Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: terrorism

  • Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Examining the Policies of Bush and Kerry

    Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Examining the Policies of Bush and Kerry

    President Bush and Senator Kerry agree that nuclear proliferation is the top national security threat facing the United States . Given this agreement, it is worth examining the solutions each candidate is offering to solve the problem.

    The issue of Russian “loose nukes” has been at the forefront of the non-proliferation agenda since the end of the Cold War. A January 2001 Report Card on the Department of Energy’s Nonproliferation Programs with Russia concluded: “The most urgent, unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction of weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists or hostile nation states and used against American troops abroad or citizens at home.” This bipartisan report called for the US to develop and implement a ten-year $30 billion plan to bring Russian nuclear weapons and materials under control. The Bush administration has been spending at a rate of less than half this amount and has made little progress. Senator Kerry calls for completing the task in a four-year period.

    In Northeast Asia, North Korea has withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and claims to have nuclear weapons. Under the Bush administration, the US has been engaged in periodic six-party talks on security issues with North Korea , South Korea , Japan , China and Russia . These talks have made little progress. By initiating its war against Iraq on the basis of purported weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration has provided incentive to countries such as North Korea to develop nuclear deterrent forces against US attack. Adding to this, Bush has labeled North Korea as part of his “axis of evil” and referred to its leader as a “pygmy.” Senator Kerry has indicated that he would intensify the process of stopping North Korean nuclear proliferation by engaging in bilateral talks, as well as six-party talks, with the leaders of North Korea on the full range of issues of concern.

    In the Middle East, the Bush administration has enraged Arab populations by initiating its war against Iraq on false pretenses. Further, President Bush branded both Iraq and Iran as part of his “axis of evil.” The administration has put pressure on Iran to cease its uranium enrichment, which Iran claims is for peaceful purposes, but thus far with little effect. The US is widely viewed in the region as hypocritical for failing to apply equal pressure on Israel to dismantle its nuclear arsenal. Senator Kerry has set forth a plan to create a consortium to supply Iran with the fuel it needs for peaceful purposes with the agreement that Iran would return the spent fuel to the consortium, thus eliminating the threat that this material would be converted to use for weapons.

    In South Asia, both India and Pakistan have developed nuclear weapons capabilities. Following the nuclear tests by both countries in 1998, the US placed sanctions on them. However, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has largely removed the sanctions and has developed close ties with Pakistan . President Bush claims to have “busted” the network of A. Q. Khan that was supplying nuclear materials and technology around the world. In fact, Khan was pardoned by Pakistani President Musharraf and has never been questioned by US intelligence agents. Senator Kerry has promised to work multinationally to toughen export controls and strengthen law enforcement and intelligence sharing to prevent such non-proliferation breaches in the future. Further, he has called for working through the United Nations to make trade in nuclear and other technologies of mass destruction an international crime.

    The United States has itself been engaged in a program to create new and more usable nuclear weapons, weapons for specific purposes such as “bunker busting,” and smaller nuclear weapons that are about one-third the size of the Hiroshima bomb. The Bush administration has supported this program, while Senator Kerry has said that he would end it because seeking to create new nuclear weapons sets the wrong example when we are trying to convince other nations not to develop nuclear arsenals.

    Both candidates recognize the dangers of nuclear proliferation and of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. The Bush administration has set up the Proliferation Security Initiative that allows for boarding ships at sea to inspect for nuclear materials. Senator Kerry has pointed out that this initiative allows for inspecting on short notice only 15 percent of the 50,000 large cargo ships at sea and has less than 20 full participants. He plans a comprehensive approach that would not rely only on “coalitions of the willing,” but would create a broad international framework for preventing nuclear proliferation. Senator Kerry would also appoint a Presidential Coordinator to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism and make the issue a cabinet-level priority.

    In evaluating the candidates in regard to their willingness and ability to deal with the threats of nuclear proliferation, we should consider also the commitments made in 2000 by the parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including the US , to achieving 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament. These steps include ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the strengthening of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the creation of a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, making nuclear disarmament irreversible, and an unequivocal undertaking to achieve the total elimination of nuclear arsenals. These steps are important not only because they are international obligations, but because the future of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the non-proliferation regime in general rests upon the nuclear weapons states as well as the non-nuclear weapons states fulfilling their obligations.

    In nearly all respects President Bush has failed to meet these obligations. He has opposed ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, opposed verification of a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, made nuclear disarmament entirely reversible under the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty and, rather than demonstrating leadership toward the elimination of nuclear arsenals, has sought to create new nuclear weapons.

    It is difficult to imagine any US president achieving so dismal a record on so critical an issue. It is time for presidential leadership that will restore US credibility in the world and not betray the national security interests of the American people.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and co-author of Nuclear Weapons and the World Court.

  • 21st Annual Evening for Peace: Broadcasting Peace: A Conversation with Walter Cronkite

    The following is a transcript of the live interview conducted by Sam Donaldson with Walter Cronkite, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2004 Distinguished Peace Leader.

    Sam Donaldson with Walter Cronkite at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 21st Evening for Peace

    Donaldson: I must tell you that for many of us, without meaning any disrespect to the people now doing the CBS Evening News, it will always be the Cronkite Show. Here was the leader with a bunch of correspondents that couldn’t be touched, I know because we tried to compete against him, and Robert Pierpoint who was here earlier tonight. He was one of the great horsemen that Walter depended upon on that show. Let’s get down to business. I hear people say that this is the most important election of our lifetime. Is it? What do you make of its importance?

    Cronkite: I think it’s more important than our lifetime. I would think that this election is perhaps the most important in the last century, going back to perhaps the Civil War.

    Donaldson: You have to explain that. Why?

    Cronkite: I expect to. Why is because we have taken a 180 degree turn in our policy and foreign policy. We have adopted this incredible decision as announced by the president in his announcement of our policy future, which is a compulsory thing they have to do every couple of years. And he announced the system of preemption. With this preemption and the unilateral nature of it, as practiced by the administration very shortly thereafter, we have established a foreign policy that is unsustainable in a world that we hope will be governed by peace rather than war. As a consequence, we are on a very, very dangerous course for not only the United States but for civilization. The suggestion that one should take preemptive action if that nation believes that it is threatened by a neighbor, for heaven’s sakes, that may sound possible to sustain if you are a dominant nation such as the United States . But what do you do if you translate that same program to one of the African neighbor nations, to one of the Middle Eastern neighbor nations? As soon as you sense that you are endangered by your neighbor, you are therefore entitled, because the United States has established this wonderful concept, you are therefore entitled to go to war. What kind of a future is that for the world? It is incredibly impossible to sustain that kind of a foreign policy around the world among all the nations of the world that are entitled because of our leadership, to say, well, the United States does it, why can’t we do it?

    Donaldson: Well, the president says it’s us against them, that we live in a dangerous world, we must defend ourselves and we’re gonna divide the world up between those who support our policy and those who don’t. Those who support us will be our allies, and those who don’t will pay the piper.

    Cronkite: I’d say that’s one hell of a way to behave to those who believe with us, to tell them that either you’re with us or against us – either you accept what we say we will do or you cannot be part of the game. That hardly seems to me to be a foreign policy that is very practical of long endurance. It may suffice for a moment, but it’s not going to live very long in the history of our universe.

    Donaldson: Walter, do you think we are safer or less safe because our strike against Iraq ?

    Cronkite: Far less safe.

    Donaldson: Why?

    Cronkite: Because as we read every day in the press and occasionally hear on television-

    Donaldson: We’ll get to that.

    Cronkite: I thought you would, so I thought I’d preempt you. The problem quite clearly is that we have excited the Arab world, the Muslim world, to take up arms against us, far beyond what was being done by Al-Qaeda and others, of the terrorist groups. We have created a new body of importance in the terrorist groups who are coalescing around the Iraqi situation.

    Donaldson: The president said in that famous State of the Union message in which he described the axis of evil that the United States would not stand idly by and permit nations to acquire weapons of mass destruction that threaten us, which suggests that maybe if the president maintains political power that we will then have to move against Iran. Maybe North Korea . What do you think?

    Walter Cronkite at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 21st Evening for Peace

    Cronkite: That is precisely the course that he has set. Actually, the truth of the matter is we do not have the military strength to take on Iran and North Korea simultaneously or even separately at this point. We have committed nearly all of the forces we have available to this enterprise in Iraq . For heaven’s sakes. This argument about a draft. That this administration would dare to assert that there is no draft in their thinking. That’s got to be an absolutely straight out lie, one of many that they have made. We cannot continue the Iraq war as it is quite clearly going to continue for quite a while and expect to be prepared to move on Iran , to move on North Korea , to even have this vaunted security and safety at home without a draft. We don’t have that kind of power in our military today. And we are being lied to when we are being told there is no thought of a draft in the Pentagon.

    Donaldson: Well, it won’t be the first time we’ve been lied to by various presidents, now, Walter. It’s nothing new.

    Cronkite: Well, yes, but do we really have time to go into that?

    Donaldson: No. I’m not asking for a litany of lies. All right. How could the administration have so badly miscalculated after we got to Baghdad in less than three and a half weeks, militarily, from the standpoint of trying to then move forward to do something in Iraq that would bring it out all right? How come they didn’t know anything about the Middle East ?

    Cronkite: I wish the hell I knew the answer to that. That’s one of the questions we have every right to ask and you’re just the guy to ask it.

    Donaldson: Well, it’s easy to ask questions. But a lot of people say, fine, if they thought they wanted to do this, they did not prepare. I’m borrowing a Kerry line, I suppose. Or maybe he stole it from you. They did not prepare for the peace. They had no plan after that. They made miscalculations, did they not? And so at the point we’re at now, answer the fundamental question: We’re hip deep in the big muddy once again, as Lyndon Johnson’s time showed: how do we get out?

    Cronkite: The program that I have proposed through the Democrats-I say that with, I hope everybody understands, my tongue in my cheek. I’m working both sides. My tongue is in both cheeks. I wrote a column about it and it didn’t get printed anywhere, but it was a great column. I proposed what I would like to hear the Democratic candidate say. My proposal was that he would say that one of the first steps he would take upon moving into the Oval Office, besides changing the furniture around a bit, would be to organize a panel of retired generals who have come out during the various discussions of the Iraq War against what has been going on in Iraq, the entire lack of planning, inadequate number of troops, all of the things that these retired generals have come on television to report on. He would organize this panel and would tell them he wanted their plan for us to get out of Iraq with honor, to get our troops home and to have them do this within the next six months. I can imagine, I would say if I were the candidate, what would happen in America as those boys and girls came home. Every Broadway, every Main Street would be festooned with American flags. We would welcome those boys and girls back in every town and community of America . They would be honored as they’ve never been honored before. But more than that, we’d be sure that everyone of those people would be entitled to an education that we would pay for to help pay them back for their service. Furthermore, we would supply a fund so that every professional person serving in the reserve, in the National Guard, who was called up and lost his practice in the law or dentistry or whatever would get financial help to restore that practice he had when he went away. Every businessman, every single small businessman who lost his business because he was called up and kept there longer than he should have been kept anyway, that individual would get financial help. I would put these people back on their feet because they’re entitled to it.

    But we would go further than that, of course. We would then begin to put together the codicil for peace that this nation would follow in the future. And that codicil for peace would be a vastly different thing than our present foreign policy. The very first thing we would do would be to reverse 180 degrees our attitude towards the United Nations. We would put our full force behind the United Nations. We would do everything we can to bring the United Nations into the position of power that it should have. We are going to have to someday in the attempt to make an international organization of this kind work. Our only real hope of establishing a lasting peace is that such an organization will work. That would mean the United Nations would have legislative power, judicial power and military power to say this is the road to peace and we will hold peace. Now that is going to require-I see your tongue moving toward your check.

    Donaldson: Towards my mouth, my lips.

    Cronkite: But let me say what that requires. I know what it requires and you know what it requires, and you’re about to hang me with it. What this requires is an understanding of the American people that we can only assure world peace through an international organization if we are willing to surrender some of our sovereignty.

    Donaldson: You’re right, Walter, you guessed my question. Both candidates, not just President Bush, but Senator Kerry, say in almost the same words, “I will never give another nation veto power over the security of the United States.” And the crowds cheer. So how are you going to convince the American people that we should in fact obey the rule of international law?

    Cronkite: As with almost everything else to be solved with our national being and for world peace, it’s going to require a lot of education. We begin with that. We’ve got to improve our educational system to the degree that we have a literate society to which you can appeal with a reasonable argument rather than the passion of the moment or the passion of the past that has to be preserved. That won’t work. We have to have a revolutionary change. You know, Tom Jefferson, old Tom said at one time that the nation that expects to be ignorant and free, expects what never can and never will be. We are on the precipice of being so ignorant that we cannot function well as a democracy.

    Donaldson: And that is a terrific segue to our business. We have distinguished members of the educational community here with great universities and all that. But our business, the news business, tap into it. Are we helping in this process that you describe today?

    Cronkite: No. We’re not participating in it at all.

    Donaldson: What happened to us?

    Cronkite: Well, what happened was cable. Not actually what the cable people are doing, but the fact that there is such a profusion today of various cable channels and cable stations that they have drastically reduced the audience for the traditional networks, that is, the old timers NBC, ABC, CBS. They have so reduced their income that they do not dare to do anything except the cheapest kind of entertainment programming. And they will not give an adequate amount of time or consideration in any other way to informing the American people of the problems of our time. They’re not helping to educate the people in any way. Now, that is in parallel, if you will, with the failure of our educational system. We have now wasted so much money with cutting the tax rates of the rich in this country that we do not have enough money left to be sure that no child is left behind. We’ve got so many children left behind today, it’s unbelievable. We’re not able to build the schoolhouses that are needed, but most of all we’re not able to pay our teachers what they deserve. These are the people we have employed to raise this educational level of the American people to the degree that we do not fall to Thomas Jefferson’s forecast; that we are an intelligent people that can understand the issues of the day and vote accordingly. We are in a position today that we cannot do that job. We literally cannot pay teachers what they’re worth. Now, where do we go from here? I hope you’re not going to ask me the next question, where do we go from here?

    Donaldson: Where do we go from here, Walter? Where do we go from here, Walter? Answer the question!

    Cronkite: Well, God knows. And unfortunately, since only God knows, that means only Bush knows.

    Donaldson: Remember this. Someone once said, God takes care of fools, drunks and the United States of America .

    Cronkite: And perhaps the Democratic party.

    Donaldson: Well, let’s cover that point. You wrote earlier this year in a column about the political campaign, and you said religion ought not to be an issue in the political campaign.

    Cronkite: Absolutely.

    Donaldson: But it is.

    Cronkite: Of course it is. It’s being exploited very successfully, I’m afraid, by the Republican party, and the group of evangelicals who have helped finance this effort to make religion an issue in the campaign, in the election.

    Donaldson: You don’t think God favors one party over the other, that God gets into the tax code? Maybe he has an exemption there, who know?

    Cronkite: I used to think that God took part in contests at one time or another, until the Boston team won a couple of nights ago.

    Sam Donaldson at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 21st Evening for Peace

    Donaldson: David Krieger said that our job is to tell the truth, bring the truth to people. But when we attempt to do that by fact checking ads, by fact checking what candidates say, we’re accused of being partisan, we’re accused of getting into the contest. What do you think our job is? How should we handle a political contest like what’s going on today?

    Cronkite: I think you’ll agree with me almost immediately. I dodge the question in a sense. We are never going to be able to do it unless the networks, and I’m talking about our traditional networks again, give us enough time to devote to information transmission to the people. Those half-hour evening news programs, as you know only too well, are vastly inadequate. After the commercials, the lead-ins, the lead-outs and all that, we’ve got something like 16 or 17 minutes at the most. We’ve got one of the most complicated nations in the world with our vast numbers of special interests across our broad nation. We are presumably a great leader of a world that is incredibly complex today, more than probably any time in recent history at any rate. And to think that we can tell just the essentials that happen in that world, that domestic world, that international world, in 16 minutes is ridiculous. We can’t do it. Now then, you and I for all of our careers with our networks have hoped for prime time. We are in this mixed time, evening time from 6:00 to 6:30. We all wished for years for prime time in which to do news or documentaries. We finally got it three or four years ago. So what do we do with these magazine shows? Sex, crime, the oddball events of the world. Nothing serious in those programs. What would happen if our networks would devote those magazine prime time magazine hours that they do to instant documentaries? Suppose that you have got the headlines at 6:30 and you came up with 60 Minutes Wednesday night for an hour and at that time, by golly, you saw a documentary and a panel of experts and so forth that would explore the problem that we revealed at 6:30. We would advise this nation, we would educate this nation in a manner in which it has never been educated before. We would use television the way people dreamed that television would be used when we first had the tubes on the market.

    Donaldson: I’m with you, Walter, but you know what would happen is the bottom line network bosses, the people who own us now, would say, “We can’t put that on because we won’t get a mass audience. Someone over here has gotten hold of the Paris Hilton tape and put it on and that’s where all the eyeballs are.”

    Cronkite: That’s exactly what they’d say.

    Donaldson: That’s exactly what they are saying.

    Cronkite: Not only would they say it, they’d do it.

    Donaldson: But you’re talking about the evening news. I remember where in the fall of 1972, you did two long Watergate stories two nights in a row, 7, 8, 9 minutes apiece. That doesn’t happen anymore. Why not?

    Cronkite: Well, that gets into a more difficult problem. I don’t know the why not because it could be done. We did those two programs, one on Friday night and one on Monday night and, actually, they were even longer than 6 or 7 minutes each. They were 17 minutes, one of them, the first one, Friday night. This was my concept. This was just before the election of that year and Watergate had been in all the headlines for three or four months and then it had suddenly died out because that’s the way stories work for the press. We had told all of it. The Washington Post team had not come up with any new revelations. Deep Throat, if there was one (I won’t start that argument), hadn’t come up with anything. As a consequence, as things work in the press, the story moved from the front page to page 3 to page 7 to page 9 to the comic page with a two liner, and I was determined that we were going to remind the American people of the Watergate story before we went to the polls a couple of months later. So we put together this review of Watergate and we went deep into the documentary type stuff. We put together and made a pretty good piece out of it. The problem was, of course, that we put it out on a Friday and practically before we were off the air, the White House – the group who had done all of this, Nixon’s group – was on the phone to Bill Paley, the chairman and owner of CBS, and was demanding that we abandon the Monday piece and, a matter of fact, they wanted a special done to correct the mistakes we had made in the piece we had done. Paley, of course, panicked, I would say, for the moment and called Dick Salant, the head of CBS News who was a brilliant man.

    Donaldson: Lawyer, good lawyer.

    Cronkite: Oh, terrific, terrific. He had to listen to Paley, of course, and Paley was saying you have to do something about this, the White House is on us, it’s very difficult, you can’t do that Monday piece. Salant was saying, well, I’ll work on it, I’ll work on it. Meanwhile Frank Stanton was calling and others were calling. The pressure was on. Salant, being as brilliant as he was, when he came to us, he came to us from the counsel’s office at CBS. Eric Severeid and all of us practically were going to quit because we thought that the management was sending in this lawyer who was going to suppress us and only be the spokesman for management. He turned out to be the greatest journalist I’d ever known in his sense of honesty, integrity and telling the full story regardless of where the chips fell. He was a tremendous man.

    Donaldson: So even though you had to cut it down, you did run the second piece?

    Cronkite: What happened was that Salant was smart enough to compromise and he called Paley and he said we’ve taken care of it, Mr. Paley. We’re gonna cut the length of the piece on Monday. Well, we did. We cut a few minutes out of a long piece, but Paley was satisfied with that and was able to answer the White House by saying, “We’re cutting it down on Monday.” That didn’t please the White House, of course. They kept insisting that we had to cancel it. But Paley stood firm on that one.

    Donaldson: I just remember that. Walter, you could spend all evening doing it, but very quickly, handicap the next nine days and if you care to make a predication about who’s going to win, make it.

    Cronkite: I really am not prepared to. I don’t know. I think it’s that close. I can’t remember an election in which I didn’t think I could call it in advance until this year.

    Donaldson: Why is it this close?

    Cronkite: I think it’s this close because there is a huge body of people who would wear the “Anybody but Bush” pin who, at the same time, are not intrigued by Kerry. I don’t think he has made the impression that he needs to make to assure a victory. He’s managed in these three debates to bring himself back to even, almost even, but not overwhelmingly in the lead. I have been disappointed myself in his candidacy. You know, you and I made a lot of comments. I remember some of yours and if I don’t remember them, I’m making them up anyway.

    Donaldson: I’ve made a lot of dumb predictions, if that’s what you mean.

    Cronkite: Not predictions, but we made fun of the fact that we ourselves were talking about charisma being a feature of presidential elections since television came in, that television had changed the whole balance of election campaigning because it injected this feature of charisma.

    Donaldson: Well, it has, hasn’t it?

    Cronkite: It has. And that’s what I was going to say, that we have to invoke that name, that charisma identification in the case of the Democratic candidate. He does not have charisma. That is a difficult thing to overcome and meanwhile, without the charisma that he needs, he has, I think, not done a very good job of campaigning. It took him too long to get away from the litany of mistakes that this administration has made and get down to the program that he himself would substitute. I think that’s what people want to hear. What would he do? And we really still haven’t gotten a very clear picture of the program with which he would come in to the White House.

    Donaldson: But we know the President’s program. Is it a case of better the devil we know than the devil we don’t know, for some people? We know what George W. Bush will do. More of the same.

    Cronkite: I know and I find it hard to believe that there’s anybody that would vote for that.

    Donaldson: Half the country . And with that, would you do something for us that I think everyone in the room would love to have you do one more time. Will you sign off! With your famous sign off!

    Cronkite: And that’s the way it is, Saturday, October 23, 2004. Goodnight.

  • Ending the Nuclear Weapons Threat to Humanity: New Thinking and Effective Campaigns are Needed

    Ending the Nuclear Weapons Threat to Humanity: New Thinking and Effective Campaigns are Needed

    We need new thinking and effective campaigns if we are to succeed in quelling the growing nuclear dangers in the world. The existing nuclear weapons states are failing to fulfill their obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament. North Korea has withdrawn from the NPT, and claims to have become a member of the nuclear weapons club. Iran is enriching uranium for what it claims are peaceful purposes. Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, recently reminded the world that there are forty countries capable of converting their “peaceful” nuclear programs to weapons programs.

    There are still well over 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world, perhaps closer to 30,000, mostly in the arsenals of the US and Russia. These two countries also continue to maintain over 2,000 nuclear weapons each on hair-trigger alert, creating the ongoing and increasing possibility of an accidental nuclear launch. Other nuclear weapons states include the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and likely North Korea .

    Throughout the world, terrorism is on the rise with groups such as Al Qaeda openly expressing a desire to obtain nuclear weapons. Should such a group succeed in this quest, they could not be deterred from using these weapons, since deterrence implies being able to locate the attacking party in order to retaliate. Thus, existing arsenals of thousands of nuclear weapons cannot deter a small group of terrorists from attacking the cities of the militarily most powerful states.

    The US attacked Iraq because of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, and has made threats of preemptive action to North Korea and Iran based on their nuclear arsenals. For geopolitical reasons, the US has turned a blind eye to Israel ‘s nuclear weapons and those of other allied nations, while attacking Iraq, a country that it falsely accused of having such weapons. The US has basically adopted a “do as I say, not as I do” strategy of nuclear arms control. Such a strategy, based on clear double standards, is extremely dangerous and destined to fail.

    The world is walking a dangerous tightrope, while facing harsh prospects of potential nuclear disaster. The only way to prevent a nuclear 9/11 is to dramatically reduce the nuclear weapons, technologies and materials in the world and to bring the remaining ones under international control. This will require US leadership as the world’s most powerful country. Without US leadership, the world will continue its flirtation with nuclear disaster, increasing the likelihood that the US itself could become the victim of its own double standards.

    Unfortunately, the US, under the Bush administration, has not only failed to show leadership to prevent nuclear terrorism and nuclear double standards, but has actively sought to improve its nuclear arsenal. It has failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and is moving toward lowering the time needed to resume nuclear testing. It has been allocating funds to research “bunker busting” nuclear weapons and “mini-nukes.” And it has forged ahead with deployment of untested missile defense systems that have caused Russia and China to make offensive improvements in their nuclear arsenals in order to maintain their deterrent capabilities.

    If we are to avert future nuclear catastrophes it is necessary to change the course of current nuclear policy. In order to do this, we need a new way of thinking about nuclear weapons that reflects the view that they undermine rather than enhance our security. This is the conclusion reached by General George Lee Butler, the former head of the US Strategic Command. General Butler was once in charge of all US strategic weapons. He stated, “Sadly, the Cold War lives on in the minds of men who cannot let go the fears, the beliefs, the enmities of the Nuclear Age. They cling to deterrence, clutch its tattered promise to their breast, shake it wistfully at bygone adversaries and balefully at new or imagined ones. They are gripped still by its awful willingness not simply to tempt the apocalypse but to prepare the way.”

    Nearly fifty years ago, Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of the 20th century, argued, “The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Shortly before Einstein’s death, he joined Bertrand Russell in issuing a short manifesto signed by themselves and nine other prominent scientists, including Joseph Rotblat , the one scientist who left the Manhattan Project when he realized that the Germans would not succeed in developing a nuclear weapon. The document, known simply as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, set forth the case that nuclear weapons make the abolition of war necessary. “Here, then, is the problem that we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war.”

    The Russell-Einstein Manifesto was Einstein’s final warning and plea to humanity. The manifesto urged that humanity has a choice: “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels?” The document went on to urge: “Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”

    To succeed in ending the nuclear weapons threat to humanity, ordinary people must engage in the issue and it must become a top priority issue. At present, most people are not engaged in this issue, or may even incorrectly believe that nuclear weapons provide prestige and enhance rather than undermine their security. What is needed is a massive, well-funded campaign of public education and advocacy in order to arouse ordinary people and officials everywhere to action.

    I will mention two encouraging campaigns that are in their early stages. The first is the Mayors for Peace Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons. 1 This campaign seeks to activate mayors around the world to engage their populations to pressure their national leaders to begin in 2005 negotiations on eliminating nuclear weapons, to complete these negotiations by 2010, and to eliminate all nuclear weapons by the year 2020. This campaign, led by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , holds promise, but at this point in time it remains dramatically under-funded. Nonetheless, it is moving forward with the expectation that more than 100 mayors and deputy mayors will state their case for nuclear disarmament at the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference at the United Nations. The Mayors for Peace Emergency Campaign is receiving support from Abolition 2000, which has created Abolition Now! to help further the Mayors Campaign. 2

    A second campaign now underway is called Turn the Tide. 3 It was created by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to focus on changing US nuclear policies. It is a campaign that reaches out to US citizens via the internet and urges them to communicate with their elected representatives to support actions set forth in their 13-point Campaign Statement:

    1. Stop all efforts to create dangerous new nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
    2. Maintain the current moratorium on nuclear testing and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
    3. Cancel plans to build new nuclear weapons production plants, and close and clean up the toxic contamination at existing plants.
    4. Establish and enforce a legally binding US commitment to No Use of nuclear weapons against any nation or group that does not have nuclear weapons.
    5. Establish and enforce a legally binding US commitment to No First Use of nuclear weapons against other nations possessing nuclear weapons.
    6. Cancel funding for and plans to deploy offensive missile “defense” systems which could ignite a dangerous arms race and offer no security against terrorist weapons of mass destruction.
    7. In order to significantly decrease the threat of accidental launch, together with Russia , take nuclear weapons off high-alert status and do away with the strategy of launch-on-warning.
    8. Together with Russia , implement permanent and verifiable dismantlement of nuclear weapons taken off deployed status through the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).
    9. Demonstrate to other countries US commitment to reducing its reliance on nuclear weapons by removing all US nuclear weapons from foreign soil.
    10. To prevent future proliferation or theft, create and maintain a global inventory of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons materials and place these weapons and materials under strict international safeguards.
    11. Initiate international negotiations to fulfill existing treaty obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for the phased and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons.
    12. Initiate a moratorium on new nuclear power reactors and gradually phase out existing ones, as these are a primarily means for the proliferation of nuclear materials, technology and weapons; simultaneously establish an International Sustainable Energy Agency to support the development of clean, safe renewable energy.
    13. Redirect funding from nuclear weapons programs to dismantling nuclear weapons, safeguarding nuclear materials, cleaning up the toxic legacy of the Nuclear Age and meeting more pressing social needs such as education, health care and social services.

    There is no magic formula for accomplishing these goals or, for that matter, for changing the world in any direction. Change often occurs one person at a time. The problem with the nuclear weapons threat is that there may not be time for such a progression of involvement. People must immediately change their thinking and they must engage in this issue as if their very lives depended upon it because they do. Many people think that this will probably not happen until another major city has been destroyed by a nuclear weapon. It would be a terrible failure of imagination if the destruction of a city is required to move us to take significant action to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity.

    We know that the danger is lurking in the dark recesses of our collective consciences. Why else would we give our tacit assent to nuclear weapons programs, even in our most prestigious universities where the next generation of leaders is being educated? We must bring the hidden fears and dangers of the Nuclear Age into the light and act with resolve to change the course of history, which sadly now seems to be racing toward inevitable future nuclear catastrophes, unless there is a real awakening.

    David Krieger is a founder and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort to abolish nuclear weapons.

    1 See http://www.mayorsforpeace.org
    2 See http://www.abolitionnow.org
    3 See https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com

  • The Real Problem on the Indian Sub-continent

    In May 1998, India stunned the world when it successfully conducted nuclear tests in Pokhran, a desert site in the western state of Rajasthan. The tests were reciprocated by its traditional rival, Pakistan , dramatically raising the stakes in the stand-off over Kashmir , one of the world’s longest-running feuds.

    Subsequently, in mid-1999, India fought a brief but bitter conflict with Pakistani-backed forces that had infiltrated Indian-controlled territory in the Kargil area close to the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir. The confrontation between the two countries, just over a year after the nuclear tests, confirmed that the nuclear status didn’t remove the danger of conflict between India and Pakistan; rather, it has increased the stakes if war is to ever occur. Both countries were in an advanced state of nuclear readiness during the entire period of the Kargil conflict. Never before can I remember the tensions within both countries being so high.

    Yet, in a statement in 2001, President Abdul Kalaam of India , continuing to promote and defend the further development of nuclear weapons, asked, “When was the last war with Pakistan? That both sides are nuclear capable has helped not engage in a big war.” 1 However, Kalaam blatantly ignored the fact that tensions escalated during the Kargil conflict due to the nuclearization of the sub-continent. With blinkers on, both President Musharraf of Pakistan and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India are pressing on to develop more advanced nuclear arsenals. Despite limited resources, in a region where there is chronic social and economic problems with hunger and disease rampant in every corner of each country, India and Pakistan continue to reiterate their commitments to develop and deploy nuclear weapons as part of their national security programs.

    But what is needed, right now more than ever, is a realistic consideration of the problems that lie in the internal sphere of each country. Socio-economic, socio-religious, sectarian, and caste conflict in several parts of the two countries are epidemic. The chaos in Karachi including several street riots, ethno-nationalist insurgencies in Assam and Nagaland in Northeast India continue to claim over a hundred lives every year and the recent Hindu-Muslim riots that killed over a thousand innocent people in the western state of Gujarat in India all point to the increasing threats within each country’s domestic sphere. Nuclear weapons are not the answer to these social problems. Furthermore, more than four million in both India and Pakistan live in abject poverty – that is more than half of the combined population of both countries. Mass unemployment and illiteracy are on the rise. The internal debt figures in India alone have more than tripled. There is a lack of basic needs such as clean drinking water and sanitation facilities. Infrastructure and the quality of education continue to rapidly diminish. There are rising number of suicides by farmers in the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Unbridled drug and arms trafficking in Pakistan are becoming more common and widespread. Spending inadequate financial resources on nuclear weapons is not the way out of these pressing socio-economic problems.

    Additionally, incidents of terrorism within both countries have also increased to include suicide attacks on not only the Indian military and para-military but also on their families. Recent bomb blasts in commercial areas in Karachi are proof that Pakistan isn’t immune from terrorism, well within its own borders, either. Nuclear weapons cannot offer a solution to these flagrant acts of terror. Moreover, there is an increasing criminalization and corruption of politics in India and Pakistan. The degradation of politics is starting to question the credibility of both countries. Nuclear weapons provide no real answer to this range of domestic issues, yet this lesson remains unlearned.

    What is needed from both countries right now is a commitment to the welfare of their populations and a firm plan for decreasing poverty, eradicating disease and death from hunger and starvation. Spending limited resources – financial or otherwise on developing a more complete range of nuclear weapons is not going to help the people of India, Pakistan or, for that matter, the people of Kashmir. Providing basic needs such as drinking water, safe infrastructure and hygienic sanitation facilities is what is urgently required. Increasing the quality of education, decreasing the level of illiteracy and paving the way for increasing youth employment are the needs of the hour. Both India and Pakistan have traditionally focused on threats on their borders. It is now time for each country to look inward and form a strong resolve to solve these deep rooted issues within each society.

    Archana Bharath an is a senior at the University of Michigan and was a Lena Chang Intern at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Summer 2004.

  • ‘Nuclear Terrorism’: Counting Down to the New Armageddon

    Nuclear Terrorism The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe by Graham Allison
    263 pp. Times Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $24.

    Terrorists are striving to acquire and then use nuclear weapons against the United States. Success, as defined by Osama bin Laden, would be four million dead Americans. Mounting evidence makes this much abundantly clear. Documents discovered in Afghanistan seem to reveal Al Qaeda’s detailed knowledge of nuclear weaponry, while intelligence confirms the terrorists’ attempts to acquire nuclear material on the black market.

    In reaction, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry are giving pride of place to catastrophic terrorism in their foreign policy platforms. Both proclaim it the nation’s No. 1 security challenge. Meanwhile, policy analysts have urgently recommended preventive measures in a flurry of reports, books, journal articles and Congressional testimony.

    Now the Harvard scholar Graham Allison is sounding his own warning in ”Nuclear Terrorism” — a well-written report for general readers on the threat and what it will take to reduce it. He addresses all the big questions: who could be planning an attack; how they might acquire and deliver the weapons; when they might launch the first assault. Allison touches on chemical and biological dangers, but he separates out the far more lethal nuclear threat for special attention. Nonnuclear radioactive (”dirty”) bombs and chemical or biological devices would kill in the thousands. A 10-kiloton nuclear bomb, delivered to Times Square by truck and then detonated, could kill up to one million New Yorkers.

    Some experts think a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons is already unstoppable. Allison disagrees — up to a point. He argues that prevention is still possible, and he gives the Bush administration some credit for several post-9/11 initiatives meant to tighten the security of nuclear weapons and material. However, he calls for far bolder measures, more money and forceful American leadership to improve what is at present rather lax international cooperation. His bottom line is blunt: anything less will make nuclear terrorism inevitable.

    Allison blames both the White House and the Congress for falling short of meeting the challenge. To take one example, since 9/11 the rate of funding has hardly changed for the Nunn-Lugar program, which was established to destroy or secure Russia’s enormous stockpile of fissile material and nuclear weapons. Much remains to be done. Of special concern is Russia’s large supply of suitcase-size nuclear bombs, which terrorists could smuggle into the United States in cargo containers or as airline baggage. The safeguards on these weapons are loose at best. (In 1997, Russia acknowledged that 84 of some 132 such weapons were missing.)

    At present, it will take 13 years, in Allison’s estimation, to secure Russia’s fissile material. Allison’s position, adopted by the Kerry campaign, is to spend whatever dollars are necessary to complete the job in four years, though achieving this objective would also require elimination of Congressionally imposed impediments to Nunn-Lugar and overcoming Russian resistance to intrusion into their facilities.

    We face many vulnerabilities — limited intelligence of the terrorists’ plans; poorly protected ports, borders and nuclear power plants. But the most urgent danger is that terrorists could acquire the fissile material with which to construct a nuclear weapon in a relatively short period of time. Russia presents the greatest problem; 90 percent of all existing fissile material outside the United States is stored within the former Soviet Union. Still, it’s not the only region we need to focus on. At least 32 countries possess weapons-grade fissile material.

    Allison would round up all fissile material and ban the creation of any more. This is a daunting task. Allison himself observes that there are some 200 locations around the world where nuclear weapons or fissile material could be acquired, and he pinpoints the most dangerous — Russia because of its huge supplies, shaky safeguards and extensive corruption; Pakistan because of its indiscriminate spreading of nuclear know-how and equipment; North Korea because of its history of selling missile systems and its apparent nuclear development program; and lastly, the research reactors (some 20-odd) with significant quantities of bomb-grade uranium located in developing countries.

    Allison’s other remedies — like imposing intrusive nuclear power plant inspections and sanctioning violators — may also prove difficult to implement in the real world of suspicious governments and corrupt officials. Because the United States is widely viewed with hostility these days, it may not be able to marshal the international support needed to shut down black markets or block the emergence of new nuclear weapons states. And then there is the question of money. Governments are reluctant to spend lavishly on prospective threats when tax-conscious citizens have not yet experienced any consequences.

    As a champion of the idea that nuclear terrorism is preventable, Allison emphasizes the elements of an offense — improved intelligence, tighter treaties, more transparency and intrusion. But a stronger homeland defense is also needed in case prevention by offense fails. And currently, homeland security is getting short shrift. For the 2005 budget, Congress has allotted $7.6 billion to improve the security of military bases but only $2.6 billion to protect the nation’s vital infrastructure. Within the Department of Defense, $10 billion is spent annually on missile defense, compared with only a few billion on all other counterproliferation programs.

    Homeland security becomes an even higher priority if one broadens one’s thinking about the potential damage from nonnuclear weapons to include more than simply the number who would die. Allison is less concerned with biological and chemical weapons and so-called dirty bombs because they kill in the thousands, not millions. But these unconventional arms can still cause mass disruption; a few anthrax incidents, after all, virtually shut down the Congress. The release of pathogens in a public space, or a biological attack on the food supply system, or a dirty bomb set off in a seaport could have enormous economic consequences. Large-scale government efforts are needed to minimize the danger of such attacks.

    What makes the job of prevention all the more difficult is that the threat of nuclear terrorism is growing at the same time as the need for nuclear-generated electricity. Allison points out that all signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty are permitted to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium to make fuel for peaceful power reactors, provided they declare what they are doing and submit to periodic inspections. In other words, states can come to the brink of nuclear weapons capability without explicitly violating the treaty. Then, without penalty, they can withdraw from the treaty and turn enriched uranium or plutonium into bombs.

    This is a loophole that both Iran and North Korea have sought to take advantage of. Allison and other experts argue that the United States should not discard the treaty but take the lead in fixing it. Their preferred solution is to distinguish ”fuel cycle” states from ”user states.” Those states where fuel-producing facilities already exist would provide enriched fuel to other states that wish to generate electricity from nuclear reactors. Coupling this with stiffer inspection provisions and penalties for withdrawal from the treaty would return the nonproliferation treaty to an important (if limited) role in countering proliferation.

    Nuclear dangers come in several forms, those that might be mounted by states and those from terrorists that cannot be contained by treaties alone, no matter how strict. Allison covers all the potential eventualities but might have been clearer in setting priorities, since resources are limited. Rogue states, capable of launching nuclear-tipped missiles, may ultimately be a threat. But the evidence indicates that the danger currently lies elsewhere. The urgent threat is nuclear terrorism, and funds need to be freed up to fill the considerable holes remaining in our counterterrorism programs.

    Allison’s comprehensive but accessible treatment of this vital subject is a major contribution to public understanding. In turn, an informed public could spur the government to complete the counterterrorism agenda. Only then, as Allison argues, will nuclear terror against America prove preventable.

    James Hoge is the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine.

  • Oyster Creek Plant Couldn’t Withstand Hit from Terrorist Aircraft

    Our political leaders need to resolve a serious predicament. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulation allows power plants like the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lacey to operate in a post-9/11 environment, although the plant’s reactor building is structurally inadequate to protect used nuclear fuel rods from a terrorist attack.

    Oyster Creek is neither structurally robust nor designed to resist an aircraft impact. This concern may also be present in 22 nuclear sites, some with more than one reactor building.

    The Nuclear Security Coalition, a consortium of independent nuclear watchdog groups, petitioned the NRC earlier this month to address structural vulnerabilities at plants with building designs similar to Oyster Creek’s. The magnitude of this issue and its implications for national security require congressional oversight; it should not be left only to the NRC review process.

    To the best of my knowledge, the current design-basis-threat orders issued by the NRC do not include a requirement to protect against an aircraft attack. In addition, the most recent evacuation plan for Oyster Creek does not consider an evacuation based on a suicide aircraft attack that can result in a Chernobyl-type event.

    The evacuation plan assumes an orderly egress from towns around the power plant, ignoring any road congestion resulting from panic outside the 10-mile plant radius. At last month’s public hearing on Oyster Creek’s evacuation plan, which estimated it would take seven to 10 hours to evacuate a 10-mile radius around the plant, someone asked how slow the response would have to be in order for the pl an to be deemed unacceptable. The panel’s response: There is no time limit. This is unacceptable.

    The impact of a large aircraft into the reactor building’s concrete floor near the spent fuel pool would cause catastrophic building failure. It would allow burning fuel to leak onto the floors below, damaging vital wiring and equipment needed to shut down the reactor. An aircraft impact would severely damage the spent fuel pool, causing a water leak that would uncover tons of radioactive fuel r ods. The result of a terrorist attack on Oyster Creek’s reactor building would exceed a Chernobyl meltdown event because there is more fuel in Oyster Creek’s fuel pool than there was in Chernobyl’s reactor.

    The impact from only one 1,000-pound object traveling at 300 mph and hitting the floor at an angle of 30 degrees above horizontal exceeds the strongest floor beam capacity by more than 500 percent. Impact on the weakest floor beam exceeds the beam’s capacity by 8,000 percent. The order of magnitude of these values clearly demonstrates Oyster Creek’s reactor building is an unacceptable safety risk.

    There are other important reasons the Oyster Creek plant should be shut down:

    “The federal government is not yet prepared to identify and prevent every terrorist plot, and the level of expertise required to stop terrorism may not occur for many years. Exelon, the owner of Oyster Creek, stated in public information newsletters that it relies on our president, the Armed Forces, the FBI and intelligence agencies to protect the plant from attack outside the fence of the plant . That isn’t good enough.

    “As described in the 9/11 Commission report, al-Qaida terrorists are meticulous in their planning and they are patient. The longer Oyster Creek is allowed to operate, the longer it is a target of opportunity.

    To succeed, they need only one aircraft, flying from an overseas airport, to disappear from FAA radar screens 15 minutes before impacting Oyster Creek’s reactor building. Timelines supplied by the 9/11 Commission report show our military fighters cannot take off, intercept and shoot down a plane within 15 minutes after terrorist actions are recognized by FAA personnel.

    “If Oyster Creek were shut down today, all fuel in the reactor vessel must be transferred to the spent fuel pool to “cool” a minimum of five years before it can be removed from the reactor building. Before any used radioactive fuel can be taken out of the reactor building’s fuel pool, Exelon must order, build and install additional dry storage vaults to store the material somewhere on site.

    “The longer Oyster Creek operates without an exact closing date, the more the work culture at the plant will degrade because of fear of losing a job. Exelon management will postpone equipment upgrades or choose “cheap fixes” if there is no assurance the company will recoup its investment for any plant repair or upgrade.

    I urge residents to support the immediate shutdown of Oyster Creek, to lobby town leaders to pass resolutions demanding the plant’s closure and to lobby congressional representatives to pass laws eliminating NRC regulations that place the interest of private companies over public safety.

    Stephen M. Lazorchak, Dover Township, is a consulting structural engineer and a former Oyster Creek employee.

    Originally published in the Asbury Park Press.

  • Better Spies Won’t Add Up to Better Foreign Policy

    America’s intelligence system failed to see terrorist threats coming from Al Qaeda that should have been evident before 9/11, and then, after 9/11, saw terrorist threats coming from Iraq that didn’t exist. A system that doesn’t warn of real threats and does warn of unreal ones is a broken system.

    A unanimous and bipartisan report of the commission established by Congress to investigate intelligence mistakes leading up to 9/11 is expected to conclude that when its report is released today. Meanwhile, a unanimous and bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee has discredited the CIA’s prewar assessments that Iraq possessed banned chemical and biological weapons and was seeking nuclear arms. Those assessments “either overstated or were not supported by the underlying intelligence,” according to the committee. The senators blamed “a series of failures” of intelligence, such as taking circumstantial evidence as definitive proof, ignoring contrary information and relying on discredited or dubious sources. The failures occurred because of “shoddy work,” faulty management, outmoded procedures, “groupthink” and a “flawed culture.”

    What to do? The White House, Congress and the Kerry campaign are all sorting through several proposals. One would create a Cabinet-level intelligence “czar” with more control over the nation’s sprawling $40-billion system for collecting and analyzing information about security threats. A second would do just the opposite – remove the CIA director from any control over other intelligence agencies and hence install a better system of checks and balances. A third proposal would fix the length of the director’s term at five to seven years, removing that position from the whim of politics. A fourth, and contrary, proposal would make the director more politically accountable to the president and Congress. Almost all the proposals would beef up American intelligence with more resources.

    Some of these ideas have merit, but they don’t respond to the core lesson we should have learned: When American foreign policy is based primarily on what our spy agencies say, we run huge risks of getting it disastrously wrong.

    The lesson isn’t new. American intelligence failed to foresee the split between China and the Soviet Union in 1960 and 1961 and thereafter never fully comprehended it – right up through Vietnam. Had U.S. policy been based on more direct diplomacy and less on covert operations we might have avoided that shameful and costly war.

    The CIA was also notoriously wrong when it told John F. Kennedy that its plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs “could not fail,” and it misread Soviet intentions before the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy managed to avoid a nuclear war only by instigating direct communication with Nikita Khrushchev.

    American intelligence wildly exaggerated Soviet defense capabilities in the 1980s, leading the U.S. to spend billions of dollars for no reason. President Reagan’s military buildup didn’t bring the Soviets to their knees; the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight.

    By all means, let’s have better intelligence. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that better intelligence is a substitute for better policy. This is especially true when the threat comes in the form of terrorism.

    Terrorism is a tactic. It is not itself our enemy. There is no finite number of terrorists in the world. At any given time, their number depends on how many people are driven by anger and hate to join their ranks. Hence, “smoking out,” imprisoning or killing terrorists, based on information supplied by our intelligence agencies, cannot be the prime means of preventing future terrorist attacks against us. It is more important to deal with the anger and hate. This means, among other things, restarting the Middle East peace process rather than, as President Bush has done, run away from it. It requires shoring up the economies of the Middle East, now suffering from dwindling direct investment from abroad because of the violence and uncertainty in the region. And it means strengthening the legitimacy of moderate Muslim leaders, instead of encouraging extremism – as the current administration’s policies have undoubtedly done.

    Equally fatuous is the notion that “preemptive war,” based on what our intelligence agencies say a potential foreign adversary is likely to do to us, will offer us protection. Terrorists aren’t dependent on a few rogue nations. They recruit and train in unstable parts of the world and can move their bases and camps easily, wherever governments are weak.

    The United States cannot control or police the world. Instead, we will have to depend on strong treaties and determined alliances to prevent illegal distribution of thousands of nuclear weapons already in existence in Russia, Pakistan, India and other nuclear powers, and of biological or chemical weapons capable of mass destruction. The administration’s “go-it-alone” diplomacy takes us in precisely the wrong direction. That the United States suffers from a failure of intelligence is indisputable. The calamitous state of our spy agencies is only one part of that failure.

    Robert B. Reich, a professor at Brandeis University , is the author most recently of “Reason” (2004, Alfred A. Knopf). He was secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. This is adapted from his article in the August issue of the American Prospect, of which he is a cofounder and national editor.

    Originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

  • Holes in America’s Defense

    In the war on terrorism, reliable intelligence is America’s first line of defense.

    The Senate intelligence committee report scheduled to be released today reveals in stark terms that in many key areas, the prewar intelligence regarding Iraq’s threat to the United States was neither reliable nor accurate. And the report tells only half of the story.

    What’s missing is the ways intelligence was used, misused, misinterpreted or ignored by administration policymakers in deciding to go to war and in making the case to the American people that war with Iraq was necessary. The intelligence committee leadership chose to defer these issues to a second report — one that will not be released until after the November elections.

    While failures by the CIA and other intelligence agencies are a significant part of the problem identified in this inquiry, the responsibility — and the blame — for the prewar intelligence debacle is much broader than described in today’s report.

    Senior decision makers throughout the executive branch must bear responsibility as well. They should have been more diligent in challenging the validity of analytical assumptions and the adequacy of intelligence collection and reporting related to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war. Instead, those analyses that conformed with pro-war views were routinely accepted and reports that did not conform to the pro-war model were largely ignored.

    Beyond Secretary of State Colin Powell’s examination of Iraqi intelligence in preparation for his February 2003 speech to the U.N. Security Council, there is little evidence that administration officials took the time to question any intelligence reports related to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

    CIA Director George Tenet is famously reported to have responded to President Bush’s question on the intelligence related to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by stating it was “a slam-dunk.” If this conversation did take place, it would have been incumbent upon the president’s senior advisers to demand to see and verify the underlying information that constituted the intelligence community’s “slam-dunk” case. Apparently that did not happen.

    The dissenting views regarding Iraq’s weapons programs in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, and the cautionary notes sounded by intelligence analysts at the Energy and State departments regarding nuclear matters, and the Air Force’s concern regarding Iraq’s unmanned aerial vehicle program all fell on willfully deaf ears. In contrast, the CIA’s analysis of terrorism, which found only weak connections between Iraq and al Qaeda, elicited considerable questioning from policymakers. Undoubtedly, this was because the administration’s decision to invade Iraq had already been made.

    Unfortunately, the administration’s conclusions drove the evidence instead of the other way around. The historic House and Senate joint intelligence inquiry into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks issued a report in December 2002 that recommended intelligence community reform. Within weeks, the Senate intelligence committee should have initiated an in-depth review of the structure and effectiveness of U.S. intelligence operations. Based on the results of such a review, it should then have initiated appropriate reforms. But more than 18 months later, no movement in that direction has occurred.

    So today we have a report that asks only some of the right questions and, at best, comes to only some of the right conclusions.

    The responsibility for problems related to prewar intelligence regarding Iraq should not be confined to intelligence analysts at the CIA but should extend to policymakers as well — particularly those at the Defense and State departments, the National Security Council, and the White House.

    Nor should the intelligence oversight committees of Congress, which are charged with scrutinizing intelligence analysis as part of their mandate, be excluded from criticism. It should be noted that the inquiry into prewar intelligence related to Iraq was initiated — and its scope expanded — in the face of significant resistance within the committee.

    The intelligence failures noted in today’s report add to the compelling need for Congress to undertake an unbiased and nonpartisan effort to strengthen our first line of defense. Time is not on our side.

    The writer is a Democratic senator from Illinois and a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

    Originally published in the Washington Post on July 9, 2004

  • A Safer Form of Deterrence and Security

    Proliferation Brief, Volume 7, Number 9

    The following are excerpts from remarks by Sam Nunn, co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, to the 2004 Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference, June 21, 2004 . To read the full text, and for video and audio of the remarks, visit www.ProliferationNews.org.

    Nuclear weapons nations must visibly and steadily reduce their reliance on nuclear weapons, and today they are not. The presidents of the United States and Russia should urgently undertake a new nuclear initiative and end their nations’ Cold War nuclear force postures by removing all nuclear weapons from hair-trigger status.

    Today, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized launch of a nuclear weapon is unacceptably high. We are running the irrational risk of an Armageddon of our own making. It is time to find a safer form of deterrence and security. If both the United States and Russia remove nuclear weapons from hair-trigger status, we can immediately eliminate the threat of rapid assured destruction and dramatically reduce the chance of an accidental, mistaken, or unauthorized launch. By taking this step, we will de-emphasize the role of nuclear weapons and make them less relevant.

    Keeping our nuclear weapons on hair trigger now increases the risk it was designed to reduce. President Bush knows this: In the summer of 2000, Presidential candidate George W. Bush said: “The Clinton-Gore administration has had over seven years to bring the U.S. force posture into the post-Cold War world. Instead, they remain locked in a Cold War mentality.”

    Later in the same speech, Mr. Bush said: “The United States should remove as many weapons as possible from high-alert, hair-trigger status – another unnecessary vestige of Cold War confrontation. Preparation for quick launch – within minutes after warning of an attack – was the rule during the era of superpower rivalry. But today, for two nations at peace, keeping so many weapons on high alert may create unacceptable risks of accidental or unauthorized launch. So, as president, I will ask for an assessment of what we can safely do to lower the alert status of our forces.”

    I have a proposal. Candidate Bush said we should remove “as many weapons as possible” from hair-trigger status. I propose that today “as many weapons as possible” should mean “all of them.” I urge the president of the United States and the president of Russia to order the military and defense officials of each country to present to the presidents, within six months, a set of options for removing all nuclear weapons of both countries from hair-trigger status. These officials should jointly:

    1. Determine what threats posed by the other side justify keeping any nuclear weapons on hair-trigger status.
    2. Determine what steps the other side must take to remove those threats and thus end the justification for hair-trigger status.
    3. Integrate these findings into proposed nuclear force postures that can assure the survivability of nuclear forces and end the need for quick launch capacity by either the U.S. or Russia.

    The presidents should then jointly adopt an approach and a timetable to get the job done and challenge other nuclear nations to follow this lead. If the defense establishments say they cannot, we need clear and convincing answers why not. The burden of proof must shift to those who insist on maintaining the hair-trigger posture in Russia and in the United States .

    Removing all nuclear weapons from hair trigger alert would move towards a nuclear posture where the decision to launch will be slower, more deliberate and far less likely. This is an essential first step in coming out from under the shadow of Mutual Assured Destruction toward an expanded doctrine of “Mutual Assured Safety” – an idea first advanced by former Defense Secretary Bill Perry – where both the U.S. and Russia would shift their nuclear weapons doctrine from one that “seeks security by threatening destruction” toward one that “seeks security by threat reduction.”

    There are a number of possible options for beginning the removal of all nuclear weapons from hair-trigger alert, including:

    1. Immediately ordering that the warheads from each side scheduled to be taken out under the 2002 Treaty of Moscow be taken off alert;
    2. Limiting the number of hair-trigger status warheads each side can deploy to several hundred;
    3. A reciprocal approach where the U.S. would remove all land-based missiles from hair-trigger alert, and Russia would do the same for its sea-based missiles.

    If the United States and Russia de-emphasize the role of nuclear weapons in our security, it would: immediately reduce the danger we pose to each other; give us more standing to encourage other nations to dismiss the nuclear option; and help build the international cooperation required to apply pressure on nations still seeking the nuclear option – nations like Iran and North Korea – and rally the world to take essential steps in preventing catastrophic terrorism

  • Nuclear Disarmament in a Time of Globalization

    Nuclear Disarmament in a Time of Globalization

    Keynote Address to the International Peace Research Association
    Sopron, Hungary

    Nuclear weapons occupy the highest rung on the ladder of military cowardice. They are long-distance devices of mass annihilation. They destroy indiscriminately – men, women and children. They draw no lines between soldiers and civilians. Those who make the weapons, who deploy them, who order their use and who press the buttons to send the missiles on their way have virtually no connection with the victims. They are simply human instruments in a chain of activities leading to massive devastation.

    The only arguably sane use of nuclear weapons is deterrence, and deterrence is largely an unproven theory. General George Lee Butler, a former commander-in-chief of the United States Strategic Command, who was in charge of all US nuclear weapons, has expressed his deep concerns about deterrence. “Nuclear deterrence,” he wrote, “was and remains a slippery intellectual construct that translates very poorly into the real world of spontaneous crises, inexplicable motivations, incomplete intelligence and fragile human relationships.” When one examines carefully the shortcomings of nuclear deterrence – its requirements of near-perfect communications, rational behavior in a time of crisis and willingness to commit mass murder – it is reasonable to conclude that reliance on nuclear deterrence for security is as insane as the threat to destroy civilization with nuclear weapons.

    In recent times, there has been a high degree of concern for nuclear terrorism, but nuclear terrorism has been practiced by the nuclear weapons states for decades. If terrorism is the threat or use of violence to achieve political goals – especially if it results in injuring or killing innocent people – then the nuclear weapons states are by definition terrorists. It is ironic that nuclear weapons are more potent tools in the hands of non-state actors than in the hands of powerful countries. Non-state actors in possession of a nuclear weapon would not be constrained by threats of retaliation. If terrorists are suicidal and cannot be located anyway, they certainly cannot be deterred from initiating a nuclear attack. In this sense, nuclear weapons are a great equalizer in the hands of extremists, and for this reason it is clear that the nuclear weapons states must do everything in their power to prevent these weapons, or the materials to make them, from falling into the hands of such extremists. The nuclear weapons states, however, appear more committed to maintaining their own nuclear arsenals than to assuring that nuclear weapons do not proliferate to non-state terrorist groups that could cause them irreparable harm.

    The only way to assure that nuclear weapons do not fall into the hands of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda is to take dramatic steps to reduce nuclear arsenals, dismantle the nuclear weapons, and place the remaining weapons and weapons-grade fissile materials under strict and effective international controls. The nuclear weapons states have not been bold in attempting to control the spread of nuclear weapons; they have acted as though time is on their side rather than on the side of those committed to waging war against them. The irony of this is that the nuclear weapons states, even with arsenals of nuclear weapons that number in the thousands, cannot deter a group such as Al Qaeda from using nuclear weapons against them. Their only hope is to prevent such groups from obtaining these most destructive of all weapons.

    Nuclearism and Globalization

    Nuclearism is one of the early manifestations of globalization. The United States went global with its nuclear threat almost from the day it first created nuclear weapons. Within three weeks of testing the first nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945 , the US used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki . It did so not only to destroy those cities and punish Japan , but also to send a message to the world and particularly to the Soviet Union . The message was, “This is what we are capable of doing and willing to do with our devastating new weapons; don’t cross us or we could use them on you.” It was a powerful message, and also an incentive to nuclear proliferation. It would take the Soviet Union just four years to test its first nuclear device.

    Very early in the Nuclear Age, the US began testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, including in the Trust Territories that had been assigned to it by the United Nations. In doing so, it continued the pre-war pattern of colonial dominance. Over the decades of the Nuclear Age, all of the nuclear weapons states have performed their nuclear testing on the lands of indigenous peoples, leaving the hazardous radioactive residue of testing in their backyards.

    Another dimension to the globalization of the nuclear threat was the development of inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), allowing for the destruction of nearly any place on the globe in 30 minutes or many places simultaneously. Even today, the US and Russia each still have some 6,000 deployed strategic nuclear weapons. Of these, some 2,250 each are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired in moments.

    The US and USSR , now Russia , as well as other nuclear weapons states, also appropriated the global commons for their nuclear forces. The nuclear weapons states continue to use the oceans, humankind’s great common heritage, for their submarine-launched nuclear forces. They agreed not to place nuclear weapons on the ocean floor, but with the availability of submarines, the ocean floor is clearly not a necessary or even useful option for them.

    Another aspect of the globalization of nuclearism is the spread of the US nuclear umbrella to its allies throughout the world, particularly in Europe , Asia and the Pacific. By extending its nuclear umbrella, the US has made many more countries complicit in relying upon nuclear weapons for their security, albeit reliant upon US nuclear weapons rather than developing their own.

    Nuclear Proliferation

    Nuclear proliferation is the flip-side of nuclear disarmament. It is also the globalization of nuclear arsenals. The existing nuclear weapons states have nearly all justified their development of nuclear weapons on the basis of nuclear deterrence. The US created nuclear weapons because it was concerned about deterring a possible Nazi nuclear bomb. The Soviet Union developed its nuclear arsenal to deter the US . The UK and France developed their nuclear arsenals to have independent deterrent forces against the Soviet Union . China sought to deter both the Soviet Union and the US . India sought to deter China , and Pakistan sought to deter India . North Korea would undoubtedly justify its nuclear weapons, if indeed it has them, as being necessary to deter the US . South Africa , which faced global hostility due to its policies of Apartheid, developed a nuclear arsenal to deter the US and Russia . It subsequently gave up its nuclear weapons. Israel , which continues to face both regional and global hostility, developed a nuclear arsenal to give it greater degrees of freedom in relation to the US and Russia and well as to deter hostilities by non-nuclear weapons states in its region.

    The US-led war against Iraq was justified initially on the basis that Iraq might be developing a nuclear arsenal and could potentially transfer nuclear weapons to terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda. Although it turned out not to be true that Iraq was developing a nuclear arsenal or even that it had links to Al Qaeda, this fear provided the justification for the first counter-proliferation war in history.

    US Double Standards Have Stimulated Proliferation

    From the outset of the Nuclear Age, the US has had a double standard when it comes to nuclear weapons. It has always relied on these weapons for its own security, yet sought to deny these weapons to other states except when it suited its purposes. In the

    late 1960s and early 1970s, Israel developed a nuclear arsenal. At best it can be said that the US turned a blind eye to this development. In sharp contrast to the US attacking and invading Iraq because it might have nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, the US , in line with its geopolitical strategies, has never even criticized Israel for its nuclear proliferation. This double standard has created an impetus to the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in the volatile Middle East .

    India ‘s position, for decades, was that it would not develop nuclear weapons if the nuclear weapons states fulfilled their obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to achieve nuclear disarmament. India made clear pronouncements that it was not willing to live without nuclear weapons in a world of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots”. Three years after the NPT was extended indefinitely in 1995 and there was still no significant breakthrough by the nuclear weapons states toward achieving nuclear disarmament, India conducted a series of nuclear weapons tests and announced that it was developing a nuclear arsenal. Pakistan followed immediately in doing the same.

    When Mr. Bush named Iraq , Iran and North Korea as part of an Axis of Evil, he put these states on notice that they were in the sights of the US . When he then went on to attack and invade Iraq to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein, Bush’s actions sent a message to Iran and North Korea, among others, that they had better consider developing a nuclear deterrent force against the US. They may have already had such thoughts before the Axis of Evil speech, but there can be no doubt that such provocative language, coupled with military action, can only act as a stimulant to develop a strong deterrent force. The Bush posture toward the states designated as an Axis of Evil stands in strong contrast to the manner in which his administration virtually ignored the nuclear proliferation activities of Pakistani nuclear physicist A.Q. Khan. Khan, whose activities have been described as a nuclear Walmart, received only a slap on the wrist from the Pakistani government, allied with the US in the so-called war against terrorism.

    Nuclear Disarmament

    In the post-Cold War period, there has been some progress toward nuclear disarmament, but it has been excruciatingly slow as measured by the need, obligation and opportunity. Current global nuclear stocks are down from a Cold War high of some 70,000 nuclear weapons to approximately 30,000. The vast majority of these, some 97 percent, are in the arsenals of the US and Russia .

    The need to dramatically reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons lies in the danger of these weapons proliferating to other states or falling into the hands of non-state extremist actors. The enormous danger of these weapons in the hands of groups like Al Qaeda should be sufficient to motivate serious efforts to achieve nuclear disarmament. So far it has not done so. The need does not exist to maintain large nuclear arsenals or, for that matter, any nuclear weapons in a world where nuclear weapons states are trading with each other rather than threatening war.

    The obligation of the nuclear weapons states to achieve nuclear disarmament is set forth in Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. At the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference, when the treaty was extended indefinitely, the parties agreed to “systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons.” Five years later, at the 2000 NPT Review Conference, the parties agreed on 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament. These steps included ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, negotiations for a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, preserving and strengthening the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, making disarmament measures irreversible, and an “unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon States to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament to which all States parties are committed under Article VI.”

    The opportunity to achieve nuclear disarmament in the post-Cold War world has been largely squandered. Bill Clinton was presented with the greatest opportunity of any leader in the post-World War II period to put an end to the dangers of the Nuclear Age. Clinton didn’t seem to grasp the opportunity that had been laid at his feet. He was largely indifferent to the issue, and this resulted in only minimal progress during his eight years in office. He did, however, support ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and did hold negotiations with Russia on ST AR T III, but these negotiations did not result in a new treaty.

    If the Clinton approach to nuclear disarmament can be described as benign indifference, the US under the Bush administration can be thought of obstructionist in its approach to nuclear disarmament. It has been an obstacle to virtually all of the 13 Practical Steps agreed to at the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. The Bush administration has opposed ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, put up barriers to negotiations for a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (in order to pursue missile defenses and space weaponization), and entered into an agreement with the Russians that makes nuclear reductions completely reversible. This agreement, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Agreement (SORT), specifies reductions of the US and Russian deployed strategic arsenals from levels of about 6,000 each to between 1,700 and 2,200 each by the year 2012. However, the treaty doesn’t require that the weapons taken off deployed status be irreversibly dismantled. As a result, many US weapons will go into storage and be available for redeployment in the future. It is likely that the Russians will do the same, and these weapons will also be available for possible theft by terrorist groups. The reductions do not have a timeline and only need to be completed by 2012. After that year, the treaty will no longer be in effect. So far as it impacts nuclear disarmament, the treaty is largely fraudulent. It gives the appearance of disarmament, but the substance isn’t there.

    In addition, the Bush administration has been pressing for research on new nuclear weapons that will be more usable, a new bunker busting nuclear weapon (the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator) and mini-nukes (low-yield nuclear weapons) that are about one-third the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. They have also begun deployment of missile defenses that have led Russia to pull out of the ST AR T II agreement. Despite their funding of research on new nuclear weapons and their opposition to the 13 Practical Steps, a US delegate to the 2004 Preparatory Committee meeting for the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, John Bolton, told the assembled parties to the treaty that they shouldn’t focus their attention on Article VI of the treaty with its nuclear disarmament provisions. “We cannot divert attention from the violations we face,” he said, “by focusing on Article VI violations that do not exist.”

    Need for US Leadership

    The world currently faces a tragic dilemma: preventing nuclear terrorism requires significant nuclear disarmament and international control of nuclear weapons and materials, but to achieve this will require US leadership, which is currently non-existent. Since the US continues to rely upon its own arsenal of nuclear weapons for security, it cannot effectively provide leadership toward nuclear disarmament. In the Bush administration’s secret, but leaked, 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, they stated: “Nuclear weapons play a critical role in the defense capabilities of the United States , its allies and friends. They provide credible options to deter a wide range of threats, including WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and large-scale conventional force. These nuclear capabilities possess unique properties that give the United States options to hold at risk classes of targets [that are] important to achieve strategic and political objectives.”

    Initiatives for Nuclear Disarmament

    At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation , we are initiating a campaign to chart a new course in US nuclear policy that we call Turn the Tide. It is an Internet-based campaign that seeks to awaken US citizens to the need to change US nuclear policy and spur them to communicate with their Congressional representatives and candidates as well as the president and presidential candidates and to cast their ballots based on positions on nuclear disarmament issues. The campaign is based on the following call to action:

    1. Stop all efforts to create dangerous new nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
    2. Maintain the current moratorium on nuclear testing and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
    3. Cancel plans to build new nuclear weapons production plants, and close and clean up the toxic contamination at existing plants.
    4. Establish and enforce a legally binding US commitment to No Use of nuclear weapons against any nation or group that does not have nuclear weapons.
    5. Establish and enforce a legally binding US commitment to No First Use of nuclear weapons against other nations possessing nuclear weapons.
    6. Cancel funding for and plans to deploy offensive missile “defense” systems which would ignite a dangerous arms race and offer no security against terrorist weapons of mass destruction.
    7. In order to significantly decrease the threat of accidental launch, together with Russia , take nuclear weapons off high-alert status and do away with the strategy of launch-on-warning.
    8. Together with Russia , implement permanent and verifiable dismantlement of nuclear weapons taken off deployed status through the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).
    9. Demonstrate to other countries US commitment to reducing its reliance on nuclear weapons by removing all US nuclear weapons from foreign soil.
    10. To prevent future proliferation or theft, create and maintain a global inventory of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons materials and place these weapons and materials under strict international safeguards.
    11. Initiate international negotiations to fulfill existing treaty obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for the phased and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons.
    12. Redirect funding from nuclear weapons programs to dismantling nuclear weapons, safeguarding nuclear materials, cleaning up the toxic legacy of the Nuclear Age and meeting more pressing social needs such as education, health care and social services.

    While this campaign is essential, it is a strategy from within the country. It is also necessary to bring pressure to bear on the US and other nuclear weapons states from the international community. The countries of the New Agenda Coalition ( Brazil , Egypt , Ireland, Mexico , New Zealand , South Africa and Sweden ) have been doing admirable work on this at the United Nations and at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conferences and Preparatory Committee meetings. These countries were largely responsible for putting forward the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to at the 2000 NPT Review Conference. I should also mention the Middle Powers Initiative, a coalition of eight international non-governmental organizations, which has provided strong support and encouragement to the New Agenda countries.

    Another important new initiative to move forward the nuclear disarmament agenda is the Emergency Campaign of the Mayors for Peace. Under the leadership of the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , this campaign has set forth a Vision 2020, calling for the initiation of negotiations for complete nuclear disarmament in 2005, the completion of these negotiations in 2010 and the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2020.

    Breaking the Silence

    Nuclear weapons pose a threat to humanity’s future, and yet most of us are silent in the face of this danger. It would not be possible to research, develop, deploy, threaten and use nuclear weapons if so many were not silent. The threat of nuclear genocide, even omnicide, has become global. Before the spread of the weapons themselves becomes global, we must break the culture of silence and conformity that allows the continuation of the nuclear threat to all humanity.

    In some ways, we have attributed god-like characteristics to nuclear weapons. Their power far exceeds that of ordinary weapons. They are credited in the US with bringing World War II to an end. It is hard to forget the emotional celebrations that took place in the streets in India and Pakistan when they tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Here is a poem in which I have tried to capture the sense of the godliness that has been ascribed to nuclear weapons by many people in the nuclear weapons states.

    WHEN THE BOMB BECAME OUR GOD

    When the bomb became our god
    We loved it far too much,
    Worshipping no other gods before it.

    We thought ourselves great
    And powerful, creators of worlds.

    We turned toward infinity,
    Giving the bomb our very souls.

    We looked to it for comfort,
    To its smooth metallic grace.

    When the bomb became our god
    We lived in a constant state of war
    That we called peace .

    But nuclear weapons certainly are not gods, nor are their possessors. These weapons are false idols, and they threaten their possessors as well as their targets. They may be powerful, but their power is only that of destruction. They have neither the power of creativity nor of construction. They threaten the future of humanity, and they corrode the souls of their possessors.

    We are approaching the 60th anniversary of the creation and first use of nuclear weapons. Time is not on our side, and we can take little comfort in the fact that nuclear weapons have not been dropped on other cities since they were used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki . In this era of globalization, the threat of nuclear annihilation is itself global. To counter this threat, we must globalize prohibitions in law and morality to the possession, threat and use of the nuclear weapons. We must end the double standards that suggest that some may have nuclear weapons while others may not. There are no safe hands in which nuclear weapons may be placed.

    The singular threat that nuclear weapons pose can only be ended by people everywhere breaking the silence and demanding that the nuclear weapons states fulfill their obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty for the total elimination of these weapons, and persisting in their demands until the goal is achieved.

    David Krieger is the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org ). He is the author of many books and articles on peace in the Nuclear Age