Dreams and nightmares
In the 1980s, I had recurring nightmares about nuclear war. Lots of people did. The nightmares, unfortunately, corresponded all too closely to the waking world, where tens of thousands of US and Soviet nuclear weapons were pointed at everyone, everywhere, at all times. We were exposed to a steady stream of graphic images on TV, in films, and in the print media that were not all that different from the unconscious horrors that invaded our sleep.
The problem now isn’t so much the nightmares as the dreams. We keep hearing about the “dream” of a nuclear-weapons-free world, and almost before the idea can register, we get handed the reality check. “Not in our lifetimes.” “A distant and difficult goal.” “Maybe a few decades from now, when conditions are better.” “One step at a time.”
Just this week, two more visions of a world without nuclear weapons momentarily rose above the noise generated by the May 25 North Korean nuclear test.
John McCain, Barack Obama’s opponent in the US presidential election, once again invoked the ghost of Ronald Reagan and reiterated his abolitionist campaign rhetoric on the floor of the Senate on June 3. He called nuclear weapons “the most abhorrent and indiscriminate form of warfare known to man” and said that “our highest priority must be to reduce the danger that nuclear weapons will ever be used.” Words like that aren’t heard in the US Senate too often.
One day later, a new Norwegian “gang of five,” including four former prime ministers and a former foreign minister, published their own call for a nuclear-weapon-free world in the Oslo daily Aftenposten, citing the original “gang of four” (Shultz, Kissinger, Nunn, and Perry) as their model. Insisting that “we have to be serious both about the vision and about the measures,” the Norwegians asserted that the US and Russia, “which together account for more than 90 per cent of the world’s arsenals, must take the first steps.”
A closer look at the two statements, however, uncovers significant differences in approach and a blurry and movable line between dream and reality. McCain’s statement is practically bipolar. He warns that “we…quite literally possess the means to destroy all of mankind” while, almost in the same breath, he recites the mantra that nuclear weapons are “still important to deter an attack with weapons of mass destruction against us and our allies.” To be fair, President Obama says essentially the same thing.
I’m very fond of catching logical fallacies. One of the commonplace varieties is the internal contradiction. This one can be paraphrased as: “The world would be a safer place without nuclear weapons, but while they’re here it’s a safer place with them.”
The Norwegians—Odvar Nordli, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Kåre Willoch, Kjell Magne Bondevik, and Thorvald Stoltenberg—give a nod to deterrence, too, but their angle of vision seems different somehow. “While reductions are going on, mutual deterrence will remain a basic principle of international security.” In other words, as we engage in the work of getting rid of these things, the possessors must continue to respect the imperative against using them. I’m reading between the lines, but that strikes me as different from asserting a need to hold onto nuclear weapons as a means to project overwhelming political power until you can replace them with something that works just as well.
In McCain’s view, the replacement is “robust missile defenses and superior conventional forces.” He also favors “a tough, and tough-minded, approach to both Iran and North Korea, both of whom have gotten away with too much for far too long.” Sen. McCain has made enormous personal strides toward embracing abolitionism, and has characteristically put himself at odds with his own party. Time will tell whether his “maverick” identity will lead him to support ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, where his principled vote will be badly needed. In the meantime, he seems not to have noticed that the US and the other nuclear weapon states have “gotten away with too much for far too long” when it comes to fulfilling their disarmament obligations.
The Norwegian gang of five has marked the road to a nuclear-weapon-free world with much better signposts. They write that the goal “must be a world where not only the weapons, but also the facilities that produce them are eliminated.” They challenge the US and Russia to “reduce their arsenals to a level where the other nuclear weapon states may join in negotiations of global limitations.” (Abolition NGOs have suggested that the right level for engaging China, France, the UK, India, Pakistan, and Israel in a real push for zero is somewhere around 500 or fewer—a substantially smaller number than the US and the Russians seem to have in mind as the outcome of a new START agreement.) They don’t minimize the threats of proliferation and nuclear terrorism, but they see the solutions in cooperative, rather than punitive, action. Unlike McCain and many of the other “new” abolitionists, who support missile defenses, the Norwegians caution that “the establishment of missile shields should be avoided, for they stimulate rearmament….Ongoing missile defence plans and programmes should therefore be subordinated to the work for comprehensive nuclear disarmament.” They have that right, too.
As much as their statement adds to the roadmap toward a world without nuclear weapons, the gang of five neglects to mention the Nuclear Weapons Convention. Diplomats seem to have an allergic reaction to the Convention. During the Q&A period at an NPT PrepCom side event last month, I asked Gareth Evans, the co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament and an ICAN supporter, whether the Commission would seriously review the content of the Model NWC before issuing its recommendations later this year. He assured me that was the Commission’s intention, but also wondered out loud whether the Convention was not a bit too “purist” – dreamlike, if you will. Gro Harlem Brundtland, who is the Norwegian commissioner and a member of the gang of five, should be encouraged to hold Evans to that promise. The Convention needs diplomatic champions.
It is less than 2 weeks until the Global Week of Action Against Gun Violence 15-21 June 2009. Please consider helping to launch IPPNW’s new “Medical Voices Against Violence:Your Story” project during this week.
Send us your stories in advance, or collect stories at your medical schools or hospitals during the Week of Action. It’s easy to record a short story – just use your digital camera and record a 1-3 minute story about an incident of gun violence you experienced, or happened in your community or to someone you know like a family member, friend, or patient– introduce yourself at the beginning with your first name only, what you do (medical student, doctor et.) and your country – then tell your short story and how if affected you as a health professional. If you can’t record a story, write one and send us a photo of you and we will print them together. Contact me for how to transmit big video files. Let’s make this a worldwide IPPNW event!
Other ideas for activities:
- Hold a “teach-in” or hospital “grand rounds” on small arms violence and health, using the IPPNW Aiming for Prevention PowerPoint, and/or One Bullet Stories that are on IPPNW’s web site. ( Contact me for a copy of the PPT). Or, use modules from the WHO TEACH-VIP curriculum.
- Write an op-ed or letters to the editor to local newspapers about the human suffering from gun violence in your country
- Organize as many doctors, nurses and other medical professionals as possible to have a public event/press conference to provide “testimony” about victims of violence they have treated in their hospitals, and call for more violence prevention initiatives in the community.
- Call your local radio station or newspaper reporter and ask them to conduct an interview with you about health effects of violence – if you need materials, contact us.
- Investigate if your medical school has any financial investments in gun manufacturers. If so, hold a press conference to call for divestment.
- Faces/stories of violence exhibit – Collect photos/stories from newspapers of shootings/other violence over the past year in your area, paste on posters, and organize an educational exhibit at your school, library or other venue – call the press to come publicize.
Medical Voices Against Violence – Submit Your Story
Have you had a personal experience with violence? Did it influence you to get involved with IPPNW or an affiliate or in other work for peace?
If so, please participate in IPPNW’s new Medical Voices Against Violence: Your Story project.
The objective of this new initiative is to highlight the human face of violence, especially armed violence, by collecting personal stories from IPPNW members around the world. We intend to use these stories to educate others via our Aiming for Prevention campaign, a health approach to armed violence prevention. Stories will be posted on the internet, included on CDs, and distributed at educational sessions on violence prevention.
We will launch this project worldwide through IPPNW affiliates during the Global Week of Action Against Gun Violence 15-21 June, 2009.
How You Can Participate:
We are seeking people to share their testimonies via video, audio, or photos and text about experiences with violence – direct or indirect. You may share something that happened to you, your family, community, country, school, work and/or neighborhood. Give us a brief description of what happened, and a brief explanation of what you felt. Also, if relevant, include how this experience made you take action or how it connected you to IPPNW and affiliates and its work for peace through health. Please do not use names of people other than your own, and please only provide your first name.
Submission formats:
o Video: 30 sec – 3 min – In Windows media or other computer-readable format
o Voice/audio recording: (include photo of yourself in JPEG format).
30 sec – 3 min
o Written: 1-2 paragraphs (include photo of yourself in JPEG format)
Please Include:
• Your first name (first name only please),
• Profession
• Nationality
• Place and general timeframe of experience, and a brief description of the experience in your own words.
To submit your story, contact Maria Valenti and we will provide transmission instructions for large video files. IPPNW will review your story and contact you with any questions. We will require a consent form for distribution.
Maybe We Should Take the North Koreans At Their Word
by Tad Daley
Shortly after North Korea exploded its second nuclear device in three years on Monday morning, it released a statement explaining why. “The republic has conducted another underground nuclear testing successfully in order to strengthen our defensive nuclear deterrence.” If the Obama Administration hopes to dissuade Pyongyang from the nuclear course it seems so hell bent on pursuing, Washington must understand just how adroitly nuclear arms do appear to serve North Korea’s national security. In other words, perhaps we should recognize that they mean what they say.
From the dawn of history until the dawn of the nuclear age, it seemed rather self-evident that for virtually any state in virtually any strategic situation, the more military power one could wield relative to one’s adversaries, the more security one gained. That all changed, however, with Alamogordo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the Cold War’s long atomic arms race, it slowly dawned on “nuclear use theorists” — whom one can hardly resist acronyming as NUTS — that in the nuclear age, security did not necessarily require superiority. Security required simply an ability to retaliate after an adversary had struck, to inflict upon that opponent “unacceptable damage” in reply. If an adversary knew, no matter how much devastation it might inflict in a first strike, that the chances were good that it would receive massive damage as a consequence (even far less damage than it had inflicted as long as that damage was “unacceptable”), then, according to the logic of nuclear deterrence, that adversary would be dissuaded from striking first. What possible political benefit could outweigh the cost of the possible obliteration of, oh, a state’s capital city, and the leaders of that state themselves, and perhaps more than a million lives therein?
Admittedly, the unassailable logic of this “unacceptable damage” model of nuclear deterrence — which we might as well call UD — failed to put the brakes on a spiraling Soviet/American nuclear arms competition that began almost immediately after the USSR acquired nuclear weapons of its own in 1949. Instead, a different model of nuclear deterrence emerged, deterrence exercised by the capability completely to wipe out the opponent’s society, “mutually assured destruction,” which soon came to be known to all as MAD. There were other scenarios of aggression — nuclear attacks on an adversary’s nuclear weapons, nuclear or conventional attacks on an adversary’s closest allies (in Western and Eastern Europe) — that nuclear weapons were supposed to deter as well. However, the Big Job of nuclear weapons was to dissuade the other side from using their nuclear weapons against one’s own cities and society, by threatening to deliver massive nuclear devastation on the opponent’s cities and society in reply. “The Department of Defense,” said an Ohio congressman in the early 1960s, with some exasperation, “has become the Department of Retaliation.”
Nevertheless, those who engaged in an effort to slow the arms race often employed the logic of UD in their attempts to do so. “Our twenty thousandth bomb,” said Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project that built the world’s first atomic weapons, as early as 1953, “will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two thousandth.” “Deterrence does not depend on superiority,” said the great strategist Bernard Brodie in 1965. “There is no foreign policy objective today that is so threatened,” said retired admiral and former CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1998, “that we would … accept the risk of receiving just one nuclear detonation in retaliation.”
Consider how directly the logic of UD applies to the contemporary international environment, to the twin nuclear challenges that have dominated the headlines during most of the past decade, and to the most immediate nuclear proliferation issues now confronting the Obama Administration. Because the most persuasive explanation for the nuclear quests on which both Iran and North Korea have embarked is, indeed, the notion that “deterrence does not depend on superiority.” Deterrence depends only an ability to strike back. Iran and North Korea appear to be seeking small nuclear arsenals in order to deter potential adversaries from launching an attack upon them — by threatening them with unacceptable damage in retaliation.
Neither North Korea nor Iran could hope to defeat its most powerful potential adversary — the United States — in any kind of direct military confrontation. They cannot repel an actual attack upon them. They cannot shoot American planes and missiles out of the sky. Indeed, no state can.
However, what these countries can aspire to do is to dissuade the American leviathan from launching such an attack. How? By developing the capability to instantly vaporize an American military base or three in Iraq or Qatar or South Korea or Japan, or an entire U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf or the Sea of Japan, or even an American city on one coast or the other. And by making it implicitly clear that they would respond to any kind of assault by employing that capability immediately, before it’s too late, following the venerable maxim: “Use them or lose them.” The obliteration of an entire American military base, or an entire American naval formation, or an entire American city, would clearly seem to qualify as “unacceptable damage” for the United States.
Moreover, to deter an American attack, Iran and North Korea do not need thousands of nuclear warheads. They just need a couple of dozen, well hidden and well protected. American military planners might be almost certain that they could take out all the nuclear weapons in these countries in some kind of a dramatic lightning “surgical strike.” However, with nuclear weapons, “almost” is not good enough. Even the barest possibility that such a strike would fail, and that just one or two nuclear weapons would make it into the air, detonate over targets, and result in massive “unacceptable damage” for the United States, would in virtually any conceivable circumstance serve to dissuade Washington from undertaking such a strike.
In addition, it is crucial to recognize that Iran and North Korea would not intend for their nascent nuclear arsenals to deter only nuclear attacks upon them. If the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States disappeared tomorrow morning, but America’s conventional military superiority remained, it still would be the case that the only possible military asset that these states could acquire, to effectively deter an American military assault, would be the nuclear asset.
The “Korean Committee for Solidarity with World Peoples,” a mouthpiece for the North Korean government, captured Pyongyang’s logic quite plainly just weeks after the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. “The Iraqi war taught the lesson that … the security of the nation can be protected only when a country has a physical deterrent force …” Similarly, a few weeks earlier, just before the Iraq invasion began, a North Korean general was asked to defend his country’s nuclear weapons program, and with refreshing candor replied, “We see what you are getting ready to do with Iraq. And you are not going to do it to us.”
It really is quite a remarkable development. North Korea today is one of the most desperate countries in the world. Most of its citizens are either languishing in gulags or chronically starving. And yet — in contrast to all the debate that has taken place in recent years about whether the United States and/or Israel ought to launch a preemptive strike on Iran — no one seems to be proposing any kind of military strike on North Korea. Why not? Because of the mere possibility that North Korea could impose unacceptable damage upon us in reply.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about UD is that it seems every bit as effective as MAD. North Korea today possesses no more than a handful of nuclear warheads, and maintains nothing like a “mutual” nuclear balance with the United States. In addition, the retaliation that North Korea can threaten cannot promise anything like a complete “assured destruction.” To vaporize an American carrier group in the Sea of Japan, or a vast American military base in South Korea or Japan, or even an American city, would not be at all the same thing as the “destruction” of the entire American nation — as the USSR was able to threaten under MAD.
And yet, MAD and UD, it seems, exercise deterrence in precisely the same way. Astonishingly, it seems that Washington finds itself every bit as thoroughly deterred by a North Korea with probably fewer than 10 nuclear weapons as it did by a Soviet Union with 10,000. Although UD hardly contains the rich acronymphomaniacal irony wrought by MAD, it appears that both North Korea and Iran intend now to base their national security strategies solidly upon it.
There is very little reason to suppose that other states will not soon follow their lead.
President Obama, of course, to his great credit, has not only made a nuclear weapon-free Iran and North Korea one of his central foreign policy priorities, he has begun to chart a course toward a nuclear weapon-free world. In a groundbreaking speech before a huge outdoor rally in Prague on April 5th, he said, “Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” (Unfortunately, he followed that with the statement that nuclear weapons abolition would not “be achieved quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime,” suggesting that neither he nor the nuclear policy officials in his administration fully appreciate the magnitude and immediacy of the nuclear peril. Do they really think the human race can retain nuclear weapons for another half century or so, yet manage to dodge the bullet of nuclear accident, or nuclear terror, or a nuclear crisis spinning out of control every single time?)
The one thing we can probably say for sure about the prospects for universal nuclear disarmament is that no state will agree either to abjure or to dismantle nuclear weapons unless it believes that such a course is the best course for its own national security. To persuade states like North Korea and Iran to climb aboard the train to abolition would probably require simultaneous initiatives on three parallel tracks. One track would deliver foreign and defense policies that assure weaker states that we do not intend to attack them, that just as we expect them to abide by the world rule of law they can expect the same from us, that the weak need not cower in fear before the strong. Another track would deliver diplomatic overtures that convince weaker states that on balance, overall, their national security will better be served in a world where no one possesses nuclear weapons, rather than in a world where they do — but so too do many others. And another track still would deliver nuclear weapons policies that directly address the long-simmering resentments around the world about the long-standing nuclear double standard, that directly acknowledge our legacy of nuclear hypocrisy, and that directly connect nuclear non-proliferation to nuclear disarmament.
The power decisively to adjust all those variables, of course, does not reside in Pyongyang or Tehran. It resides instead in Washington.
Tad Daley is the Writing Fellow with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Nobel Peace Laureate disarmament advocacy organization. His first book, APOCALYPSE NEVER: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in January 2010.
The Tortoise is Breathing
As the 2009 NPT PrepCom drew to a close, one of the African delegates was reported to have quipped “The tortoise is breathing.”
There was little disagreement — among the “diplos” and NGOs alike — that this was a successful PrepCom at a time when success was badly needed. All of the procedural issues were resolved quickly, and without the destructive behavior that had blocked progress since 2000. As a result, the 2010 Review has a forward-looking agenda , and all signs are that the delegates will engage in serious discussions about very specific disarmament and non-proliferation objectives, many of which are reflected in the 13-step action plan adopted in 2000. There is even talk of a five-year plan with measurable goals as an outcome of the 2010 Review that can be evaluated in 2015.
That’s the good news. The disappointment for NGOs and for many delegations was the inability to reach consensus around the recommendations drafted by the Chair. A very strong first draft distributed by Ambassador Chidyausiku at the end of the first week (see “Will the NPT finally open its arms to the Nuclear Weapons Convention?”) had been significantly watered down by the opening of the second week. The explicit reference to the Nuclear Weapons Convention had been removed, as had the clause on halting qualitative improvements of nuclear weapon systems. The rest of the language relating to disarmament came across as much more conditional than it had been in the Chair’s very straightforward first draft.
Almost as soon as the second draft appeared, the divisions in the room between ardent supporters of the first draft — largely from the non-aligned movement — and supporters of the second draft — largely though not exclusively the nuclear weapon states — became apparent. Some states said they could have supported either version, but in a process where consensus rules, the outcome was predictable. The PrepCom ended without agreement on substantive recommendations to the 2010 Review.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. A set of recommendations to the liking of civil society would have been the icing on the cake, but we can be happy that the cake came out of the oven without falling. The disagreements over substance are real, and the draft recommendations served as a focal point for lively discussions among the delegates — and between delegates and NGOs — for an entire week — something that never happened during the gridlocked years of the Bush administration. The fact that the PrepCom didn’t tie the Review Conference to the weaker language of the revised draft recommendations gives NGOs much more latitude in the coming year to influence the content of the Review.
Pardon my uncharacteristic exuberance, but when I read the following sentence in the just-released draft recommendations to the 2010 NPT Review Conference on the Amtrak train from New York to Boston this afternoon, I nearly jumped out of my seat:
Examine, inter alia, ways and means to commence negotiations, in accordance with Article VI, on a convention or framework of agreements to achieve global nuclear disarmament, and to engage non-parties to the treaty.”
Before you put me into a home for the terminally dull, what that means in plain, non-diplomatic English, is that the Chair of the 2009 PrepCom, Boniface Chidyausiku of Zimbabwe, has done in one sentence what the NGO community has spent 12 mostly dark years trying to accomplish: he has made the Nuclear Weapons Convention part of the NPT work plan. Specifically, he has identified the Convention as the implicit goal of Article VI of the NPT, and has called on states to explore ways to commence negotiations on a Convention, even as they work on strengthening disarmament and non-proliferation objectives to which they have already agreed.
If this sentence survives the second week of the PrepCom and remains in the recommendations forwarded to the Review Conference, all NPT states — including the NPT nuclear weapon states — will be honor bound to engage in a serious discussion of the Convention from this point forward. Moreover, part of their task, spelled out explicitly by the Chair, will be to find creative ways to include the non-NPT nuclear weapon states — India, Pakistan, Israel, and the prodigal DPRK — in the disarmament process.
This does not mean that negotiations on a Nuclear Weapons Convention will begin tomorrow, or even in June 2010. The representatives of the nuclear weapon states at the PrepCom continue to talk about the Convention as something off in the distance, maybe 30 or 40 years from now. We still have a lot of work to do if we’re to convince them that the whole process could come to a conclusion much sooner.
Nevertheless, this is a significant breakthrough. One of the most frequently expressed criticisms of the Nuclear Weapons Convention, other than the feeling among many diplomats that taking it up is premature, is that the NWC somehow competes with or would distract from desperately needed measures to strengthen the NPT. During the formal NGO session on May 6, we rebutted that argument, making it plain that the NWC and the NPT are closely linked and mutually reinforce each other.
“The aim of NWC negotiations,” we told the delegates, “is not to provide an alternative to the NPT, rather to develop an additional instrument that would build upon the NPT and other nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament measures. It would thus be sensible to connect NWC negotiations closely with the ongoing efforts to implement and strengthen the NPT.”
By echoing that point of view in the draft recommendations, and by including it as a prominent element of the proposed action plan on disarmament, Chairperson Chidyausiku has not only validated the single most important goal NGOs brought with them into this PrepCom, but has also shown how essential interim steps can be placed in a comprehensive framework — something else that has been central to NGO arguments in favor of the Convention.
At the very least, well respected members of the diplomatic and parliamentarian communities have been speaking up for the Convention at this PrepCom. Jayantha Dhanapala, a former UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament and the current President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs told participants at an IPPNW-sponsored PrepCom workshop that Article VI of the NPT anticipates negotiation of an NWC. He was joined in this assessment by Randy Rydell, a senior political affairs officer in the UN Office of the High Representative for Disarmament Affairs. Rydell’s former boss, Hans Blix, has also endorsed the Convention. Henrik Salander, the new Chair of the Middle Powers Initiative and the Chair of the 2002 NPT PrepCom, has offered some strong words of support as well. Just to name a few.
The nuclear weapon states may be less than ecstatic about this, but the one idea that would completely eliminate nuclear weapons and prohibit them as a matter of international law is starting to get some traction.
The draft recommendations to the 2010 Review reaffirm the importance of the commitments made at the 1995 Review and Extension Conference and the 2000 Review, and acknowledge that those commitments have not yet been fulfilled. What the parties to the NPT should do in 2010, the recommendations state, is set “practical, achievable and specified goals and measures leading to the elimination of nuclear weapons.” Is it just my wishful thinking, or do others hear the desire for a time frame in that?
Among the specific interim steps mentioned are CTBT ratification, negotiation of a fissile materials ban, diminished operational status (which means taking nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert, at long last), deep and verifiable reductions, irreversibility, and others that were part of the 13-step action plan endorsed in 2000 and that were relentlessly trashed by the Bush administration right through 2008. The recommendation that might actually have the greatest repercussions in the short term, were it to gain acceptance, is that there be no qualitative improvements in nuclear arsenals. Stopping the modernization of nuclear weapons and of the infrastructure to produce warhead components and delivery systems really would make abolition only a matter of time.
We all agree that the NPT is the foundation of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, the walls of which would be strengthened by the mortar of a CTBT, a fissile materials treaty, stronger safeguards, and other interim measures. What has eluded the diplomatic imagination up until now is the recognition that the Nuclear Weapons Convention is the capstone of the whole edifice. Maybe that idea is finally starting to sink in.
IPPNW Interview: Xanthe Hall
Xanthe Hall is a disarmament expert and long-time antinuclear campaigner for IPPNW-Germany. Her views are sought and respected on topics ranging from missile defenses to a nuclear-weapons-free Europe. VS asked Xanthe about the current political landscape in Germany and about the prospects for a nuclear-weapons-free world.
IPPNW: European NGOs are demanding that NATO take a hard look at its nuclear weapons policies as it marks its 60th anniversary. What is IPPNW-Germany contributing to this campaign?
XH: IPPNW-Germany is one of the main organizations behind the three-year campaign “our future—nuclear weapon free”—supported by 50 organizations Germany-wide—which aims to get the US nuclear weapons withdrawn from Germany by 2010. Through this campaign we are highlighting in particular the nuclear sharing agreement in NATO, which provides for member states to host US nuclear weapons, to provide logistics and pilots, and to take part in nuclear planning for a potential NATO nuclear attack. When we started this campaign, most people here did not even know that there were still nuclear weapons in Germany. We changed this by having a large demonstration and actions at the Büchel nuclear base last summer. At the 60th anniversary this week in Strasbourg, many of us will be there. We will run a workshop on the nuclear weapons’ issue and talk about how changes in the US and UK nuclear policies might affect NATO nuclear policy, which is up for review again after the Strasbourg meeting. There is a general election in Germany this year, so we are asking candidates to take a definite position on the US nuclear weapons. After the election, we will ask the governing parties (at least one of which will be for the withdrawal) to write it into the coalition agreement that these weapons will be withdrawn. The goal is that by the next NPT Review Conference this decision will have been taken and can be announced, thus adding momentum to the disarmament debate.
IPPNW: You just organized a successful panel on the Nuclear Weapons Convention at the Middle Powers Initiative’s Article VI Forum in Berlin. Are diplomats and government officials more receptive to the Convention than they were a year or so ago? Read more…
IPPNW Interview: Andrew Pinto
Dr. Andrew Pinto is a family physician and a member of Physicians for Global Survival (IPPNW-Canada). He is currently pursuing speciality training in public health at the University of Toronto. This interview relates to his paper that was recently published in Medicine, Conflict and Survival titled “Engaging Health Professionals in Advocacy Against Gun Violence,” as well as his own involvement in violence prevention activities.
IPPNW: Was there something specific that happened that prompted you to become involved in joining IPPNW and working for peace?
AP: I was incredibly fortunate to complete my undergraduate degree at McMaster University, where I met Joanna Santa Barbara, Vic Neufeld, Neil Arya and others who were engaged in “peace through health”. These people became my mentors and continue to advise me today. I had always known that health was influenced by social, economic and political factors, but began to see how to frame problems like war from a public health perspective. Further, I came to understand the links between armed conflict, poverty, underdevelopment and the spread of diseases such as HIV. In my third year, the attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred. I witnessed an outpouring of hatred and a desire for vengeance amongst my fellow students, and the world community blindly joining the “War on Terror”. This was juxtaposed against the 2001 Peace Through Health Conference at McMaster. It was here that I met Dr. Olupot-Olupot, a Ugandan physician. This led to my first research on gun violence and was the beginning of my involvement in advocacy on this issue. I should emphasize that I am still a novice in many ways, and have a great deal more to learn from others about working for peace.
IPPNW: Health professionals have long been involved with advocacy around the social determinants of health, including poverty. Can you tell us what special expertise health professionals bring to the work of preventing violence? Read more…
New Life for Nuclear Disarmament at the UN?
Keynote Address
Coalition for a Strong UN Annual Meeting
April 18, 2009
John Loretz
Program Director, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
I think it’s fair to say that a discussion about the prospects for achieving a nuclear-weapons-free world—and the important role the United Nations can and must play in getting us there—couldn’t come at a more opportune time.
I’ve been working on this issue going on 30 years now, and I share the sense of hope and excitement that we now have a US president who has made the elimination of nuclear weapons the policy goal of this country. President Obama has gone so far as to say that the US, as the only country ever to have used a nuclear weapon, has a moral responsibility to lead us to a world without nuclear weapons. He is right, and he’s going to need plenty of courage, persistence, and support to make it happen.
I’d like to refresh our memories about the nature of nuclear weapons, and what’s at stake as long as they continue to fill the world’s arsenals. This is an unavoidable consequence of inviting a speaker from IPPNW, but it’s also an important thing to do whenever the topic relates to these unconscionable instruments of mass extermination.
The 12.5-kiloton bomb detonated in the air over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 created ground temperatures that reached about 12,600 degrees (F) and incinerated the city. More than 100,000 people died and approximately 75,000 were injured among a population of nearly 250,000.
The 21-kiloton bomb detonated in the air over Nagasaki three days later leveled 2.6 square miles, killed 75,000 people immediately, and left 75,000 terribly injured. The cancers, birth defects, and other generational effects of radiation exposure among survivors and their families in both cities persist to this day.
A similar explosion over New York City today would kill more than a quarter of a million people.
A nuclear war involving only 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons targeted on megacities — something now within the capability of India and Pakistan, for example — would kill 20 million people outright, a number equal to half of all those killed worldwide during the six years of World War II. As if that weren’t horrifying enough, the smoke and soot thrown into the upper atmosphere would cause a sudden global cooling severe enough to disrupt agriculture worldwide for at least a decade. The resulting “nuclear famine” among populations already living on the edge of starvation could kill another billion people.
A nuclear war between the US and Russia—whose leaders have persisted up until now in keeping thousands of weapons ready to be launched on missiles in a matter of minutes—would kill hundreds of millions and could trigger a nuclear winter. As remote as that possibility might seem two decades after the end of the Cold War, it has never gone away.
The stakes could not be higher. Increasing knowledge of how to construct nuclear weapons, increasing availability of the materials with which to make a bomb, increasing numbers of people desperate enough to use the bomb, and, most important, a lack of international resolve to fulfill the pledge of disarmament make the use of nuclear weapons inevitable if we do not act decisively.
The bottom line is that sooner or later we will either abolish nuclear weapons, or they will abolish us.
On March 23, IPPNW released a Medical Appeal signed by more than 300 physicians and medical leaders from 39 countries —senior faculty and deans of medical schools, heads of medical associations, health ministers, medical journal editors, and Nobel laureates—calling on President Obama and Russian President Medvedev to confront “this gravest threat to human survival” and to “end the nuclear weapons era once and for all.”
The release of the letter was timed to precede the first meeting of the two leaders at the G-20 summit in London this month, and coincided with an intense period of diplomatic and media interest in the goal of a nuclear-weapons-free world, including the joint US-Russian statement and the subsequent speech by President Obama in Prague, which cemented the dramatic shift in US nuclear policy to which I just referred. These recent events have transformed IPPNW’s work—and that of civil society as a whole—from that of an opposition movement trying to prevent the development of new nuclear weapons and their global spread, to that of advocates for a new, widely shared vision of a world in which nuclear weapons no longer exist.
Now comes the heavy lifting, which includes making important decisions about how to frame the entire project of getting to zero so that individual, incremental steps taken in the short term are clearly seen as parts of a whole, rather than as ends in themselves. Getting down to 1,000 or fewer warheads each in a new US-Russian agreement to replace the expiring START would constitute real progress. But reductions in arsenal size — even deep reductions — need to be treated as a down payment toward the goal of elimination.
At some point, the other nuclear weapon states must become engaged in the process. One possible pathway is closing the gap between the enormous arsenal sizes of the US and Russia and the arsenals of China, France, and the UK, which number in the hundreds. That would be a sign of real good faith and could help kick start negotiations among the five NPT nuclear weapon states. India and Pakistan, who have said two things consistently—that they will not join the NPT as non-nuclear-weapon states and that they would join negotiations on a global nuclear disarmament treaty if the US and Russia make the first move—would find it increasingly difficult to avoid sitting at the table.
A big unanswered question, in my view, is how to engage Israel, which has never acknowledged its nuclear arsenal but, at the same time, has given unmistakable signals that it will not relinquish its nuclear weapons in the absence of a Middle East peace agreement and security guarantees. Experts with whom I’ve consulted believe that multilateral negotiations on a nuclear weapons convention could proceed a long way before this issue would have to be addressed directly.
Working with international lawyers, scientists, and other civil society experts, IPPNW has offered a roadmap toward a nuclear-weapons-free world in the Nuclear Weapons Convention — a comprehensive framework for global nuclear disarmament. The Model Convention we helped to draft has been a working document of the General Assembly since 1997 and majorities of UN Member States have repeatedly voiced their support for it.
A lot will have to change in the UN system if it is to make a constructive contribution to the goal of a nuclear-weapons-free world.
The first resolution of the General Assembly, adopted in 1946, called for “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.”
That urgent task not only remains unfulfilled more than 60 years later, but, with regard to nuclear weapons, it has barely begun. Nuclear arms control and disarmament proposals continue to be offered in a piecemeal, disconnected fashion while existing arsenals are “modernized” and new arsenals come into existence. Procedural disputes have been used as stalling tactics.
The UN Conference on Disarmament, the world’s sole multilateral disarmament negotiating body, is engaged in no negotiations. The UN First Committee sends dozens of strongly worded resolutions on different aspects of nuclear disarmament to the General Assembly each year, and each year the General Assembly adopts them and moves to the next item on its agenda.
NPT Review Conferences and Preparatory Committee sessions have been dominated by debates about whether disarmament or non-proliferation should come first, when the Treaty obliges Member States to pursue both simultaneously.
Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan made this point eloquently in 2006, at the conclusion of his term: “[T]hese two objectives –- disarmament and non-proliferation -– are inextricably linked, and…to achieve progress on either front we must also advance on the other.…It would be much easier to confront proliferators, if the very existence of nuclear weapons were universally acknowledged as dangerous and ultimately illegitimate.”
In making that assertion, Secretary-General Annan reiterated the view of the International Court of Justice, which, 10 years earlier, had advised the General Assembly that all states had an obligation, under international law, “to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”
Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who told the Conference on Disarmament in January 2008 that it must “rekindle the ambition and sense of common purpose that produced its past accomplishments,” has more recently called the Nuclear Weapons Convention “a good point of departure” for negotiations.
I’d now like to take a closer look at the two UN bodies with primary responsibility for working on nuclear disarmament — the First Committee and the Conference on Disarmament — and end with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is coming up for a pivotal five-year review in May 2010.
First Committee
The UN has six specialized committees that meet each year during regular General Assembly sessions, and that return to the GA with recommended resolutions. The very first resolution adopted by the General Assembly in 1946 called for “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.”
In keeping with the priority given to that first resolution, the GA made its First Committee responsible for disarmament and international security. Every year, the General Assembly adopts dozens of First Committee resolutions by majority vote or by consensus.
Unlike the Conference on Disarmament, the First Committee is not a negotiating body. Its purpose is to facilitate discussion, compromise, and consensus building, and to help states reach common understandings about the value of disarmament proposals and the most effective and acceptable ways to pursue them.
Unfortunately, the First Committee shares one trait in common with the CD: its discussions rarely seem to get anywhere because of the rigidity of its process, and the relative ease with which states can block consensus. The FC offers delegates an opportunity to be flexible and creative, and to consider security issues from each other’s perspectives rather than just from their own. Yet delegations too often remain entrenched in their own governments’ policies and security doctrines and are unwilling to deviate from hardened positions. Rather than engage in real debate, therefore, the First Committee has largely degenerated into what Reaching Critical Will calls “a resolution-generating machine, from which repetitive, redundant resolutions are tabled and voted on year after year.”
The 63rd session of the General Assembly was no different, in that regard, from those of the recent past. The GA last December adopted 57 First Committee resolutions on w e a p o n s o f mass destruction, conventional weapons, and regional disarmament and security, including 22 resolutions on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation issues.
In the latter category were resolutions on the risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, decreasing the operational readiness of nuclear weapons, a ban on new types of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear disarmament (that is, the complete elimination of nuclear weapons), a nuclear weapons convention, reducing nuclear danger, the central role of the NPT in achieving a nuclear-weapon-free world, nuclear-weapons-free zones, entry into force of the CTBT, and a UN conference to eliminate nuclear dangers.
The GA adopted all these important resolutions by large-to-overwhelming majorities. For the most part, the yeas and nays depicted the fault lines on these issues between the nuclear weapon states and their allies (whether willing or reluctant) and the non-nuclear-weapon states. The US, for the record, voted against every single nuclear disarmament resolution in 2008, with the exception of two that it sponsored—one to solicit support for Bush administration counter-proliferation programs; and the other to demand compliance with non-proliferation obligations, innocuously worded to mask its ulterior motive, which was to send a message to Iran. (Not surprisingly, Iran and several other members of the non-aligned movement abstained.)
Many of us in the NGO community were perplexed by the vote of support for the nuclear weapons convention, mention of which was embedded in a resolution reiterating the unanimous conclusion of the International Court of Justice that there is an obligation under international law for states to pursue nuclear disarmament in good faith and, in particular, to commence multilateral negotiations leading to an early conclusion of a convention to eliminate nuclear weapons. That resolution got 127 votes. The Model Convention is a working document of the GA and of the NPT. Yet to this day NGOs get nothing but resistance to our requests for substantive discussion of the Convention among governments and UN diplomats. We plan to confront this situation head on at the upcoming NPT PrepCom, as I’ll explain in a bit.
All of the First Committee resolutions, once adopted, essentially went back into the hopper for resubmission during the 64th session.
A properly functioning First Committee could do a lot to advance creative thinking about disarmament and to promote good faith implementation of disarmament and non-proliferation obligations. A more effective and accountable First Committee should be high on the list of goals for strengthening the UN and reforming its institutions.
Conference on Disarmament
The CD came out of the General Assembly’s First Special Session on Disarmament in 1978, and was created to fill the need for a single multilateral negotiating forum on disarmament issues, including nuclear disarmament. The CD’s rules require decision making by consensus, which is frequently given as the reason why the only successfully concluded disarmament treaties in the subsequent 30 years have taken place outside the CD.
The last time the CD took a decision to negotiate on a substantive issue—fissile materials—was in 1998. Those negotiations never started. Since 2000, the CD has declared its intent to focus on four core issues: nuclear disarmament, a fissile materials ban, prevention of an arms race in outer space, and negative security assurances. The word “focus” may be a bit of a reach, because the CD has been in gridlock during this entire decade, and has not even been able to agree on a program of work, let alone conduct actual negotiations on any of these issues.
The hangup on the fissile materials ban has centered on the problem of verification — not disagreements over how to verify compliance with a treaty in a technically sound and politically acceptable way, but disputes over whether verification should even be a subject of negotiations. The Bush administration said that a fissile materials ban could not be verified (more to the point, it was not about to countenance the idea of intrusive inspections in the US itself), but said it was willing to negotiate a treaty without verification measures—an approach similar to that taken in the deeply flawed Moscow Treaty (SORT) negotiated by the US and Russia in 2000. Not surprisingly, most other CD members have rejected this notion, consensus has not been achievable, and the discussion has gone in circles.
The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was a different kind of example of the dysfunctionality of the CD. After consensus on the draft CTBT was blocked in the CD by India and Iran in 1996, Australia, with the support of 127 state co-sponsors and NGOs such as IPPNW, brought a CTBT resolution to a special session of the General Assembly, where it was approved by an overwhelming 158 to 3 vote. Even liberated from CD deadlock, the CTBT has yet to enter into force.
(Interestingly, one of the more divisive issues within the CD has been the role of civil society and, in particular, the influence of NGOs. NGOs, as a rule, have not been allowed to address the CD for several years, although this is common practice in other UN forums, including the First Committee and NPT Reviews and Preparatory Committee meetings.)
The situation has degenerated to the point where the head of one delegation to the Conference on Disarmament recently referred to “the cycle of hope, missed opportunities, and despair” that has characterized the CD’s work for many years. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the CD is actually an obstacle to nuclear disarmament, because it stands in the way of efforts to promote alternative negotiating forums.
Some useful ideas have been proposed for breaking the deadlock in the CD and getting things back on track. The Blix Commission and others have recommended that the CD conduct its normal business by two-thirds majority voting, and that it adopt veto-free procedures. Another suggestion is that the CD restrict itself in the short term to some single achievable piece of work, so that it can have a success on which to build. Hope is also being expressed that a change in US attitudes and behavior under the Obama administration will open up new possibilities for productive work in the CD, with or without changes in operational norms. We’ll get a sense of that soon enough.
Non-Proliferation Treaty
In a couple of weeks, the parties to the NPT will gather at UN headquarters in New York for the third and final Preparatory Committee for the 2010 NPT Review. This is a critical meeting for a number of reasons. Frustrations over non-compliance with Article VI of the Treaty have reached a breaking point; anger over the nuclear double standard and erosion of confidence in the non-proliferation regime—with Iran and North Korea as the current focal points; and a growing sense among NGOs that the Treaty is being exploited by the proponents of global nuclear energy expansion have all contributed to a widely shared belief that the NPT is at a crossroads.
The Treaty has always had its problems, but they have gotten worse over the last decade after a brief period of raised expectations. At the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference, the parties agreed “to pursue systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons.” They went further in 2000, committing themselves to an “unequivocal undertaking” to eliminate nuclear weapons, and endorsing specific benchmarks spelled out in a 13-step action plan. By the way, each of these benchmarks — including entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a ban on the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons, reduced operational status, a diminished role for nuclear weapons in security policies, and the continued development of verification capabilities, among others — is an integral part of the Model Nuclear Weapons Convention.
With the arrival of a neoconservative regime in the US, all that changed. During the PrepComs for the 2005 Review, the US not only walked away from the commitments made in 1995 and 2000, but shamelessly blocked any mention of their existence from subsequent reports. The US was not alone in causing trouble, but the other NPT member states did not — or did not want to — confront John Bolton and his Bush-appointed successors. The 2005 Review failed, and the attitude of many delegations during the first two PrepComs for 2010, it seems to me, was to deliberately run out the clock on the Bush administration and to quietly develop proposals that might receive a better reception from his successor. That’s where we are right now, and the NGOs preparing to descend on Conference Room 4 in two weeks are waiting with bated breath for evidence of a meaningful change for the better.
The Member States of the United Nations set out to achieve a nuclear-weapons-free world in the 20th century, and failed to reach that goal. This failure can be traced back, in part, to the fact that the General Assembly did not insist upon the commencement of negotiations on a time bound schedule.
In contrast, Mayors for Peace, under the leadership of Hiroshima Mayor Taditoshi Akiba, has called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2020 — the 75th anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This goal—endorsed by IPPNW — is achievable if negotiations on a Nuclear Weapons Convention commence no later than the conclusion of the 2010 NPT Review.
We face an enormous challenge, even in a political climate where the elimination of nuclear weapons has moved into mainstream thinking about global security policy. Those who favor a nuclear-armed world—as long as they can decide who gets to own nuclear weapons and who does not—are already starting to push back from their exile in right-wing think tanks. A United Nations that overcomes its institutional shortcomings, and becomes an effective champion of a world without nuclear weapons, can play an important role in getting us to the long-awaited end of this road.
Zero Nuclear Weapons is the New Benchmark
The leaders of the world’s two largest nuclear powers have committed themselves and their countries to achieving a nuclear-weapons-free world. That pledge, made by presidents Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev at their April 1 meeting in London—and elaborated by President Obama in a policy-transforming speech in Prague on April 5— must be the benchmark against which all progress to reduce the threat of nuclear destruction is now measured.
Presidents Medvedev and Obama have outlined a course of near term actions that, if negotiated successfully, will bring us closer to the goal of global nuclear disarmament than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Over the next few months, we will find out how high they plan to set the bar.
For example, arms control experts have suggested that the goal of negotiations on a new treaty to replace the expiring START 1 could be a reduction to no more than 1,000 warheads on each side. This would be undeniable progress. A reduction to 500 warheads, however, would be an eye-catching demonstration of the intention to reach zero. It could also stand as a good faith challenge to the other nuclear weapon states, whose arsenals already number in the hundreds or fewer, to commence negotiations on a comprehensive agreement to rid the world of all nuclear weapons.
The US and Russian leaders also promised “to work together to fulfill our obligations under Article VI” of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). For most of the near-40-year history of the NPT, the nuclear weapon states have paid lip service to their nuclear disarmament commitment under Article VI, while doing everything possible to avoid compliance. As a result, the patience of the non-nuclear-weapon states—and their willingness to comply with their own non-proliferation obligations—has been strained to the breaking point. With a crucial five-year review of the NPT scheduled for 2010 and a final preparatory meeting coming up in New York next month, solid evidence of this fresh intent to comply with Article VI will be essential.
The joint statement contained a familiar but important list of measures to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons and to make their spread less likely. Among these are entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the negotiation of a ban on production of fissile materials, and stepped-up efforts to prevent terrorists and other non-state actors from acquiring nuclear weapons. An unambiguous decision to end the development of all new US and Russian nuclear weapons—both warhead designs and delivery systems—would send a clear signal to the rest of the world that eliminating these instruments of mass extermination is not just a goal, but a plan.
For several years, Russian anger at the prospect of US missile defense deployments in Europe and the rapid expansion of NATO, matched by US objections that Russia has not done more to hold Iran accountable to its non-proliferation obligations, had all but derailed progress in bilateral relations, and had threatened to escalate into a new arms race. That both leaders seem willing to step back from confrontation on these issues, to consider each other’s perspectives, and to seek mutually acceptable solutions comes as a breath of fresh air. The long-overdue removal of US nuclear weapons from European bases, a moratorium on the installation of missile defense components, and assurances from Moscow that it will not modernize its missile delivery systems would go a long way toward rebuilding eroded trust.
The lesson of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that a single nuclear weapon could destroy an entire city. During the Cold War, we came face-to-face with the horrifying realization that the explosion of thousands of nuclear weapons in a war between the US and the former Soviet Union would have destroyed humanity itself. That threat has not gone away. New scientific research has shown that even 100 Hiroshima-size warheads, exploded over major cities, would cause a sudden global cooling, the disruption of agriculture worldwide, and could lead to the deaths of a billion people who already live on the margins of starvation.
The stakes are far too high to risk the use of these weapons by accident or miscalculation. For this reason, the US and Russia should take all their missiles off high alert. That step could be taken immediately, with a simple presidential directive.
Presidents Obama and Medvedev concluded their first meeting by stating that “Now it is time to get down to business and translate our warms words into actual achievements of benefit to Russia, the United States, and all those around the world interested in peace and prosperity.”
To resounding and well-deserved applause in Prague, President Obama acknowledged that the US, “as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon…has a moral responsibility to act.” Making sure he and the leaders of the other nuclear weapon states act together to make this new vision a reality is both a responsibility and an opportunity that may not come our way again.
The large majorities who have said they want to live in a world without nuclear weapons will support Presidents Medvedev and Obama as they “get down to business.” At the same time, we should make clear our expectation that their pledge to free the world from the threat of annihilation by the most destructive weapons ever created will soon take the form of a comprehensive plan for getting to zero.
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