlight, which would heat the smoke to temperatures near the boiling point of water, which would lead to ozone losses of 20%-50% over populated areas. This would almost double the amount of UVV reached in some regions, and would create UVV indices unprecedented in human history.

In North America and Central Europe, the time required to get a painful sunburn at midday in June could decrease to as little as six minutes for fair-skinned individuals. As the smoke layer blocked warming sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface, it would produce the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1,000 years. This is a slide taken from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in an article published by doctors Toon and Robock. Medical experts have predicted that the shortening of growing seasons and corresponding decreases in agricultural production could cause up to 2 billion people to perish from famine. The climatologists also investigated the effects of a nuclear war fought with vastly more powerful thermonuclear weapons possessed by the US, Russia, China, France and England.

Some of the first thermonuclear weapons constructed during the 1950s and 60s were a thousand times more powerful than an atomic bomb. And when you look at photos of nuclear weapons, it’s important to consider how far away they were taken. This was our first test of a nuclear weapon. During the last 30 years, the average size of thermonuclear or strategic nuclear weapons has decreased, yet today each of the approximately 3,200-3,500 strategic weapons deployed by the US and Russia is 70-80 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that were modeled in the India-Pakistan study. The smallest strategic weapon has an explosive power of 100,000 tons of TNT, a ton is 2,000 pounds, compared to an atomic bomb, that averaged an explosive power of 15,000 tons of TNT.

If you look at the scale, the largest nuclear bomb versus the atomic bomb, you’re going up by a factor of about 1,000. So you have 24,000 pounds of TNT, 3 million pounds of TNT for an atomic bomb, and really about 2.4 billion pounds of TNT for our large strategic nuclear weapon. And I made this photo just to compare an image I showed of the Hiroshima bomb at the base of what it would look like in comparison to Castle Bravo. I had a veteran from the South Pacific say, “You need to do a slide, because the atomic bombs were like fire crackers compared to hydrogen bombs.”

Strategic nuclear weapons produce much larger fire storms than do atomic bombs. A standard Russian 800 kiloton warhead, which John was kind enough to publish in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, on an average day will ignite fires covering a surface area of 90-152 square miles. So a war fought with hundreds or thousands of US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons would ignite immense nuclear firestorms covering land surface areas of many thousands or tens of thousands of square miles. This would probably occur within a period of a couple of hours, or less possibly. This is the US-Russian nuclear war. The scientists calculated that these fires could produce up to 180 million tons of black carbon, soot and smoke, which would form a dense global stratospheric smoke layer. The smoke would remain in the stratosphere for 10 to 20 years and would block as much as 70% of sunlight from reaching the surface of the northern hemisphere and 35% from the southern hemisphere.

It takes maybe a month or two for it to equilibrate. So much sunlight would be blocked by the smoke that the noonday sun would resemble a full moon at midnight, if you were in the northern hemisphere. Under such conditions, it would require only a matter of days or weeks for the daily minimum temperatures to fall below freezing in the largest agricultural areas of the northern hemisphere. Freezing temperatures would occur every day for a period of between one to three years. Average surface temperatures would become colder than those experienced 18,000 years ago at the height of the last Ice Age, and the prolonged cold would cause average rainfall to decrease by up to 90%. Growing seasons would be completely eliminated for more than a decade, and it would be too cold and dark to grow food crops, which would doom the majority of the human population. So the profound cold and dark following nuclear war became first known as ‘nuclear winter’, and it was first predicted in 1983 by a group of NASA scientists. And I took the liberty of copying a cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that announced this discovery, I think it was in 1984.

During the 1980s, a large body of research was done by such groups as the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment and Scope, the World Meteorological Organization, and the US National Research Council of the US National Academy of Sciences. Their work essentially supported the initial findings of the 1983 studies. The idea of nuclear winter, published and supported by prominent scientists, generated extensive public alarm, put political pressure on the US and the Soviet Union to reverse a runaway nuclear arms race. Unfortunately, this created a backlash among many powerful military and industrial interests, who undertook the extensive media campaign to brand nuclear winter as ‘bad science’ and the scientists who discovered it as ‘irresponsible’. Critics used various uncertainties in the studies and the first climate models, which are primitive by today’s standards, as a basis to criticize and reject the concept of nuclear winter. In 1986, the Council on Foreign Relations published an article by the scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who predicted drops in global cooling about half as large as those first predicted by the 1983 studies, and they described this as ‘nuclear autumn’.

Nuclear autumn studies were later found to be deeply flawed, but it didn’t matter, because nuclear winter was subject to criticism and damning articles in the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine. In 1987, the National Review called nuclear winter ‘a fraud’. In 2000, Discover Magazine published an article which described nuclear winter as ‘one of the 20 greatest scientific blunders in history’. The endless smear campaign was successful, and the general public, and even most anti-nuclear activists, were left with the idea that nuclear winter had been discredited. I found this with Physicians for Social Responsibility, when we were trying to get funding in 2001 to renew nuclear winter research. 9/11 took it off the agenda, but I was kind of shocked that no one really believed this anymore. Yet the scientists didn’t give up, and in 2006 they returned to their labs to perform the research that I just described at the beginning of my talk. The new research not only upheld the previous findings, but it actually found the earlier studies underestimated the environmental effects of nuclear war, because it found that the smoke is heated by sunlight, and it creates a self-lofting effect. That’s why it stays in the stratosphere for so long.

So after the initial series of studies were published in 2007 and 2008, two of the lead scientists, Dr. Alan Robock from Rutgers and Dr. Toon of the University of Colorado, made a series of requests to meet with the members of the Obama administration. They offered to brief the White House about their findings, which they assumed would have great impact upon nuclear weapons policy. But their offers were met with indifference. Finally, after a number of years of trying, I’ve been told that Dr. Robock and Toon were allowed an audience with John Holdren, the senior advisor to President Barack Obama on Science and Technology. Also, Dr. Robock has met with Rose Gottemoeller, as you all know, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control. Dr. Robock has the impression that neither Holdren nor Gottemoeller think that nuclear winter research is correct. But it’s not only Holdren and Gottemoeller who reject the nuclear winter research. According to sources cited by Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, and I really respect Greg, he’s a brilliant guy. He goes to the White House quite frequently, and talks to people in the National Security Council. He says that the US Nuclear Weapons Council, which is a group that determines the size and composition of US nuclear weapons, as well as the policies for their use, has stated that ‘the predictions of nuclear winter were disproved years ago’.

It may be that General John Hyten, the Head of the Strategic Command, who is in charge of the US nuclear triad, and General Paul Selva, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the second highest-ranking officer in the US, have never seen or heard of the 21st century nuclear winter studies that I describe. Perhaps when they hear a question about nuclear winter, they only remember the smear campaigns done against the early studies, or maybe they just choose not to accept the new research, despite the fact that it has withstood the criticism of the global scientific community.

Regardless, the question of nuclear winter research by the top military and political leaders of the US raises some profoundly important questions. Do they fully understand the consequences of nuclear war? And do they realize that launch-ready nuclear weapons they control constitute a self-destruct mechanism for the human race? Meanwhile, US political leaders generally support the ongoing US confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia and China. Mainstream corporate media, including the editorial boards of The New York Times and Washington Post engage in anti-Russian and anti-Putin rhetoric that rivals the hate speech of the McCarthy era. The US has renewed the Cold War with Russia with no debate or protest and subsequently engaged in proxy wars with Russia in Ukraine and Syria, as well as threatening military action against China in the South China Sea. And I brought this up just to show that the Bulletin has supported more recently these studies. This was an article that Toon and Robock.

I’m going to just quickly summarize, since this is supposed to be the state of nuclear danger, how I see it. Hillary Clinton, who appears to be likely to become the next President of the US, has repeatedly called for a US-imposed no-fly zone over Syria, where Russian planes are now flying in support of the Syrian armed forces. Marine General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Congress in September that, should the US attempt to set up such a no-fly zone, it would surely result in war with Russia.

Apparently, there’s now some debate about this. However, Russia has responded by moving its latest air defense system to Syria, and has stated it would shoot down any US or NATO planes that attempted to attack Syrian armed forces. Russia has also sent its only aircraft carrier, along with all of its Northern fleet and much of its Baltic fleet to the Mediterranean in its largest surface deployment of naval vessels since the end of the Cold War. In response to what NATO leaders describe as Russia’s dangerous and aggressive behavior, NATO has built up a rapid defense force of 40,000 troops on the Russian border in the Baltic states and Poland. This force includes hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles and heavy artillery. NATO troops stationed in Estonia are within artillery range of St. Petersburg, which is the second largest city in Russia. Imagine if that was in Tijuana and they could hit Los Angeles. The US has deployed its Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense System in Romania and is constructing another such system in Poland. The Mark 41 launch systems that’s used in the Aegis Ashore systems can also be used to launch nuclear long-range cruise missiles, so it’s a dual-use system. And Putin has pointed this out.

In other words, the US has built and is building launch sites for nuclear missiles on the Russian border. This fact has been widely reported on Russian TV and has infuriated the Russian public. It was in St. Petersburg at an economic forum when Putin… You can look on the internet under ‘Putin’s warning’, and he lectured a group of international media people that Russia would be forced to retaliate against this threat. So, while Russian officials maintain that its actions are no more than routine, Russia now appears to be preparing for war. And Hans pointed out that these things can be viewed in different ways, but I still find some of this alarming, myself. On October 5th, Russia conducted a nationwide civil defense drill that included 40 million of its people being directed to fallout shelters. Reuters reported on October 7th that Russia had moved its Iskander-capable nuclear missiles, as Hans referred to, to Kaliningrad, which borders Poland.

So, while the US ignores the danger of nuclear war, Russian scholar Stephen Cohen reports that the danger of nuclear war with the US is the leading news story in Russia. I listen to Cohen interviews on the John Batchelor Show every week, and it’s really one of the few sources in our media where you can get informed updates. Cohen speaks Russian and he listens to the Russian media, and he states, “Just as there are no discussion of the most existential question of our time in the American political class, the possibility of war with Russia, it is the only thing being discussed in the Russian political class. These are two different political universes. In Russia, all the discussion in the newspapers, and there is plenty of free discussion on talk show TV which echoes what the Kremlin is thinking, online, in the elite newspapers, and in the popular broadcasts, the number one, two, three and four topics of the day are the possibility of war with the United States.”

And Cohen goes on to say that, “I conclude from this that the leadership of Russia actually believes now, in reaction to what the US and NATO have said and done over the last two years, and particularly in reaction to the breakdown of the proposed cooperation in Syria, and the rhetoric coming out of Washington, that war is a real possibility. I can’t remember when, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, that Moscow leadership came to this conclusion in its collective head.”

My own personal assessment of the state of the nuclear danger today is that it’s profound. The US is sleepwalking towards nuclear war. Our leaders have turned a blind eye to the scientifically predicted consequences of nuclear war and appear to be intent on making Russia back down. This is a recipe for unlimited human disaster. But it’s still not too late to seek a dialogue, diplomacy and detente with Russia and China, and to create a global discussion about the existential dangers of nuclear war, which, when was the last time you heard about this? You certainly didn’t hear about it in the presidential debates. It’s like people have forgotten about it. But I think that they don’t want to think about it, because it’s just too painful.

We must return to the understanding that nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought. And this can be achieved if we listen to the warnings from the scientific community about the omnicidal consequences of nuclear war. I think we need to hold the feet to the fire of the US Nuclear Weapons Council, because any debate on this is useful, because then people will go, “What?” Just like my students in my class, they’re all uniformly horrified when they find out about what nuclear weapons will do. They don’t know, they really don’t know. And I think this recognition can provide what David suggested to be as a pressure point.

October 24, 2016
The State of the Nuclear Danger by Hans Kristensen

This is the transcript of a talk given by Hans Kristensen at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse” on October 24, 2016. The audio of this talk is available here. A link to Kristensen’s PowerPoint presentation that accompanied this talk is here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

Thanks very much for the invitation to come all the way out here. I managed to see two oceans in one day, so that’s pretty good. And I’ve been asked to talk about the state of affairs, so to speak, in the nine nuclear weapons countries, which is impossible in 15 minutes. [chuckle] So a lot of this is information overkill, of course, but the point of it is so that the slides and the information is available for you later on if you want to go online and look at it. So some of them I’ll just jump very quickly across them. But basically what I want to capture in this one is to give you an impression of three major themes, three major issues, the state of affair with the effort to reduce nuclear weapons, what has been accomplished and what does the trend look like for the next decade or so. And then look at the modernization programs that are around the world and the nuclear operations that we’re seeing changing very significantly right now, as a matter of fact.

Somebody said that today was the anniversary of the UN Charter, I think it was. And today, as we speak, is also the beginning of US Strategic Command’s Global Thunder Nuclear Strike exercise that is beginning today. The B52s are taking off, the ICBMs are exercising and the ballistic missiles submarines. So we’ll see what comes out. But this is sort of a good reminder that there are two pieces here that are competing, and right now this one will be in focus for sure for the next week or 10 days.

So I want to begin with a reminder. John very kindly reminded us of the hope, which I think is relevant and it’s also important when you look at the development of nuclear forces over the last several decades, we’ve had enormous progress compared to the arsenals that were during the Cold War. That’s of course if you’re interested in numbers. If you’re looking for this sort of final outcome, it’s a little more murky, but both in terms of overall numbers, in terms of categories of those weapon systems and what they were intended to do has changed significantly. In the United States, for example, the US has done away with all of its non-strategic nuclear weapons, except a few hundred that are for the tactical fighter aircraft. That means all army weapons, artillery, short-range missiles, all navy weapons, anti-submarine, anti-air, land attack, cruise missile, gone and destroyed. A huge development, these weapon systems used to sail around the world, rubbing up against other nuclear navies on the world oceans, sailing into countries’ ports whether they had non-nuclear policies or not, what have you.

So, that is an amazing development in my view. Where we are now, what should capture your imagination, of course, is the bottom chart there, the enormous difference in the perception between the United States and Russia. How many nuclear weapons they think they need for security, versus everyone else. There’s no country on the planet who thinks they need more than a few hundred nuclear weapons for sort of basic nuclear deterrence missions. So the rest is very much a leftover of what we saw during the Cold War, the mindsets, the strategies, the inertia from the different agencies, it’s very hard to get them out of this nuclear business, and the politicians from the states where they produce some of these systems, of course.

But if you look at just the United States and Russia, I’m going to focus on just the United States and Russia in this one, not just because they’re the biggest, but also because of the way things are developing right now, they are some of the most important, I think, trends in terms of what can influence the future of nuclear weapons globally. The most important part is that the pace of reductions has slowed down significantly, compared to two decades, one decade ago. We saw some very dramatic changes. And now it is as if the nuclear powers are not heading toward zero, they’re sort of hedging toward the indefinite future and thinking about what should their position be in the world of powers, decades from now. So that means that this development toward zero has really slowed down, and it is likely to stay very modest in the future years. The new START Treaty is the only existing treaty that has any effect on nuclear forces right now, and that treaty is so modest in terms of reductions and perhaps, more important, of the treaty is the verification regime that’s associated where the countries go on and inspect each other’s bases and what have you.

But we are in a very problematic trend here, I think, because you can see the United States is reducing its number of deployed strategic warheads, and the Russians have started to increase their strategic nuclear warheads. And so, there are no limits under the treaty until 2018, so no one is in violation of the treaty now. [chuckle] At that day, February 2018, that’s when they have to meet the limit. And we’re talking only a few hundred warheads, so this is just about adjusting what is on the forces, this will not require any significant adjustment of the nuclear posture. So this is a very modest treaty. It looks bad, but I think you should also look at this statement from the US Department of Defense from 2012, which said that, even if Russia breaks out of the new START Treaty with significantly more nuclear warheads deployed, they would not be able to have an effect on the strategic stability, the thinking that goes into strategic stability seen from the US perspective.

So the US is not very interested anymore in exact parity. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about what you can do with the forces you have. And Obama, of course, came in with a lot of promise or expectations, hope about reductions and fundamental change. He had a phrase that was, “To put an end to Cold War thinking.” That was the key in the Prague speech. And that is probably the one thing they certainly have not done, because if you look at how… The blue line is the fluctuation in the US stockpile. How many weapons have entered the stockpile? How many have left the stockpile over the years? So you can see the activity in and out of the stockpile here.

And so what you should note, of course, is the enormous build up in this area. Eisenhower added over 11,000, I think it’s even higher, I think it’s 17,000 weapons to the stockpile. It’s mad. And then it slowed down and there were even some that were removed, but it was zig-zagging here until the end of the Cold War, when we saw these enormous reductions here, and later, the Bush administration. But Obama has been very modest, very little effect. He has taken about 700 nuclear weapons out of the stockpile. And that’s, of course, a lot, it’s more than most nuclear weapons states in the world, but out of this arsenal of 5,000, it’s much more modest. And so he has actually come out being the president that has reduced the US nuclear stockpile the least of any post-Cold War president.

Now, we hear again and again that the United States has not been doing anything on its nuclear weapons, that we’ve had a “procurement holiday,” as they call it. And people used to argue that so that they can make the case, that now we need some money to modernize. But this of course ignores completely the modernizations that have happened for the last two decades. These may not have been entirely new weapons systems that came in. We have changed the way we go about things in the United States, so we instead spend more energy on extending the life of the existing systems, extending the life of existing nuclear warheads, etcetera. But we’ve had some significant ones in that period. The ballistic missile submarine fleet came in, the Trident II missile was introduced also out in the Pacific Fleet. We’ve had an entire upgrade of the Minuteman III force, the B-2 bombers came in in that period as well. Numerous different warheads were introduced, life extension programs, command and control, and now, we have B61-12, the next guy, the nuclear bomb that is being worked on. So this has been quite a busy holiday. [chuckle]

But that’s just to say, the United States doesn’t go about its nuclear modernization in the same way that Russia or China go about their nuclear modernizations, nor do the cycles happen at the same time. So it’s completely off the mark to look out the window and say, “They’re modernizing, we’re not. So therefore, we must be behind.” Our modernization came in the 1980s and early 90s. The Russians’ came in in the late 1990s and in the 2000s, so they’re in the middle of their modernization cycle. And then it’ll go like that. It doesn’t happen at the same time. But it’s very important to not begin to spin modernization programs any which way you want it. But the Russian modernization program is across the board. They’re in the middle of it, mainly phasing out Soviet-era systems and replacing them with new ones. So we see ICBMs coming in, mobiles, as well as silos, we see new submarines, we see them working on first an extension of the production line for the black jet bomber, but they’re also working on a new bomber. We see a broad range of modernizations effort in the non-strategic as well, non-strategic forces like the Iskander, for example, that gets a lot of headlines right now, but also attack submarines like the Yasen-class with land attack cruise missile capability.

For the United States, the same story. Across-the-board modernization that includes both ICBM subs, bombers as well as tactical weapon systems and the infrastructure, the factories to produce these things. And over the next decade, they are thinking in the order of $340 billion to be spent on this enterprise and we’ve heard, of course, $3 trillion, no, $1 trillion for the next 30 years, I think that’s the word. And there’s also some of that modernization that has effects for NATO, and this has to do with the B61 bomb that is deployed in Europe, part of the arsenal, integrated onto US bombers over there but also allied bombers. Yes, the United States provides nuclear weapons to allies’ bombers so that in a case of war, they would deliver our nuclear weapons, very controversial arrangement. There’s a whole story to that. We can go back to that later, whatever.

But right now, it’s the B61-12 that is the focus of this effort. This will come, take all the gravity bombs that are currently in the US arsenal and build those capabilities into one weapons system. Right now, they have numerous versions of the B61, as well as a very high yield B83 bomb. The effects, the military effects of those capabilities will be concentrated into one weapons system, that’s the B61-12. The new about this is that it has a tail kit that guides it to its target so it can hit it more accurately. Thereby, they can use a warhead with a much lower maximum yield to get the same effects that today require hundreds of kilotons in yield. So that’s a way of making a nuclear weapon much more efficient. But of course, that also means that you suddenly have all the weapons systems, so to speak, everywhere, instead of in certain bases or only for certain types of aircraft, now it’s gonna be available across the force.

China, very quickly, they’re in the middle of a modernization, shifting to more mobile systems, more capable ICBMs, including now beginning to put multiple warheads on their ICBMs. They’re building new bombers that may have nuclear cruise missile capability. It’s not quite clear. A ballistic submarine fleet and some ground launch cruise missiles that are being identified as possibly nuclear. France, a similar situation. They’re in the middle of a modernization of their force. They’ve just finished introducing this cruise missile on their bombers. They have a new version of their ballistic missile submarines that’s been introduced into the navy. And they’re putting new kinds of warheads on them.

Britain has just decided to go ahead with replacement of its ballistic missile submarine fleet. So we will see that. They’re using a modified version of the American W86 warhead on their system. Of course, if you ask the Brits it’s not true, they say it’s their own system, but it is a version of it that is similar to it but with some modifications. They are using the US re-entry body, the new re-entry body that the US has just flushed into its fleet that has a special fuse on it that enables this warhead to significantly increase the kill capability of hard targets. So this is happening both in the British fleet, but also in the US fleet.

Pakistan: Full speed ahead. Short range, medium range, cruise missiles, infrastructure, plutonium production facilities, reactors coming in, air launch, ground launch, cruise missiles, a very dynamic program, including very short range system. This one has a range of only 60 kilometers. Specifically designed to be used before strategic nuclear weapons are used. So this is an opening front in the Pakistani-India relationship that is very worrisome, and designed specifically to be used against Indian conventional forces invading Pakistan.

India: Looking more toward China, but certainly keeping its eye on Pakistan, but developing a longer range system that will be able to cover all of China. It’ll begin to deploy them in canisters on the road, instead of these sort of open transport modes, so they’ll be much more resilient and flexible and can be used actually also quicker in a quicker respond. Their first ballistic missile submarine has just been handed over to the navy and we will see that beginning to go at some point over the next couple of years, out on actual patrols with nuclear weapons. They also have various other systems, but that’s sort of the focus of their nuclear posture development.

Israel: The same situation, with land-based ballistic missiles and bombers with gravity bombs. There might be a nuclear cruise missile capability on their submarines. There have been lot of rumors about it. It’s a little foggy still, but that’s the sort of the overall trend here. The most important part then is this combination, as well as a longer range version of the Jericho ballistic missile. We hear numbers of Israeli arsenals, 200, 300, some people even say 400 nuclear weapons. I think they’re vastly exaggerated. I think the Israeli arsenal is probably closer to sort of 80 to 100 warheads, or something like that. They don’t have a war fighting type of nuclear arsenals. I don’t really think what they would do with all those weapons.

And of course, North Korea: Full speed ahead. You name it, they’ll come up with some system some way or another. They’re working on a submarine, land-based mobile ICBMs, fixed ICBMs, they’re trying to get that in. There have been rumors of some cruise missile capability, but there are many rumors about North Korea. And right now, despite five underground nuclear tests, it’s still not entirely clear that they have managed to weaponize these weapons so that they can be delivered with a ballistic missile. We still need to see more of those kind of tests where they’re testing vehicles that are actually intended to deliver the warhead. So there is a process there, but they’re certainly on their way, no doubt about it.

And finally, operations. We’ve seen some significant changes over the last four, five years, in the way that Russia and the United States are operating their nuclear forces. Part of the picture is that these nuclear forces are dual capable. So, sometimes, they may be intended as conventional operations, but they also send a nuclear message. And we’ve seen that again and again, when information, for example, about the Iskander system going to Kaliningrad, is being really highlighted in the news media and the public reactions, as a nuclear system going in. But the primary mission, of course, is conventional. But it has nuclear capability, we believe. We’ve seen some significant operations in the Baltic and North Sea area, including apparently, a simulated nuclear strike in 2013 against Sweden, with Backfire bombers.

We also have other naval nuclear weapons. Russia has a much broader nuclear weapons arsenal, in terms of types, both for the navy, the air defense system, the air force and the ground forces. And they seem to be holding on to that capability. On the US side, we have seen new deployments of nuclear-capable fighter squadrons to both the Baltic states, to Poland, and even to Sweden, a place where we did not see those type of deployments 10 years ago. We see now, a periodic forward deployments of long-range nuclear bombers to Europe, to operate for several weeks from a base, and flying around and do exercises deep, deep into the Baltic Sea, and over-flying the Baltic states, just a few tens of miles from the Russian border. We are beginning to see now, again, ballistic missile submarines conducting port visits in Europe, to signal that Europe is backed by the American ballistic missile submarine strike force.

So a very significant development. And very recently, just the last couple of years, we’ve seen some completely new developments in the bomber force operations. It started in 2015, with this one that was called Polar Growl, an exercise that sent four nuclear-capable bombers on missions up over the North Pole. They went all the way to their launch point for the cruise missiles, as well as into the North Sea, and these are just hypothetical strike patterns for each bomber, carrying 20 air launch, long-range cruise missiles. 80 cruise missiles is a significant force just for eight bombers. This year we saw a repetition of this, looking a little different, but the same central theme. A couple of bombers flying up over the North Pole, going just along the Russian coast, outside that territory, of course, and this one, going over the North Sea, and all the way into the Baltic Sea, and doing exercises up, along and down the coast of the Baltic states.

And in the Pacific, we saw the B2 bombers going up, going down toward the Kamchatka Peninsula, which is where the Russian Pacific submarine fleet is based. STRATCOM said they have not done this type of an exercise since 1987. So, we’re now back… European Command has forged what they call a new link with STRATCOM, for assurance and deterrence missions. And that is a description from a chapter in their posture statement that deals with the nuclear forces, so this is nuclear messaging. And so this raises the question. What’s the plan? Does anybody know about the next step? I can’t imagine next year’s exercise, will probably have to be a little bigger and do something a little extra, because otherwise, we’re slacking. We’re messaging here, right? So, this is a worrisome step, where we’re beginning to take, and the Russians are beginning to take the step further up the escalation ladder. Yes.

[Were those planes carrying nuclear weapons at the time?]

No. The planes are not carrying nuclear weapons. In fact, US bombers do not carry nuclear weapons anywhere. They are loading nuclear capable systems, but without the warheads for exercises. But we’ve seen in 2007, obviously, that mistakes can happen. That was when six cruise missiles were flown across the United States, because the security system broke down. But on these exercises, no. But what we’re beginning to see is that these are nuclear-capable bombers that are going to missions. We’re also beginning to see conventional long-range strike bombers going on these missions. And when they’re doing these exercises, they’re loading onto the bomber force both nuclear and conventional long-strike cruise missiles. So this is an integration of conventional nuclear, in the strategic mission in support of both Europe and Asia. Yes?

[In Russian exercises, do we know whether they refrain from using nuclear weapons? From flying their nuclear weapons with their bombers?]

Know, is a strong word. I would say, we suspect that they don’t. Even in the Russian military, it’s just a lot of trouble if you have an accident. And why do it if you don’t have to. But they do simulate it. Absolutely. They simulate both the loading process and all the procedures when they fly, and the launch procedures, etcetera, etcetera.

[But we can’t tell?]

Exactly. We can’t tell if that plane really has something on board, unless we have some really good intelligence. So, that’s sort of, everybody’s doing it and everybody’s doing more of it and this is the concern right now.

[Since we don’t know if the Russian planes, for example, are carrying nuclear weapons, doesn’t it make it more dangerous in a period of crisis?]

Exactly, and there was a debate a few years ago about whether the United States should add conventional warheads to its submarines’ ballistic fleet. And there was a heavy opposition in the US Congress against it, specifically to try to keep a red line between nuclear and conventional. You would have had conventional and nuclear on the same submarine, and so they said, “Nah, let’s not do that.” [chuckle] But on the bombers, that’s part of the standard posture. You can have conventional. You can have JASSM cruise missiles. You can have air launch cruise missiles. Now they’re building, working on building a new long-range nuclear cruise missile, it’s called the LRSO, so far. That’s going to come into the force in the mid, late 20s. That’s going to replace the ALCM. This is part of this overall repetition of the current nuclear posture through the modernization.

October 24, 2016
Assessing the Alarming Lack of Progress by Jackie Cabasso

This is the transcript of a talk given by Jackie Cabasso at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse” on October 24, 2016. The audio of this talk is available here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

It’s really a great honor and a little bit daunting to be on the podium here with Professor Chomsky, but he seems a pretty down-to-earth guy. [laughter] I’m going to try to limit my remarks to the allotted time, there’s a great deal to say on this topic. When I looked at my email this morning, I saw two subject lines one after the other. “Top British General warns of nuclear war with Russia, ‘the end of life as we know it’” immediately followed by, “The week the world agreed to make nuclear weapons illegal.” I think that this kind of sums at where we’re at, but it also underlines the point that with the internet and social media that we have available to us today, we’re operating in a blizzard of propaganda, probably unprecedented, that makes our work even harder, because we don’t know who to believe or what to believe. And this makes the imperative for critical thinking even more important. I believe that we need to think much more deeply and systematically about the causes of our existential predicament, which are the same as the causes of climate change, wars, unprecedented economic disparities resulting in a plethora of social ills, and we need to make strategic organizing and advocacy choices based on this analysis.

This will also help build a movement of movements that we will need to prevail on nuclear disarmament and many other pressing issues, the popular movement to that Noam was just talking about. I believe that nuclear weapons are not a single issue and cannot be understood as such. Nuclear weapons are ultimate instruments of power, power projection, militarism and war; they are the currency of global domination. There’s an inextricable link between nuclear and conventional weapons also, especially in light of today’s high-tech arms racing. Nuclear weapons cannot simply be plucked out of this equation. I believe that nuclear disarmament will not be possible unless accompanied by significant demilitarization and general disarmament, which is sometimes called strategic stability, and I’ll talk more about that.

At the height of the Cold War and the height of the anti-nuclear movement in 1982, as I was being arrested non-violently blocking the gates to the Livermore nuclear weapons lab, along with Dan Ellsberg and several thousand other people, I could not have dreamed that less than 10 years later the Soviet Union would disappear overnight and the Cold War would end. Like many others I think in such unlikely event I would have predicted that nuclear disarmament would quickly follow, but we were wrong. We didn’t understand the forces that were driving the nuclear arms race, and I’m not sure that we do now. When assessing the alarming lack of progress on nuclear disarmament, we sometimes forget the fundamentals haven’t really changed since the beginning of the nuclear age, and certainly not since the end of World War II.

In appealing to the 1982 United Nations Second Special on Disarmament the Hiroshima Mayor, Takashi Araki, said, “Hiroshima is not merely a witness of history, Hiroshima is an endless warning for the future of humankind. If Hiroshima is ever forgotten it is evident that the mistake will be repeated and bring human history to an end.” When the Cold War ended, it was almost as if the planet itself breathed a huge sigh of relief. People around the world hoped and believed that they had escaped the nuclear holocaust and largely put nuclear weapons out of their minds. During the 1980s, fear of nuclear war was by far the most visible issue of concern to the American public. Yet following the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons and especially US nuclear weapons, fell off the public’s radar screen. Nuclear arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament became increasingly isolated issues, experts in Washington DC redefined post-Cold War nuclear priorities almost solely in terms of securing Russian loose nukes and keeping nuclear materials out of the hands of rogue states and terrorists.

Meanwhile, deeply embedded in the military industrial complex, Pentagon planners and scientists at the nuclear weapons labs conjured up new justifications to sustain the nuclear weapons enterprise. Following the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Colin Powell, then Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared, “You’ve got to step aside from the context we’re been using for the past 40 years, that you base military planning against a specific threat. We no longer have the luxury of having a threat to plan for, what we planned for is that we’re a super power. We are the major player on the world’s stage with responsibilities and interests around the world.” And this sounds a lot like some of Ashton Carter’s recent rhetoric.

When looking back over things that I’ve written in the past, I found many similar themes recurring that I’d actually forgotten about, because things keep moving so fast. How many people remember Presidential Decision Directive 60 that was issued by President Clinton in 1997, nearly 10 years after the Cold War ended? This Presidential Directive reaffirmed the threatened first use of nuclear weapons as the cornerstone of US national security, and contemplated an expanding role for nuclear weapons to deter not only nuclear, but also chemical and biological weapons. The Bush doctrine of preventive war was a continuation and an expansion of programs and policies carried out by every US administration, Democrat and Republican, since President Harry Truman, a Democrat, authorized the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

You may remember the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, which I also had sort of put out of my mind. It stated that “nuclear attack options that vary in scale, scope and purpose will contemplate other military capabilities”. And it did something very important that described the transition to a new strategic triad, which provides an understanding of how the US planned to, and in fact is planning to carry out its global war-fighting strategy. In one corner of the new triad, the old strategic triad, the nuclear triad, consisting of submarine-based ballistic missiles, land-based based intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers was moved up to one corner and combined with conventional high tech weaponry. This category was named Offensive Strike Systems.

The other legs of the new triad were defenses and a revitalized defense infrastructure that will provide new capabilities in a timely fashion to meet emerging threats. This was a super-sized infrastructure to serve as both the nuclear and the conventional weapon systems, the warheads and the delivery systems. And these were all bound together by enhanced command and control and intelligent systems. And these three legs of the new strategic triad were designed and are designed to work together to enable the United States project overwhelming military force. And in this context you can understand that, so-called defenses actually work like shields with the swords of offensive weapons, and protect the US forward deployments and freedom of action around the world. In particular, the missile defense systems, which we’re hearing a little bit about now as provocations to Russia and China, or as perceived provocations to Russia and China, were describe by Admiral Ramdas, the former head of India’s Navy, who’s describe US theater missile defenses as “a net thrown over the globe”.

Now, in 2010, the Obama Nuclear Posture Review was released, exactly one year and one day after the Prague speech. And despite hopes for dramatic change, of course, this Nuclear Posture Review revealed no substantial changes in US nuclear force structure, maintained all three legs of the strategic triad, only marginally reduced the role of nuclear weapons in US national security policy, stating, “These nuclear forces will continue to play an essential role in deterring potential adversaries and reassuring allies and partners around the world”. The NPR explicitly rejected reducing the high alert status of intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic submarines, concluding that, “The current alert posture of US strategic forces with heavy bombers off full-time alert, nearly all ICBMs on alert and a significant number of sea-launched ballistic missiles at sea at any given time should be maintained for the present”.

It also reaffirmed the policy of extended deterrence and retains the capability to forward deploy US nuclear weapons on tactical fighter bombers and heavy bombers, including at NATO bases in Europe, while proceeding with the modification of the B61 bomb carried on those planes. That was before the 2011 turnaround that Professor Chomsky talked about. I don’t have time to really go into it, but I want to talk about in greater specificity about the linkage between nuclear and high tech conventional offensive and defensive weapons, again, this concept called strategic stability.

Okay, I’ll move quickly. The US government as, I think everyone here knows, is officially committed to modernizing its nuclear bombs and warheads, delivery systems, the laboratories and plants that design and maintain them, and US policy and budget documents for many years now manifest an intent to keep thousands of US nuclear weapons in active service for the foreseeable future, and the capacity to bring stored weapons into service, and to design and manufacture new weapons should they be desired. Russia’s nuclear weapons programs and policies closely mirror those of the US, and are also reflected in the other nuclear weapons possessing states. But perhaps and even more dangerous than nuclear warhead modifications are upgrades for delivery systems for conventional weapons.

In 2008, General Kevin Chilton, head of the US Strategic Command, declared, “We have a Prompt Global Strike delivery capability on alert today, but is configured only with nuclear weapons, which limits the options available to the President and may in some cases reduce the credibility of our deterrents.” And along these lines the Pentagon began development of a new generation of long-range delivery systems, capable of carrying conventional warheads. The US is hoping to take advantage of continuing advances in space technologies and improvements in guidance technologies to place non-nuclear as well nuclear payloads on long-range missiles. The goal is to achieve “Prompt Global Strike, the ability to hit targets anywhere on earth in an hour or else and to hit them accurately enough so that non-nuclear payloads can destroy the target”. This is one of many ways in which the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons has been blurred.

In addition, the US is researching new kinds of weapons, including gliding, maneuvering reentry vehicles that could carry a variety of weapons and hypersonic weapons, intended to attack targets many times faster than the speed of sound, before a defender could react. Russia actually is believed to be testing these as a possible way to attack missile defense systems. Tests of hypersonic vehicles that are part of this research and development effort have been conducted in recent years at Vandenberg Air Force Base, not so far from here, where the US Air Force routinely conducts tests of unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. The possibility that Prompt Global Strike Program might succeed, although there are many technical obstacles, impedes nuclear disarmament efforts and is helping to accelerate a new round of arms racing.

Russian security analysts have been raising concerns for years that these conventional US alternatives to nuclear weapons might pose an obstacle to US/Russian nuclear arms control negotiations. In 2009, Alexei Arbatov at the Carnegie Moscow Center observed, “There are very few countries that are afraid of American nuclear weapons. But there are many countries which are afraid of American conventional weapons. In particular, nuclear weapon states like China and Russia are primarily concerned about growing American conventional, precision-guided long-range capability.” Paradoxically, Robert Einhorn, a special advisor for non-proliferation and arms control to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, remarked in 2007, “We should be putting far more effort into developing more effective conventional weapons. It’s hard to imagine a president using nuclear weapons in almost any circumstance, but no one doubts our willingness to use conventional weapons.” And this statement, unfortunately, is all too true. In 2015, the US spent almost $600 billion on its military, more than twice as much as China and Russia combined, and more than one third of the world’s countries combined.

An even more overpowering conventional US military threat surely is not the desired outcome of the nuclear disarmament process. How will potential adversaries with fewer economic resources respond? Won’t they have an incentive to maintain or acquire nuclear weapons to counter US conventional superiority? And won’t that in turn entrench US determination to retain and modernize its own nuclear arsenal, thus rendering the goal of nuclear disarmament nearly impossible? This conundrum poses one of the biggest challenges to the elimination of nuclear weapons.

I wanted to actually just talk about the political machinations around the START II Treaty and the ratification process, because it’s an example of how nuclear disarmament treaties have been turned on their heads and actually have become anti-disarmament treaties. This was true with the comprehensive test ban process. But the political conditions attached to Senate ratification in the US, and mirrored by Russia, effectively did turn START into an anti-disarmament measure. And this was stated in so many words by Senator Bob Corker, a Republican Senator from Tennessee whose state is home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, site of the proposed multi-billion dollar uranium processing facility.

He said, “I am proud that as result of ratification we have been successful in securing commitments from the administration on modernization of our nuclear arsenal and support of our missile defense programs, two things that would not have happened otherwise. In fact, thanks in part to the contributions of my staff and I have been able to make, the new START Treaty could easily be called, ‘The Nuclear Modernization and Missile Defense Act of 2010′”. And one of the problems that we face as anti-nuclear advocates is that this critique was kept out of the debate in Washington by the arms control groups who were trying to be realistic. So we’ve seen what the outcome of that has been. Those conditions, by the way, were essentially mirrored by the Russian Duma. And in my personal opinion, we’re worse off with that treaty, because of the process then we would be if it hadn’t happened in the first place.

So in conclusion, the concept of security, I think, needs to be re-framed and redefined at every level of society and government, with a premium on universal, human and ecological security, a return to multilateralism, and a commitment to cooperative, non-violent means of conflict resolution. Nuclear disarmament should serve as the leading edge of a global trend towards general and complete disarmament, and redirection of military expenditures to meet human needs and protect the environment. Progress towards a global society that is more fair, peaceful and ecologically sustainable is inter-dependent. We are unlikely to get far on any of these objectives without progress on all. And I want to emphasize that these are not preconditions for disarmament, but together with disarmament, are preconditions for human survival. In our relationships with both each other and the planet, we are now up against the hard choice that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., warned us about, non-violence or non-existence.

October 24, 2016