Africa moves to halt the evolution of the Shaka spear into a nuclear warhead
By Dr. Walter Odhiambo – IPPNW Regional Vice President, Africa
Thirteen years after it officially opened for signature, the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free-Zone Treaty (Treaty of Pelindaba) finally came into force with the twenty-eighth deposit of its ratification instrument by Burundi on 15 July 2009. This is a major historical development applauded by the entire IPPNW fraternity and Africa region in particular. We congratulate the leaders of African States for this noble vision that sets the continent ahead in the right trajectory. A brief review of the history of conflicts in Africa will illustrate why this development is worthy of some jubilation.
“With passage of time and advancement in technology, weapons of war and violence have undergone unmatched metamorphosis. The discovery of the gunpowder marked a major but sad revolution, catapulting humanity to the age of firepower and replacing the traditional tools of war like swords, machetes and Shaka Zulu spears. These crude historical weapons had a limited range and were not as lethal as the gun.”
The above statement is an excerpt from an editorial I wrote in the December 2008 issue of The Annals of African Surgery entitled “The Burden of Firearm Injuries.” Shaka is the name of a fearless and ruthless Zulu warrior whose reign of terror in the Southern region of Africa is legendary. He lived at a time when man considered war the most popular, respectable and effective mode of settling disputes. Kings and Emperors attacked their neighbours simply for the purposes of expanding their Kingdoms or empires and to acquire the neighbour’s wealth and property. It was an era when, according to Chinua Achebe in “Things Fall Apart,” a man’s greatness was judged by “how many human heads he brought home from the battle field.” Read more…
IPPNW Interview: Homsuk Swomen and Ogebe Onazi
Medical students active with IPPNW’s Nigerian affiliate Society of Nigerian Doctors for the Welfare of Mankind (SNDWM) were inspired to create a radio show to promote peace. The program has been airing on Silverbird Rhythm FM broadcast from Jos, Nigeria. This interview is with Nigerian medical student leaders who helped develop and implement the program – Homsuk Swomen, national student representative of IPPNW Nigeria, and Ogebe Onazi, African co-regional student representative.
Homsuk Swomen, national student representative of IPPNW Nigeria with co-presenters
IPPNW: Why did you develop this radio program?
HS and OO: We were motivated to develop this program because of the recurrent violence that ravages Jos, a calm and peaceful city of middle belt Nigeria; sensitize the public on the health effect of guns and light weapons; and to advocate the need for tougher legislation on acquisition of small arms.
It was designed to influence the minds of our listening audience and the wider public on the need to practice peace. The media (that is, newspapers, radio and television) has had an incredible influence on the minds of people and the quality of livelihood across the entire world over many decades. This informed our decision to go upstream and use the radio as a means to disseminate relevant and worthwhile research-based health information that may help check the spread of violence and small arms in Nigerian society, particularly with Jos as the reference point.
IPPNW: Have you experienced any types of violence in your personal lives or in your communities?
International medical student representative, Agyeno Ehase on left with radio show co-organizer, Onazi Ogebe.
OO: I have experienced violence personally and in my community. I remember an experience I had in my pre-clinical period when I was attacked at gun point on my way to my off-campus house and was subsequently robbed. And also, in the Jos community of Nigeria, we witnessed an ethno-politically engineered violence that left many injured, homeless and dead in recent times (28th November, 2008).
HS; yes! In my hometown Yelwa-Shendam, there was massive destruction of lives and property in 2004 which caused violence in neighbouring Kano state. I was living in fear during the last violence in November 2008 because my neighbourhood in Jos had a 50/50 religious population waiting to fight at the slightest provocation. It affected my state of mind. I witnessed the violence in September 2001 also as human beings were roasted and axed before my eyes.
IPPNW: What expertise as medical students do you bring to this issue? Read more…
A Giant Passes: Senator Edward M. Kennedy – 1932-2009
As the eulogies for United States Senator Ted Kennedy start to pour in following his death last night, we will be reminded what a tireless and effective champion he was for people’s health, for education, for the rights of working people, for immigrants’ rights, and for peace and social justice across the board, not only in the US but around the world.
He was all those things and more. In particular, he was an ardent and unwavering supporter of nuclear disarmament. In 1982, when the fear of a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union was the world’s nightmare, Kennedy and Senator Mark Hatfield sponsored the Nuclear Freeze amendment. The goal of the Freeze was to get the two nuclear superpowers to stop the relentless, massive buildup of their arsenals and to start disarmament negotiations. The legislation itself did not make it through the Senate (the US House passed its own version of the Freeze that year), but the Freeze concept galvanized a public movement to renounce nuclear weapons that claimed Ted Kennedy as a political leader.
Although he devoted himself primarily to other vital issues later in his Senate career, Kennedy’s voice and his vote on nuclear disarmament were always there when it counted. He led the fight for ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1998, and when the Senate rejected the CTBT he worked just as hard to support a moratorium on nuclear testing not only in the US but also worldwide. In 2002, he rejected the Bush administration’s false claims that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons and stockpiling other weapons of mass destruction, and was one of 23 Senators who had the courage to vote against the Senate resolution authorizing the war against Iraq.
When the Bush/Cheney administration pulled out all the stops to get Congressional funding for low-yield nuclear weapons, Kennedy didn’t mince any words. Here’s what he said in May 2003, at a decisive moment in the debate about so-called mini-nukes:
This issue is as clear as any issue ever gets. You’re either for nuclear war, or you’re not. Either you want to make it easier to start using nuclear weapons, or you don’t.
“Our conventional weapons already have vast power and accuracy, and we can make them even more powerful. No one at the Pentagon and no one in the Administration has given us any example — none at all — of a case where a smaller nuclear weapon is needed to do what a conventional weapon can’t do.
“For half a century, our policy has been to do everything we possibly can to prevent nuclear war. And so far, we’ve succeeded.
“The hard-liners say things are different today. A nuclear war won’t be so bad if we just make the nukes a little smaller. We’ll call them mini-nukes. They’re not real nukes. A little nuclear war’s O.K.
“That’s nonsense. Nuclear war is nuclear war is nuclear war. We don’t want it anywhere, anytime, anyplace.
“Make no mistake. A mini-nuke is still a nuke.
“Is half a Hiroshima O.K.? Is a quarter of a Hiroshima O.K.? It’s a little mushroom cloud O.K.? That’s absurd.
“This issue is too important. If we build it, we’ll use it. No Congress should be the Congress that says, ‘Let’s start down this street,’ when it’s a one-way street that can lead only to nuclear war.”
Kennedy was on the winning side of that vote, and the world is better for it.
The best way to honor the memory of a person who brought this much passion and commitment to improving the quality of our lives – in the case of nuclear disarmament, to ensuring our very survival – is to complete the task he stayed with for some 30 years. If we could not abolish nuclear weapons in Ted Kennedy’s lifetime, let’s make sure we do it before another generation passes.
Halfway to a nuclear-weapons-free world?
On July 15 the entire Southern Hemisphere became a nuclear-weapons-free zone (NWFZ). That’s when the Pelindaba Treaty entered into force, obliging all African states to renounce nuclear weapons and to refrain from acquiring them, and prohibiting the nuclear weapon states from stationing them anywhere on the continent. All 52 African states have signed the Treaty (it opened for signature in 1996), and last month Burundi became the 28th country to ratify – the magic number for entry into force.
Pelindaba now joins the Treaty of Tlatelolco (South America), the Treaty of Rarotonga (South Pacific), the Treaty of Bangkok (Southeast Asia), and the Antarctic Treaty in banning nuclear weapons south of the equator. Even better, most of Africa is north of the equator. So are substantial geographic areas covered by nuclear-weapons-free zones in Central Asia and Mongolia. In all, 114 countries – 60% of the world – have now banned nuclear weapons from their territories as a matter of international law.
That’s not a bad start.
One of the criticisms of NWFZ treaties is that they are largely symbolic – that the nuclear-weapon states will station and transport weapons wherever they want (especially on submarines) and that no treaty will protect the parties from the effects of a nuclear war between non-parties. The latter point is certainly correct, as the nuclear winter studies and more recent findings about the global climate effects of regional nuclear wars have made painfully clear.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that some nuclear-weapons states – including the two largest – have signed and ratified additional protocols to some of the NWFZ treaties and are being pressed to commit themselves to the terms of all of them. That may be symbolism, but it’s symbolism with the weight of international law behind it.
The texts of all the NWFZ treaties, lists of members, and other useful information for anyone wanting to learn more about the role of these zones in helping to achieve a nuclear-weapons-free world can be found at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
The Strategic Value of Remembering
I visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first time some 40 years after reading John Hersey’s account of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a teenager growing up on Long Island during the early years of the Cold War. Thinking about what I might write this morning—the 64th anniversary of the world’s horrifying introduction to nuclear weapons—I opened my fragile old copy of Hersey’s book at random and came upon this description:
Mr. Tanimoto, fearful for his family and church, at first ran toward them by the shortest route, along Koi Highway. He was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatever.” *
On a sweltering August day in 2005, the only physical evidence of the Hiroshima bombing was the A-bomb Dome—the twisted and bizarre wreckage of the former Industrial Promotion Hall, which had sustained overpressures of 35 tons per square meter, about 100 meters from the hypocenter of the explosion. Seeing the dome for the first time is a shock for which photos and film clips cannot prepare one. It’s grotesque, but strangely beautiful, like the mushroom cloud itself.
I’d heard that a kind of identity fatigue was starting to set in among younger people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—they understood the unique place of their cities in history, but no longer wanted to be defined by events so distant from their experience and their hopes. I saw a small example of this during a visit to the Nagasaki Peace Museum a few days later. Two teenage girls, looking at a diorama of injured people fleeing from the fires ignited by the Nagasaki bomb, pointed at a model of a man whose flesh was dripping from his arm and started to giggle. They had undoubtedly seen more “realistic” images in video games. But they kept looking, and the meaning of what they were seeing began to register on their faces. By the time they moved on, mockery had been replaced by something a lot more thoughtful. These images, as far removed in time as they are from most of our personal memories, still have the power to move us. Read more…
Apollo or Extinction
by Tad Daley
On December 31st, 1999, National Public Radio interviewed the futurist and science fiction genius Arthur C. Clarke. Since the author had forecast so many of the 20th Century’s most fundamental developments, the NPR correspondent asked Clarke if anything had happened in the preceding 100 years that he never could have anticipated. “Yes, absolutely,” Clarke replied, without a moment’s hesitation. “The one thing I never would have expected is that, after centuries of wonder and imagination and aspiration, we would have gone to the moon … and then stopped.”
Were Clarke alive today, he undoubtedly would have added, “and then lost so much interest that we erased the tapes of our epochal voyage because of a shortage of blank cassettes.”
This month, the 40th anniversary of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong’s first footsteps on the moon, you will hear many rationales for sending humans into space, many noble goals that the challenge of space can help humanity to fulfill. However, in cosmological consequence, one, and only one, stands paramount above all others — human immortality. Space is the only place where we can ensure ourselves against extinction. Read more…
Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century: Getting It Wrong
Admiral Halsey notified me
He had to have a berth or he couldn’t get to sea.
I had another look and I had a cup of tea and a butter pie.
I always liked that song. A little bit of Beatlesque story telling, presumably floating out of Paul McCartney’s hash pipe. I always assumed if there was an Admiral Halsey, he was simply a character in a pop song, like Father McKenzie or the pretty nurse selling poppies on Penny Lane.
Then I came across his name in the first volume of Larry Wittner’s authoritative history of the nuclear disarmament movement [1], and learned that British Admiral William Halsey had publicly criticized the use of the atomic bomb against Japan a little more than a year after the event, only to be pilloried by the US State Department and Navy Secretary James Forrestal. Bernard Baruch, Wittner tells us, lashed out at Halsey for “putting America in the wrong on moral grounds in the eyes of the world.”
These were people who were determined to build as many bombs as possible, as fast as possible, and to ensure a US nuclear monopoly for as long as possible. Real paragons of morality. A little more than 60 years later, those advocating a nuclear-weapons-free world find themselves vilified by some intellectual heirs of the first bomb enthusiasts—a disgruntled collection of neocons in exile, including the likes of Frank Gaffney, Henry Cooper, and Troy Wade [2]. Unlike 60 years ago, however, one of the main objects of the nuclear priesthood’s ire happens to be the President of the United States.
Calling themselves the New Deterrent Working Group, they have published a white paper that recycles one old and bankrupt argument after another for retaining and modernizing the US nuclear arsenal [3]. I’m about as ardent a recycler as you can find, and even I understand that certain things just need to go into the trash or, like toxic waste, be permanently isolated from the environment. This paper is one of those things. Read more…
They did not find the reset button
Maybe we had expected too much. There had been so many promises. In his speech in Prague in April President Obama said: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”.
That is, Obama had chosen the Road to Zero nuclear weapons. Did he discuss this with the Russian President Medvedev? No sign of that.
Another chance: ”… to cut off the building blocks needed for a bomb, the United States will seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons”.
Russia and the USA are here basically in agreement. Obama and Medvedev could have scored an easy point:
We will cooperate and make this reality.
President Obama further promised in Prague: Today, I am announcing a new international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years. We will set new standards, expand our cooperation with Russia, and pursue new partnerships to lock down these sensitive materials
Here USA and Russia are since ten years or more cooperating in securing nuclear weapons and fissile material in Russia. They now agreed to cooperate to secure the weapon grades uranium globally and to reduce their stock of plutonium. Good, and important. But will there be a treaty, or just a declaration of intent? Read more…
IPPNW Responds to the Moscow Summit
In March 2009, just before the historic first meeting between US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War sent the two leaders a letter signed by more than 300 of the world’s top physicians, appealing for leadership toward a world without nuclear weapons. Our hopes and expectations were raised by the statements issued from the London meeting, and by President Obama’s speech in Prague a few days later, when he pledged “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” and added that “as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.”
From the perspective of the US-Soviet Cold War, when tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert threatened humanity with extinction, the goal announced by Presidents Medvedev and Obama this week in Moscow — the reduction of US and Russian strategic arsenals to their lowest levels since the mid 1950s — is welcome news.
As a promised “down payment” toward a nuclear-weapons-free world, however, this is a disappointingly small step. Combined stockpiles of 3,000 strategic warheads are still more than enough to kill and injure hundreds of millions of people, and plunge the Earth into a nuclear winter. Even a nuclear war using only a fraction of the proposed arsenals would result in a humanitarian and climate catastrophe to which physicians could offer no meaningful medical response.
There is no plausible definition of deterrence that could not be satisfied with far fewer weapons during the transition to a nuclear-free world. Engaging the other nuclear weapon states in meaningful negotiations will require deeper reductions by the world’s largest nuclear powers, and we see no reason to postpone such reductions despite the need to resolve disputes about missile defenses, NATO expansion, and conventional force levels. Taking all US and Russian missiles off high alert would go a long way toward removing the danger of accidental nuclear war, and can be done by executive orders in Washington and Moscow. We have urged both leaders to take this security enhancing and confidence building step in the past, and we do so again.
Ridding the world of nuclear weapons will not happen overnight. But we should not have to wait for another generation of leaders to finish the task to which Presidents Obama and Medvedev say they are committed—and to which we believe they are committed. A nuclear-weapons-free world can be achieved in our lifetime, but it will require bolder action than we have seen so far.
The Russian and US negotiating teams, with the support of abolitionist Presidents, could exceed the modest goals set for them in Moscow, and we hope they will. IPPNW told Presidents Obama and Medvedev in March that “A thousand years from now no one will remember most of what you will do over the next few years; but no one will ever forget the leaders who abolished the threat of nuclear war.” We reiterate that message as the Moscow summit comes to a close, and continue to offer our support, our encouragement, and our impatience for a world that is no longer held hostage to these instruments of mass extermination.
by Tad Daley and Kevin Martin
If our thousands of nuclear weapons actually do serve to deter, then why should we be concerned about a nuclear North Korea or a nuclear Iran? If they do not serve to deter, then why retain them at all?
When South Korean President Lee Myung-bak visited Washington for a summit with President Barack Obama on June 16, the United States reaffirmed its “commitment of extended deterrence” to Seoul, “including the US nuclear umbrella.” In response, on June 25, the 59th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, North Korea vowed to continue to expand its nuclear arsenal, to deliver a “fire shower of nuclear retaliation” in response to US “provocations,” and insisted that the nuclear umbrella statement only “provides us with a stronger justification to have a nuclear deterrent.”
It is not entirely clear to us why the international community considers it wholly legitimate for the United States to say, “if North Korea engages in aggression against South Korea or the United States, we will retaliate with nuclear weapons,” while it universally condemns North Korea when it says, “if the United States engages in aggression against us, we will retaliate with nuclear weapons.” Perhaps, in light of all this radioactive rhetoric, it is worth pausing to consider just what “nuclear deterrence” might mean in today’s world … or whether it means anything at all.
The conventional wisdom holds that nuclear weapons have only one legitimate function in today’s world – deterrence. Most often this is framed as one country (the deterror) dissuading the use of nuclear weapons against it by another country (the deterree), by threatening nuclear retaliation in reply. This has long been the primary answer to the awkward question, just what are nuclear weapons for? Read more…
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