Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: UN Security Council

  • Libyan Delusions

    Martin HellmanBack in March, as NATO attacks on Libya moved into full swing, I wrote three related blog posts (“Libyan Blowback?”, “More on Libya,” and “Let’s Make a Deal!”) that illuminated the nuclear proliferation aspects of our attacks. But, humanitarian concerns trumped nonproliferation considerations, and we attacked anyway. Or did we fool ourselves? Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article “Revenge Feeds Instability in Libya” on page A7 which suggests that we suffered at least some self-delusion:



    Tawergha, which rebels seized last month, … serves as a cautionary tale of what awaits Libya if the sort of victors’ justice Tawergha has endured for weeks is repeated as rebels move into other pro-Gadhafi cities. It could turn whole tribes and regions into disaffected swaths of society, fueling violence and instability. … rebels have been torching homes in the abandoned city 25 miles to the south. … On the gates of many vandalized homes in the country’s only coastal city dominated by dark-skinned people, light-skinned rebels scrawled the words “slaves” and “negroes.”


    “We are setting it on fire to prevent anyone from living here again,” said one rebel fighter as flames engulfed several loyalist homes. … “The revolution was supposed to give people their rights, not to oppress them,” said Hussein Muftah, a Tawergha elder who fled to Tripoli last month, referring to the Feb. 17 uprising.


    UN Security Resolution 1973, which formed the basis for NATO’s attacks on pro-Gaddafi forces, authorized military action to protect civilians. Where is the public pressure to “do something” now? Or were our earlier actions driven – probably unconsciously – more by hatred of Gaddafi than concern for human suffering?


    We need to probe our motivations more deeply before engaging in seemingly small wars. Otherwise, as my three earlier posts show, we increase the risk of a final, nuclear war.

  • A Seat at Humanity’s Table

    Frank Kelly“Everyone deserves a seat at humanity’s table.”  That was a favorite expression of my friend Frank Kelly, who died in 2010, one day before his 96th birthday.  Frank believed it was essential for a peaceful future that everyone be seated at that big table and everyone’s voice be heard.  I couldn’t agree more.  We need a table that has room for all of us, a table at which everyone is fed with opportunity; everyone’s human rights are upheld; and everyone has a chance for their voice to be heard. 


    Right now there aren’t enough seats at the table, and the seats that exist have been taken by the wealthy and dominant of the world.  But who should speak for humanity?  Should it be the G-8 or the G-20?  Should it be the P-5, the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the ones who reserved for themselves the privilege of the veto power?  Should it be corporate titans?  Should it be representatives of the military-industrial complex?  These are the people who have claimed the seats at humanity’s table for themselves, and they seem quite content sitting there, hoarding resources and opportunity, and pulling the strings of the world.  But all is not well. 


    The rich and powerful may not yet recognize it, but they are sitting on a precipice, and they have a long way to fall.  The table where they are sitting is not stable.  They may believe that they can maintain their exclusive control of the table by using their wealth and power to bring in the police to cordon off the area, but this is only a temporary fix.  Unless they open the doors and expand the table, they are headed for a fall.  And with them is likely to go the table and all the resources they have sought to maintain for their exclusive use.


    To bring everyone to humanity’s table is not just the polite thing to do, it is the right thing to do.  It is also necessary.  The poor of the world know what is going on behind locked doors.  They know that their poverty and suffering are related to the greed at the restricted table.  All that those without a seat at the table are asking for is a chance to be heard and to be part of the decision making about the great problems confronting humanity, including the inequitable allocation of resources, the militarization of the planet, the destruction of the environment, the abuse of human rights, and the list goes on.  All of these great global issues can only be effectively addressed by global cooperation, and such cooperation is not possible if chairs are missing from humanity’s table. 


    It is increasingly evident that either everyone will be seated, or at least represented at the table, or the table will become increasingly irrelevant to solving the world’s problems.  The world has become too small to treat as a country club and put up “No Trespassing” signs to keep most of the world’s people away from humanity’s table.  We’ll either find a way to make room for all of us at the table, or we will fail in achieving the cooperation needed to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

  • Stoking an Asian Cold War?

    This article was originally published by In Depth News.

    Proxy wars between countries was one of the more tragic features of the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR. Both super-powers fuelled the conflicts supplying military materiel and political support while they piously claimed that nuclear deterrence worked so that they themselves never went to war. The U.S. in particular claimed that the George Kennan doctrine of the “containment” of the USSR worked and ere long the Communist giant imploded obligingly.

    Fast forward two decades, and a declining U.S. super power, trapped in economic woes of its own making, is groping for ways to contain a rising China. Proxy wars are no longer possible especially for a super power mired in the morass of Iraq and Afghanistan and encumbered by the unending and ubiquitous “war against terrorism” fighting an unseen enemy.

    What better then than to outsource the task of the containment of China to ambitious India and reluctant Japan? That, essentially, is the subtext of the unusually lengthy Joint Statement that came out at the conclusion of President Obama’s recent visit to India and the rationale for his Asian tour. Unsurprisingly both Japan and now India are the chosen candidates of the U.S. for permanent member status in the UN Security Council.

    The scenario has been a long time in gestation and operation and spans the presidencies of Bush the Son and of Barak Obama giving it the bipartisan support it needs as national security policy. For India — the world’s most populous democracy unable to match China’s poverty alleviation record and bedevilled by home-grown terrorism — the opportunity to escape the stigma of ostracism following the 1998 nuclear blasts was too good to be true.

    The Nehruvian vision of Non-alignment and moral superiority as the key to Great Power status had failed to unlock the door. Now it was self-built economic muscle (and a clever manipulation of the U.S. political system by the wealthy Indian lobby) and a replay of the old “Yellow Peril” cry replayed as a “string of pearls” theory that secured a place at the high table.

    The sophistication of Indian diplomacy will ensure that the new game will be played with finesse and without any of the crudity of the earlier proxy wars. It will garner huge bilateral trade and technology-transfer benefits for itself while maintaining normal relations with China competing at the same time for economic payoffs and political influence with China in Asia and Africa with U.S. support.

    Japan was settling into a low-key role after brief episode of assertiveness under Koizumi and a succession of bland Prime Ministers with little impact on the international political and economic scene. But China’s ill-conceived saber-rattling over the Diaoyu Tai or Senkaku islands plus Medvedev’s ill-timed visit to the Kuril Islands has made her ready to question China on its intentions in the East and South China Seas, recall its Ambassador from Moscow and play hard ball in the Six Nation Talks over North Korea’s nuclear weapon programme.

    It is a dangerous game to play especially since China is able to revive old animosities against the Japanese with its domestic audience and apply economic pressures as well. For the U.S. the revitalization of its old alliance with Japan on the eastern flank of China was long overdue and the rebuff over Okinawa was a sign that Japan had to fall back in line.

    While the speculation over the shift of the global centre of gravity from the Atlantic to the Pacific goes on, the Atlantic powers — the U.S. and NATO militarily and the U.S. and the EU economically — are not ready to abdicate their role in global affairs. The logical — and inexpensive — way to continue to exert influence in the Pacific and the Indian Oceans is through allies justifying their selection as a natural alliance among “democracies” with a common allegiance to human rights, anti-terrorism and nuclear non-proliferation (giving the Obama slogan of “a nuclear weapon free world” a rest).

    The side benefits are to break Non-aligned and G77 solidarity in the UN and other forums like the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round of negotiations and the upcoming Climate Change talks in Cancun isolating China at the same time. Possible irritants in the newly forged U.S.-EU-Japan-India axis will continue to be India’s stance regarding Iran’s nuclear programme, China’s human rights record and Myanmar or Burma’s military junta. The adroit management of this will be a small price to pay rather than giving the Republicans the satisfaction of shredding Obama’s foreign policy as they have done with his domestic policies.

  • Statement of Costa Rican President on Reducing Military Spending

    This speech was delivered to the United Nations Security Council on November 19, 2008

    A curious tale from Scandinavian mythology tells of two kings condemned to fight one another for eternity. If one succeeded in killing the other, the victim would rise again to continue their struggle until the last day of the world. The story has several versions, but, in all of them, the kings and their armies are revived each morning with new weapons, ready to take to the field of battle once more. This fantasy, product of a warrior culture, became a painful premonition of the events that would mark, with blood, the history of the twentieth century: an escalation of weapons, enemies, threats and war that ended the lives of hundreds of millions of people and forced us into the trenches of international insecurity.

    There lies the reason for the creation of this Security Council: in the search for solutions to the endless battle within the human species, fed by the frenzy of the arms race. It is unlikely that any organization has ever been set a more ambitious task than that. And it is unlikely that any organization has faced more difficult choices. Many of those dilemmas remain to be resolved but their answer can be found, without a doubt, in the content of the Charter of the United Nations. In 1945, with the smoke still clearing after the worst war in human memory, the founders of this Organization wrote in Article 26 of the Charter of the United Nations:

    “In order to promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources, the Security Council shall be responsible for formulating, with the assistance of the Military Staff Committee referred to in Article 47, plans to be submitted to the Members of the United Nations for the establishment of a system for the regulation of armaments.”

    The wording of that Article is no accident. It makes a statement of which this Council must take note, to the fullest extent of its meaning: spending on arms is a diversion of human and economic resources; that is to say, a use that is not correct. As a minimum, the Charter asks us to accept that excessive military spending exacts an infinite cost in opportunity.

    These are not the delusions of a citizen of the first country in history to abolish its army and declare peace on the world. They are not the dreams of a Nobel Peace laureate. This is the text that holds up this building. It is the text that justifies any action of this Security Council. Article 26 has been, until now, a dead letter in the vast cemetery of intentions for world peace. But in that place there also rests the possibility of reviving that intention; of giving it the meaning intended by those who precede us in this struggle.

    “The least diversion of resources” means, first and foremost, finding alternatives to excessive military spending that do not damage security. One of those alternatives is to strengthen multilateralism. As long as nations do not feel protected by strong regional organizations with real powers to act, they will continue to arm themselves at the expense of their peoples’ development — of the poorest, in particular — and at the expense of international security. The Security Council must support, as a guarantor of collective security, multilateral accords adopted in our various regional organisms. Costa Rica will work along these lines during the coming year as a way to generate an environment that allows for the gradual reduction of military spending.

    Ours is an unarmed nation but it is not a naïve nation. We have not come here to lobby for the abolition of all armies. We have not even come to urge the drastic reduction of world military spending, which has now reached $3.3 billion a day — which is shameful. But a gradual reduction is not only possible, but also imperative, in particular for developing nations.

    I am well aware that neither this Organization nor this Council nor any of its Members can decide how much other countries spend on arms and soldiers. But we can decide how much international aid they receive and on which principles such aid is based. With the money that some developing nations spend on a single combat plane, they could buy 200,000 MIT Media Lab computers for students with limited resources. With the money they spend on a single helicopter, they could pay $100 monthly grants for a whole year to 5,000 students at risk of dropping out of school. The perverse logic that impels a poor nation to spend excessive sums on its armies and not on meeting the needs of its people is exactly the antithesis of human security and is ultimately a serious threat to international security.

    That is why my Government has presented the Costa Rica Consensus, an initiative to create mechanisms to forgive debts and support with international financial resources those developing countries which increase spending on environmental protection, education, healthcare and housing for their people and decrease spending on weapons and soldiers.

    In other words, this initiative seeks to reward developing countries, whether poor or middle-income, that divert increasingly fewer of their economic and human resources to the purchase of arms, just as stipulated in Article 26 of the Charter of the United Nations. Today, I ask members for their support in making the Consensus of Costa Rica a reality.

    I also ask members for their support for the arms trade treaty that Costa Rica, along with other nations, presented to the United Nations in 2006. This treaty seeks to prohibit the sale of arms to States, groups or individuals, when there is sufficient reason to believe that they will be used to violate human rights or international law. I do not know how much longer we can survive unless we realize that it is just as terrible to kill many people, little by little, every day, as it is to kill many people in a single day. The destructive power of the 640 million small arms and light weapons that exist in the world, 74 per cent of which are in the hands of civilians, has proven to be more lethal than that of nuclear weapons and constitutes one of the principal motors of national and international insecurity.

    Costa Rica knows that the members of this Council include some of the countries that top the list for the sale and purchase of small arms and light weapons in the world. But my country also knows that those nations have recognized terrorism and drug trafficking as serious threats to international security.

    International organized crime depends on arms trafficking, which until now has flowed with terrifying freedom across our borders, with the result that these same powerful nations suffer the consequences. Although the treaty would not eliminate the existence of such criminal groups, it would certainly limit their operations.

    If we do not succeed with these measures, if the Costa Rica Consensus does not win the support of developed nations and if the arms trade treaty sinks in the waters of this organization, our pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals will become nothing more than the impossible dream of a world that, like Sisyphus, labors without rest towards an unattainable goal.

    We are working to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and, yet, armed conflicts constitute the principal cause of hunger in our world. We are working to improve health care, particularly maternal health and the fight against AIDS and malaria. Yet, military spending drains millions of dollars from the health-care budgets of poor countries. The Millennium Development Goals were brave words, but they will never be more than words if we do not regulate arms or devise incentives to reduce global military spending.

    Humanity can break the chain that, until now, has forced us to spend our centuries in an incessant and fratricidal struggle. That was the belief of those who founded this Organization. The enormous mission entrusted to this Council is not a failed expectation, but it is a rocky path. Maintaining peace will never be a simple task, nor will it ever be completed. But, I assure you that strengthening multilateralism, reducing military spending in favor of human development and regulating the international arms trade are steps in the right direction, the same as that marked out 63 years ago by those who, having survived atrocities, were nonetheless able to hope.

    Oscar Arias is a Nobel Peace laureate and President of Costa Rica.

  • Let Us Inspect Everywhere

    After Sept. 11, the risk of a further spread of weapons of mass destruction is seen in a new light. There is a fear that terrorist groups or reckless states might launch attacks with such weapons. The United States and its allies have now shown their readiness to deal with the risk through armed action in the case of Iraq. A horribly brutal regime has been eliminated and can no longer reactivate a weapons program — if there still was one. How are other suspicious cases to be tackled?

    First, which are the suspicious cases, and which weapons are we talking about? Listening to the debate one might sometimes get the impression that the world is full of terrorist organizations and rogue states bent on proliferation. The matter is serious enough without such exaggerations. Chemical and biological weapons might be within the reach of terrorists — whether these are groups or individuals. That risk is taken seriously and there seems to be relatively little problem achieving cooperation between police and financial institutions.

    However, the greatest concerns relate to states. The spread of long-range missiles seems to be only somewhat impeded by export controls. As for nuclear weapons, we know that the U.S. and Russia, the UK, France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan have them. We know further that Iraq was developing them and that its capability was eliminated under International Atomic Energy Agency, or IDEA, supervision after the Gulf War. North Korea currently claims it has developed nuclear weapons, while Iran denies it has any ambitions to do so.

    If North Korea is not induced to abandon its present course of action, it may create incentives for a further nuclear buildup in East Asia. If Iran were to move toward a nuclear-weapon capability the Middle East situation may be further aggravated.

    Clearly, we are no longer where we were only a few years ago, namely, in an almost universally shared effort to write the final chapters of the nuclear nonproliferation book. The U.S. is developing a missile defense, has rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and may be interested in constructing new types of nuclear weapons.

    What can be done to resume the remarkably successful efforts that were under way only a few years ago? Nuclear-weapon-free zones had come to extend from Latin America across the whole of Africa to Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. These developments were brought about not through armed actions but through regional and global détente, patient negotiation and the good example of the great powers participating in real disarmament.

    The crucial point was always that the foreign and security policies of individual states in the regions, and of the great powers, helped to reduce the incentives to acquire nuclear weapons and to pave the way for a renunciation of them. Security guarantees, including alliances, are among the means of reducing incentives.

    It is not hard to see even now that peaceful solutions of the political and security problems in the Middle East, on the Indian subcontinent, and the Korean peninsula probably are the most important elements both to prevent armed conflicts and to tackle the problem of proliferation in these areas. Multilateral assurances to North Korea that it will not be attacked must be a central part of the effort to lead that country away from the possession and export of nuclear materials and missiles. Security Council resolution 687 on Iraq states that disarmament in Iraq constitutes steps toward the goal of establishing a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. That thought should not be missed at the present time, when disarmament is being secured in Iraq and the road map for peace is on the table. Steady movement along the map is clearly fundamental not only for peace but also to the eventual freedom from weapons of mass destruction in the whole region, including Iraq, Iran, Israel and Syria.

    It has not been questioned that export controls remain important. Effective long-term international on-site inspection similarly remains a vital instrument in the efforts to counter proliferation. Inspection is designed to create confidence among neighbors and in the world by verifying the absence of weapons programs and by deterring such programs through the risk of detection. In open societies, like Japan’s and South Korea’s, the task is relatively straightforward. The transparency of the societies combined with the international inspection process gives a high degree of confidence. In closed totalitarian societies, like Iraq and North Korea, the task is more difficult.

    Inspections in Iraq brought a high degree of confidence that there remained no nuclear-weapon capability and few, if any, SCUD-type missiles. However, despite very far-reaching rights of immediate access to sites, authorities and persons, and despite access to national intelligence and overhead imagery, many years of inspection did not bring confidence that chemical and biological weapons had been eliminated in Iraq. In March, the U.S. gave up on the possibility of attaining adequate and durable assurance on the elimination of proscribed weapons in Iraq through U.N. inspections and instead moved to seek it through armed action.

    Does this suggest that international inspection is meaningless in closed societies? No, it can be relied on to verify the absence of the large installations that are likely to be indispensable for nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Full guarantees against research and development are hardly attainable and possible hidden stores of biological and chemical weapons may also be very hard to discover. Armed action and occupation can obviously deal with these risks, but these approaches have great costs and problems and the assurance obtained from them is not likely to last forever.

    Inspection and long-term monitoring requires patience and persistence, scarce commodities in national and international politics. While it requires support by individual states it is clearly more easily accepted — and more credible — if managed by authorities which are independent of the states which assist them, for instance, by providing intelligence. Used in this manner, inspection and long-term monitoring through international organizations could provide an important element in the prevention of the spread of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere.

    In the fields of missiles and biological weapons, there are presently no specialized intergovernmental organizations that could provide inspection in the manner that the IAEA and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons do in the nuclear and chemical fields. Over the years, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission — Unmoved — has acquired much experience in the verification and inspection of biological weapons and missiles as well as chemical weapons — but only in Iraq. It has scientific cadres who are trained and could be mobilized for cases other than Iraq. If the Security Council gave it a broader mandate, it could provide the Council with a capability for ad hoc inspections and monitoring, whenever this might be needed in the efforts to prevent proliferation.
    * Hans Blix is executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

  • Back to the Security Council: The Bush Administration Remains Eager for War

    Back to the Security Council: The Bush Administration Remains Eager for War

    US polling indicates that only a third of the American public would support a war against Iraq without United Nations approval, while a large majority would support such a war with UN backing.

    Most likely on the basis of these polls, the Bush administration has now gone back to the UN Security Council with another resolution seeking war against Iraq. The resolution, co-sponsored by the UK and Spain, is a call to war under Chapter VII, which contains the use of force provisions of the United Nations Charter.

    In essence, the resolution is an attempt to turn some details of the reporting requirements under Resolution 1441, and a dispute over the actual range of a short-range Iraqi missile, into an authorization to bomb the Iraqis, remove Saddam Hussein from power and occupy Iraq. The resolution concludes that “Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it in Resolution 1441 (2002).”

    An alternative proposal has been submitted to the Security Council by France, Germany and Russia, which calls for more in-depth and reinforced inspections. It finds that “the conditions for using force against Iraq are not fulfilled,” and that “inspections have just reached their full pace…are functioning without hindrance…[and] have already produced results.”

    The two proposals offer vastly different alternative outcomes. The US/UK/Spain resolution is an authorization for US military action against Iraq. The French/German/Russian proposal seeks to maintain the peace and achieve “the verifiable disarmament of Iraq.”

    The world awaits the result of the Security Council’s decision, which is likely to come in the next two weeks. If nine of the fifteen members of the Security Council vote for the US resolution and none of the permanent members of the Council exercises its veto power, the United States will set loose the dogs of war on Iraq.

    Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney all seem so eager to get on with the war they have been anticipating and working toward for years. They will undoubtedly be doing everything within their power, and probably much that is beyond their actual authority, to coerce other members of the Security Council to vote for their resolution.

    Not since Vietnam have US leaders been so eager to prosecute a war where someone else’s children will die and be used to kill the children of another nation. If they “succeed” in getting the votes in the Security Council, we will again witness the awesome power of the US military machine that consumes half the money Congress votes to spend each year.

    Even if the Bush administration fails to get the necessary votes in the Security Council, it is still possible that it will follow through with its threats to proceed to war with a “coalition of the willing.” This would dramatically divide the US population, wreak havoc on the system of international law that has existed since World War II, and undoubtedly increase the hatred and violence directed against the United States and its citizens.

    A US-led war against Iraq would be a tragedy not only for the people of Iraq, but for the world. The greatest tragedy, however, may be that at this pivotal moment in world history, the US should have leadership that is so militaristic and myopic, missing an extraordinary opportunity to fight for justice and democracy by working with the international community instead of against it.

    It has never been more important for the American people to wake up, stand up and act to exercise their combined “veto power” on the threatened actions of this war-hungry and dangerous administration by stating an unequivocal and resounding No to the proposed war.
    *David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the editor of Hope in a Dark Time, Reflections on Humanity’s Future (Capra Press, 2003).

  • Powell Provides Arguments But Not the Case for War

    Powell Provides Arguments But Not the Case for War

    US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented his case to the UN Security Council on February 5, claiming that the inspections of Iraq were not working. Powell made his case like a good prosecutor would make his case to a jury. He set forth allegations and evidence of Iraqi defiance, much of which is subject to proof and much of which is not provable. But unlike the situation of a prosecutor in a courtroom, Powell did not have any opposition and his evidence was not subjected to opposing views.

    After hearing Powell, the question remains: Who is to decide whether there should be a war? Should the decision be made by the United States, the country that put forth the evidence? Or should the decision be made by the UN Security Council, which is the authorized decision making body according to international law as well as US law, under Article VI (2) of the US Constitution.

    Members of the Security Council responded fairly clearly that their choice, at least for the time being, is to give Powell’s information to the UN inspectors and to give the inspectors more time. Additionally, there was discussion about increasing the size of the inspection force to make it more effective.

    In response to Powell’s presentation, the foreign ministers of France, Russia and China, all of which hold veto power in the Security Council, rejected the need for imminent military action and instead said the solution was more inspections. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin stated, “Let us double, let us triple the number of inspectors. Let us open more regional offices. Let us go further than this.”

    This Security Council’s position is in line with the UN Charter, which states that the UN can only authorize military action when there is imminent threat to the peace. This imminent threat has not been demonstrated in the case of Iraq, as there is no proof, nor even evidence, that Iraq has the intention of launching an offensive attack. US rhetoric in naming some members of the Security Council “old Europe” and US actions in forming “new alliances” with countries outside the Security Council will not alter the Council’s legal authority to determine when the use of force is necessary.

    In general, the international community seemed to appreciate that Powell shared the evidence that he had. This evidence will now be examined to discover whether it is valid or invalid, and on the basis of that examination the UN inspectors will be helped in their work and the Security Council will be aided in making its decision on war or peace.

    The US should continue to be forthcoming with its intelligence information on Iraq, as is requested in article 10 of UN Resolution 1441. Subsequent intelligence information should be provided by the US, not to disprove the effectiveness of the UN inspections, but to support them and increase their effectiveness. The willingness of the United States to fully cooperate with UN inspectors will reflect on whether the Bush administration is taking inspection process seriously or simply considers the inspections to be an unfortunate impediment to its seemingly unrelenting desire for war.
    *David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the co-editor with Richard Falk of The Iraq Crisis and International Law.