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Originally in Junge Welt
26.05.2010 / Focus / Page 3

It has been 40 years since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed.
The states without nuclear weapons declared their abandonment to both
development and acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the nuclear weapons
possessors agreed to universal disarmament.  Every five years, the so-called
Review Conferences occur, where revisions are made under the respect for the
rights and obligations under the contract that was initially established.
Whereas the discussions with the Council resolutions in 1995 and 2000 ended
in further steps towards disarmament, the 2005 meeting was a disaster
because of the resistance of the United States.  After the announcement from
the US President in the following year to strive for a nuclear weapons-free
world, the conditions surrounding his goal have fundamentally changed.
Initiatives, which aim towards disarmament, like the new SART treaty, the
debate in the United States to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Ban Treaty
and the Nuclear Posture Review (again) are reviving the disarmament debate.

Until the end of the week, an often forgotten point was agreed upon at the
NPT Conference in 2010: (Almost) all ideological and political divides -
from Brazil to Cuba, from China to the US, from Iran to Nigeria - agreed
upon an unrestrained policy for peaceful use of nuclear technologies.  It
was left to the non-governmental organizations to denounce this policy as
irresponsible, immoral and unsustainable.

Foreign ministers from almost every country spoke out verbally for the
nuclear disarmament, saying yes to a world without nuclear weapons.  The
actions of at least the NATO countries, however, speak a different language.
In her speech to the NATO summit in Tallinn at the end of April, US
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton set the “spirit of NATO” for this year’s
NPT Conference.  Last week the former US Secretary of State Madeline
Albright submitted a first draft of the future strategy of the military
pact, which again clearly reinforces that nuclear weapons are indispensable
for NATO.  They must remain in Europe, be modernized, and act as an integral
part of future military strategy.  One cannot more clearly express a ‘no’ to
a world without nuclear weapons.

But it is not only NATO that clearly has an anti-disarmament stance.  US
President Obama declared through a governmental decree, that an additional
80 billion dollars would be allocated to the modernization and creation of
new nuclear war heads.  Funding for U.S. defense research centers,
especially at one in Los Alamos, New Mexico, will rise in the coming years
at an annual rate of more than ten percent.  Washington is part of the
trend: in the past months it has become clear, that all nuclear-weapons
state - the official and the “unofficial” ones - have a verbal commitment to
disarmament, a costly modernization of their nuclear potential.

In pursuing nuclear rearmament and deterrence policy, NATO is undoubtedly a
pioneer and a proponent.  At the same time, the group of those states who
want a world without nuclear weapons is also increasing.  It is more of a
grass-roots movement; they are comprised of political elites of the First
World and the elites of the South.  Central to all of these forces is the
support of a Nuclear Weapons Convention: an international treaty for the
destruction of all nuclear weapons.

Those advocating for this cause include UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon,
the majority of all states (e.g. the non-aligned, but also Austria and
Switzerland), the vast majority of parliaments (including the EU Parliament
in Brussels), conservative elder statesmen, churches, unions, and thousands
of mayors.  And lastly: 25 million people worldwide have expressed their
will through signature to an end of nuclear weapons.

In this unique international chorus for a nuclear-free world, no one can do
more when the weapons increases are verbal and sometimes come with forced
and practical concessions.  However, the NPT regime threatens to fall apart.
Because the system is a two-tiered system of states, where there are the
“nuclear haves” and the “nuclear have-nots”, a disarmament promise is no
longer attainable after 40 years of this unfair system.  Fundamental change
of international power relationships has set the self-consciousness for
equality of states on the agenda.  The dramatic consequence will be an
unchecked spread of nuclear weapons; nuclear plans lay in very many areas,
and the technological requirements are available in more then 40 states.
Not to mention also accessible by terrorists and states that wish to use
them.

The Bundestag spoke out in April in a notable resolution for a world without
nuclear weapons.  Members of parliament have called for concrete steps to be
taken, especially the removal of US nuclear weapons from Germany.  The
stance of State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Werner Hoyer, in New York
pivoted between full NATO loyalty and trying to salvage at least some
short-term disarmament projects.  The German policy of nuclear sharing,
which violates the NPT, is a part of the nuclear weapons problem that
Germany has concealed.

The peace movement showed their flag in New York.  The conference, “for a
nuclear-weapons free and equitable world,” attracted more than 1,500
participants, including speakers such as UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon.
And more than 15,000 people from over 25 countries joined in demonstration
in the unmistakably smelly streets of New York to call for a nuclear weapons
convention and a world without nuclear weapons.  There were also many “side
events”, actions of civil disobedience and other public events that
substantiated arguments during the NPT conference.  They were the largest
actions of the international peace movement against nuclear weapons in more
than 20 years.

The author is the managing director of the international association of
lawyers against nuclear arms (IALANA), founded in 1988.

While the world applauds the growing recognition that the abolition of nuclear weapons seems to be an idea whose time has finally  come—from the calls by rusty cold warriors and former statesmen and generals to eliminate nuclear weapons—to the recent modest START negotiated by President Obama and Medvedev to cut nuclear arsenals under new verifications procedures, there are appalling countervailing forces, born from the old 20th century paradigm of war and terror, that undercut the growing positive pressures to end the nuclear scourge.   In addition to the pushback from the military and the Republican party in the US Congress to hold the START agreement hostage to billions of new dollars for the weapons labs to build new plutonium cores for the atom bombs, continue sub-critical explosions of plutonium and chemicals at the Nevada test site,  and erect new buildings in the weapons complex, as well as continued expansion of destabilizing missile “defenses” and space warfare programs, there is a growing global proliferation of so-called “peaceful” nuclear reactors, metastasizing around the planet and spreading their lethal technology as incipient bomb factories.

Ironically as new calls come from the nuclear sophisticated “haves” to control the nuclear fuel cycle, there has been an explosion of interest from nations that never sought “peaceful” nuclear power before to achieve the technical know-how that will allow them to play in the nuclear club with the big boys.   Thus we see  countries like El Salvador, Ghana, Burma and Indonesia  declaring their intention to build nuclear power plants as well as hearing expressions of interest from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman Qatar, Saudi Arabia Sudan Syria Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen![1]

Fueled by commercial interests, the western patriarchal network of industrialized nations is now vigorously promoting a “nuclear renaissance” of civilian power. There has been an explosion of interests in licensing new uranium mines around the world, in Africa, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, India, the United States—even at the very the rim of the sacred land surrounding the awesome Grand Canyon, despite the known tragic consequences of mining on the health of indigenous peoples who bear the brunt of the toxic activity with higher birth defects, cancer, leukemia and mutations in every community where uranium is mined.

The nuclear crisis we face today is a direct result of the export of peaceful nuclear technology to countries such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Indeed, every nuclear reactor enables a country to develop its own nuclear weapons, as we have seen in the case of India, Pakistan, and Israel, who never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and now North Korea, which exploited the fruits of “peaceful” technology and then quit to develop its own deterrent against US bullying. Under the guise of “peace”, other countries, such as South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Libya were also well on their way to developing nuclear bombs, which they later abandoned. Former IAEA Director, Mohammed ElBaradei stated “We just cannot continue business as usual that every country can build its own factories for separating plutonium or enriching uranium. Then we are really talking about 30, 40 countries sitting on the fence with a nuclear weapons capability that could be converted into a nuclear weapon in a matter of months.”

The signers of the CTB were well aware that by having a nuclear reactor, a nation had been given the keys to a bomb factory and would need to be included in any effort to ban nuclear tests, regardless of whether they proclaimed any intention to develop weapons. And former US CIA Director, George Tenet, said, “The difference between producing low-enriched uranium and weapons-capable high-enriched uranium is only a matter of time and intent, not technology.”

There are nearly 200 million kilograms of reactor wastes in the world—with only 5 kilograms needed to make one nuclear bomb. The US is planning to build 50 more reactors by 2020; China plans 30; with 31 more now under construction–to churn out more toxic poisons; on tap for bomb-making, with no known solution to safely containing the tons of nuclear waste that will be generated over the unimaginable 250,000 years it will continue to threaten life on earth.

Countless studies report higher incidences of birth defects, cancer, and genetic mutations in every situation where nuclear technology is employed—whether for war or for “peace.” A National Research Council 2005 study reported that exposure to X-rays and gamma rays, even at low-dose levels, can cause cancer. The committee defined “low-dose” as a range from near zero up to about… 10 times that from a CT scan. “There appears to be no threshold below which exposure can be viewed as harmless,” said one NRC panelist.  Tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste accumulate at civilian reactors with no solution for its storage, releasing toxic doses of  radioactive waste into our air, water and soil and contaminating our planet and its inhabitants for hundreds of thousands of years.

An April, 2010 study released by the New York Academy of Sciences, authored by noted Russian scientists, concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died of cancer caused between 1986 by the Chernobyl accident through 2004. [2] The industry-dominated IAEA, has been instrumental in covering up the disastrous health effects of the Chernobyl tragedy, understating the number of deaths by attributing only 50 deaths directly to the accident.  This cover-up was no doubt due to the collusive agreement between the IAEA and the World Health Organization, which under its terms provides that if either of the organizations initiates any program or activity in which the other has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult with the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement. Thus our scientists and researchers at the WHO are required to have their work vetted by the industry’s champion for “peaceful” nuclear technology, the IAEA.

The industrialized nations have the hubris to think they can manage a whole new regime of nuclear apartheid, despite their recent and most welcome acknowledgement by their leadership of the breakdown of the nuclear weapons arms control regime.  They’re planning a top-down, hierarchical, central control of the nuclear fuel cycle, in a mad plan to reprocess the irradiated fuel rods in the “nuclear have” countries, such as the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Japan and India, who are to be members of a new Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.  The Partnership will ship toxic bomb-ready materials to the four corners of the world and back, in a nightmare scenario of plutonium in constant transit, subject to terrorist theft and negligent accidents on land and on sea, while creating a whole new class of nuclear “have nots” who can’t be trusted not to turn their “peaceful” nuclear reactors into bomb factories.  It’s just so 20th century! Time for a paradigm shift to safe, sustainable energy.

Every 30 minutes, enough of the sun’s energy reaches the earth’s surface to meet global energy demand for an entire year.  Wind can satisfy the world’s electricity needs 40 times over, and meet all global energy demands five times over.  The geothermal energy stored in the top six miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times the energy of the world’s known oil and gas resources. Tidal, wave and small hydropower, can also provide vast stores of energy everywhere on earth, abundant and free for every person on our planet, rich and poor alike.    We can store hydrogen fuel in cells, made from safe, clean energy sources, to be used when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.  When hydrogen fuel is burned, it produces water vapor, pure enough to drink, with no contamination added to the planet.[3]

Last year the governments of Germany, Spain and Denmark launched the International Renewal Energy Agency, IRENA, which would empower developing countries with the ability to access the free energy of the sun, wind, marine, and geothermal sources, would train, educate, and disseminate information about implementing sustainable energy programs, organize and enable the transfer of science and know-how of renewable energy technologies, and generally be responsible for helping the world make the critical transition to a sustainable energy future.  IRENE is the Greek word for peace, so this new initiative is especially well named.

While the NPT purports to guarantee to States who agree to abide by its terms an inalienable right to so-called peaceful nuclear technology, it is highly questionable whether such a right can ever be appropriately conferred on a State.  Inalienable rights are generally distinguished from legal rights established by a State because they are moral or natural rights, inherent in the very essence of an individual. The notion of inalienable rights appeared in Islamic law and jurisprudence which denied a ruler “the right to take away from his subjects certain rights which inhere in his or her person as a human being” and “become Rights by reason of the fact that they are given to a subject by a law and from a source which no ruler can question or alter”.   John Locke, the great Enlightenment thinker was thought to be influenced in his concept of inalienable rights by his attendance at lectures on Arabic studies. [4]

During the Age of Enlightenment natural law theory challenged the divine right of kings.  The US Declaration of Independence spoke of “self-evident truth” that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights …life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Where does “peaceful nuclear technology” fit in this picture?  Just as the Comprehensive Test Ban cancelled the right to peaceful nuclear explosions in Article V of the NPT, a protocol to the NPT mandating participation in IRENA would supercede the Article IV right to “peaceful” nuclear technology.  There are now 144 nations participating in IRENA.  www.irena.org  We urge you to insure that your nation joins as well.

Alice Slater is the New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Convener of the Abolition 2000 Sustainable Energy Working Group

[1] http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/ah2007/kalamnamiddleeaststudies/2010/03/a_nuclear_middle_east.html
[2] http://counterpunch.org/grossman04232010.html
[3] See generally, http://www.abolition2000.org/a2000-files/sustainable-now.pdf
[4] Judge Weeramantry, Christopher G. (1997) Justice Without Frontiers,  pp. 8, 132, 135,

Original article: Disarmament Times

In May, disarmament organizations will assemble alongside government delegations meeting for the 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference. Coming together in side events between attempts to pursue and persuade diplomats has become a familiar practice among the world’s nongovernmental organizations, and should provide an opportunity to reflect and to develop strategies together. The focus on governments, however, often overshadows our own discussions, limiting their scope to what those in power might be persuaded to do in the near term and how we might persuade them to do it.

As we gather this year, humanity is confronted with several crises, each different but all ultimately intertwined. We face the decline of our natural environment, with climate change being only one of the human-induced transformations destroying natural and man-made systems from which we draw our sustenance today, and limiting our options for how we will live in the future.

These changes strike the poorest first — those who cannot afford to move, build expensive new infrastructure, or import the means of existence from afar when their locale is devastated by a global mode of production dedicated to short-term growth heedless of the long-term consequences. As competition for key nonrenewable resources intensifies, essentials of food and energy devour an increasing portion of their income, creating a rising cycle of misery exacerbated by a two tier global economy in which immensely powerful private corporations destroy local markets while ultimately raising the price of many necessities, pumping up profits by pushing costs off on ecosystems and future generations.

At the same time, the economic crisis persists, precipitated by the collapse of the latest and largest financial bubble and prolonged by the immense gulf between those few who control most of the world’s wealth and productive assets and the millions who can neither find productive work nor pay for what might be produced by others. What recovery there has been consists mainly of securing more of the world’s wealth and social product for the top 20 percent or so, the increasingly self-contained top-tier economy of government organizations and giant corporations that buy and sell most of the world’s goods to each other and their upper echelons, inhabiting fortified islands of wealth amidst a global sea of poverty.

The growing chasm between the minority who hold secure places in the economy of large — and largely authoritarian — organizations and the rest of humanity is the defining social fact of our time. Unless it is directly confronted and overcome it will define the limits of the politically possible, driving increased conflict and with it expenditure by the wealthy sectors of society on “security.” Both pervasive conflict and the misdirection of ever more resources in an effort to contain it (rather than removing its causes) will make the transformation of global energy, transportation, agriculture, and industrial systems essential for long-term human survival more difficult, perhaps impossible.

IN THE FIRST DECADE of the new century, we have wars and threats of wars, with nuclear weapons moving ever closer to the center of conflict. Nuclear weapons and nuclear “nonproliferation” serve as the justification for wars and as the stalking horse for the economic and geopolitical agendas of largely unaccountable elites who control the most powerful states. They are already nuclear armed and have shown themselves, as in the case of the United States, ready to threaten nuclear weapons use against those who have none. And nuclear weapons — the all too real national arsenals, not the theoretical ones that the demonized states du jour or “terrorist” groups might or might not be trying to acquire — remain the machinery of ultimate catastrophe. They are still there, waiting at the end of some as yet unforeseen chain of great power elite contention and confrontation as those in power attempt to “manage” the multiple crises in ways that apply ever more technology and violence, while stubbornly refusing to address the fundamental causes of deteriorating ecosystems and proliferating social conflict.  This systematic exclusion of discussion about root causes, enforced myriad ways in forums world wide, creates a pervasive feeling of inertia, a sense that political systems everywhere are not working.

DESPITE ALL OF THIS, most of the visible “disarmament work” generated by “civil society” organizations, proceeds with little change from one year, and one decade, to the next. The principal focus remains on three kinds of things:

The first is the weapons themselves: the effects of their use, their legal status, the effects on “stability” of various weapons systems when possessed by one or another combination of adversaries, the ecological effects of designing, testing, and producing them.

The second is the mechanics of disarmament:  how to dispose of weapons when no longer desired, how to verify their destruction or their continued existence, how to track the materials and technologies that can be used for their manufacture.

The third is how to prevent anyone new from obtaining them. Efforts to mobilize support for elimination of nuclear arsenals concentrates on long-familiar litanies within these limits: the horrors we already know from the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan, informed speculation regarding their civilization-destroying capacity, the elaboration of convincingly plausible, and by now endlessly tweaked and refined, proposals for verifiable step-by-step elimination of nuclear arsenals, and a shifting array of related issues regarding the economic, social, and ecological costs of maintaining them.

WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS, the analysis and recommendations offered by the visible layers of “civil society” stay on the terrain favored by professionals and experts:  the description of social ills, and technical prescriptions for their elimination. Even moral appeals have narrowed to a kind of specialization, with only those expert in religion or who hold irrefutable status as victims qualified to be heard.  When connections between issues are made, they usually are made regarding the effects of nuclear weapons and the institutions that sustain them, rather than the causes for their existence. Mirroring the top-down “management” approaches to controlling the “nuclear danger” of those who control the most powerful states, scrutiny of fundamental causes is consigned to the margins.

The questions of precisely who finds it useful to devote vast resources to maintaining civilization-destroying arsenals and the immense array of institutions that sustain them, and exactly what they find them useful for, are seldom asked. Rather than holding those in power to account for their actions, the experts and professionals who dominate “civil society” arms control and disarmament discourse look for every opportunity to take them at their word. They grasp eagerly at the latest endorsement of “disarmament” by those who hold or have held power, no matter how abstract or contradictory. This year no doubt we will hear repeated quotations from U.S. President Barack Obama echoing in the halls of the United Nations, as a few hundred miles south his administration’s proposals for massive increases in funding for nuclear weapons research and production march in bipartisan lockstep through the halls of the U.S. Congress.

MARTIN LUTHER KING OBSERVED that “all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands.” We are in another moment like that now, a time of great dislocation and upheaval. We need a new conversation amongst ourselves about how we must order our societies and economies if we are going to make it through
these times. We need to stop looking always upward towards those in power for what they might be willing to give us.

Moments of great social transformation are characterized — in many ways, defined — by the failure of the existing political, cultural and intellectual institutions to meet the needs of the majority of the population and to make decisions in ways we believe legitimate. Today, the professionals who inhabit these institutions have little to say about what is most important.  The “practical” too often has come to be equated with asking only for what can be had within the existing institutional contexts, which means not challenging the existing distribution of wealth and power.  If these constitute fundamental causes of the problems we are trying to solve or key obstacles to their solution, this is a doomed strategy.

We need to have the courage to turn our attention and our efforts away from the states and their forums and back to each other. The discussion, analysis, and political course of action that bring real disarmament will not come from refining the discourses dominated by those who currently hold power and control debate, but by rendering them irrelevant. We must focus our efforts on building and sustaining solidarity, mutual support, and a common political program amongst those who suffer from an unjust and undemocratic global order of things that is enforced by overwhelming violence. As long as that order of things remains, nuclear weapons will be there, and likely in civilization-destroying numbers. The work of “reducing the nuclear danger” needs to be less about fewer weapons and more about greater justice.

How do we accomplish this? No one person can point the way forward; the kinds of work that are needed will vary from place to place. The first step is to admit that the predominant professionalized single-issue politics is not working. In addition to beginning a new conversation, we need to redirect our time and resources to the settings and kinds of activities where that conversation might actually take place.

Here in the United States, we need to take our resources and our attention back down from the centers of power to the cities, towns and neighborhoods where the effects are felt of decisions made at a distance (often geographically and always socially). This is necessary because human scale organizations where people can build trust and support, and can practice the skills of democracy — of making decisions together about things that matter — are the essential building blocks of any larger, sustainable movement for a world that is more fair and democratic. It is necessary because propaganda thrives in social settings where people are fearful and isolated, and places where we work together to understand the world and to support one another in the face of violence and injustice are the strongest defense against the powerful institutions that ceaselessly strive to manipulate us. Finally, it is necessary because the hard questions about how we will remake a failing social order from within ultimately are felt and understood in the way they affect our livelihoods and the people and places we love.

Whether our community should accept the lure of the next military contract or the next manufacturing link in a global chain of corporate production making ecologically unsustainable products that only a minority of human beings can afford, or instead should start to discuss and plan for a future that might allow us to live well within the ecological limits of our locale, region, and planet is a hard conversation to start, and harder to sustain. But it is also the kind of conversation from which a new way forward might emerge. When the debates that matter are limited to NGO experts, corporate lobbyists and professional politicians hovering around the apex of power in political systems dominated by concentrated wealth, the first order of business is to assure that the most powerful interests will be taken care of. After that, those who claim to represent the rest of us go forth and portray the dividing up of the remaining scraps as the only “practical” steps towards a better world.

THE INTRACTABLE CHARACTER of the nuclear dilemma is not an aberration or deviation from the “natural” or “healthy” path of the current order of things, but rather its penultimate expression. The immensely destructive wars of the last century on all sides manifested, accelerated and set irreversibly in motion processes for the pursuit and accumulation of power by large, authoritarian organizations both “public” and “private” at a pace and scale that dwarfed anything that had come before. It is the nature of these power dynamics to grow and intensify at an ever-accelerating rate, despoiling the planet and consuming its resources at a pace that has become impossible to comprehend, much less control. The development of the atomic bomb was just a loud punctuation point, a marker of a much broader process nearing totality, the beginning of an ending, whether the bomb is to be the means of our ending or not. Who will oppose these forces? That is the question we must ask.

Andrew Lichterman has worked on peace and disarmament issues for decades, both in paid and volunteer positions. He is a member of the boards of the Western States Legal Foundation and the Los Alamos Study Group. The opinions expressed here are his own.

Editor’s Note: This will be the first in a series of articles on civil society and nuclear disarmament.

Original article: Yes Magazine

by Alice Slater

Following the first START agreement, the United States destroyed hundreds of B52 bombers and displayed them for view by Russian satellites. Both nations have destroyed Cold War weapons, ranging from nuclear warheads to bombers to missile silos. Photo courtesy of the United States Defense Threat Reduction Agency

The United States and Russia reached agreement on a new START treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) to lower their count of deployed atomic warheads from 2,200 each to between 1,500 and 1,675. They would also cut their stocks of strategic bombers and land- and sea-based missiles from a current level of 1,600 each to 800. The treaty replaces the 1991 START agreement, which expired last December. Since each country still has about 10,000 weapons, mostly undeployed and in storage, the new START is a modest step forward. It is, however, a down payment on improved U.S.-Russia relations and a possible prelude to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Presidents Obama and Medvedev will sign the new treaty in Prague, the site of President Obama’s groundbreaking speech one year ago in which he set out a vision for a nuclear free world.

There are 23,000 nuclear bombs on the planet, all but 1,000 of them in the U.S. and Russia. To convince the other nuclear weapons states (the U.K., China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea) to join negotiations for their total elimination, it is imperative that the U.S. and Russia cut their enormous arsenals first.

“No Nuclear Weapons” Sarah van Gelder interviews former Secretary of State George Shultz.

Obama and Medvedev pledged to negotiate these weapons cuts as a step towards “a nuclear free world.” The talks almost ran aground when the U.S. announced it was putting new missile defenses in Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, after it had canceled plans to site them in the Czech Republic. Russia views the expansion of U.S. missile defenses as a threat to the integrity of its nuclear arsenal. The parties agreed to finesse their differences by settling for language in the treaty’s preamble—which the U.S. argues is not binding—acknowledging that the size of offensive arsenals must be tied to the number of anti-missile defenses.

Powerful forces are arrayed against Obama’s vision. Forty-one Republican senators wrote to him warning that they would not ratify the START treaty if the president made any moves to cut back on the U.S. missile defense program. They have also exacted a stiff price by requiring an increase in the nuclear weapons budget, including plans for a new facility to manufacture plutonium cores for new bombs. And the nuclear weapons labs are raising questions about the soundness of the nuclear arsenal without further money spent on testing and weapons development.

Nevertheless, international expectations for progress in eliminating nuclear weapons are on the rise. In addition to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s proposal to begin negotiations on a nuclear weapons convention to ban the bomb, the German Bundestag has just passed a motion urging major steps towards nuclear abolition—including removing U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Germany and beginning international talks on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons.

In May, the UN will host a conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which contains a promise from the nuclear powers to give up their nuclear weapons in return for a pledge from all the other states not to acquire them. Tens of thousands of citizen activists will march from Times Square to the UN headquarters in New York, calling for nuclear abolition. Strategy sessions to develop next steps are planned by the Abolition 2000 Network and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. On June 5th, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is organizing in communities all over the world to urge negotiations to ban the bomb.  While President Obama qualified his call for a nuclear free world by saying it might not be achieved “in my lifetime,” his very articulation of the vision has unleashed the aspirations of people all over the world, making the abolition of nuclear weapons an idea whose time has come.

Alice Slater wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Alice is New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace FoundationAbolition 2000 Network. and serves on the coordinating committee of the

President Obama’s call for a nuclear-weapons-free world in Prague last April unleashed a great outpouring of support from international allies and grassroots activists demanding a process to actually eliminate nuclear weapons. One recent and unexpected initiative has come from America’s NATO allies. Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway have called on NATO to review its nuclear policy and remove all U.S. nuclear weapons currently on European soil under NATO’s “nuclear sharing” policy. Despite U.S. insistence on strict adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which prohibits the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear weapons states, several hundred U.S. nuclear bombs are housed in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey.

Citing Obama’s announcement in Prague of “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” the NATO allies have broken ranks with the United States. All five governments are experiencing domestic pressure to end the hypocrisy of the NPT, where nuclear “haves” disregard their disarmament requirements with impunity while using coercion, sanctions, threats of war, and even actual war (as in Iraq) to prevent the nuclear “have-nots” from acquiring nuclear bombs. Together with calls from major former political and military leaders to eliminate nuclear weapons, as well as UN Secretary General Ban-ki Moon’s proposal for a five-point program “to rid the world of nuclear bombs,” these NATO members have seized the political moment. They have decided to do their part to maintain the integrity of the NPT in advance of the five-year review conference this May at the UN in New York.

The NATO five put NATO’s nuclear policy on the agenda for an April strategy meeting in Estonia. They have neither been dissuaded by Obama’s cautionary note that the goal of a nuclear-weapons-free world “will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime,” nor discouraged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mistaken qualification of Obama’s remarks when she said that “we might not achieve the ambition of a world without nuclear weapons in our lifetime or successive lifetimes” (emphasis added).

Progress Elsewhere

Japan has also called for more rapid progress on nuclear disarmament. The new Democratic Party government, which ended 60 years of one-party rule, wrote Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to disavow the pro-nuclear advocacy of former Japanese officials. U.S. militarists often cited such advocacy as a rationale for maintaining the U.S. nuclear “umbrella” over Japan. Supporting Obama’s call for a nuclear-weapons-free world, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada urged the United States to declare that nuclear weapons would be used only for the “sole purpose” of deterring a nuclear attack. The declaration would end current U.S. policy, first expanded by the Clinton administration and maintained throughout the Bush presidency, to preemptively use nuclear weapons against the threat or use of chemical, biological, or conventional forces. Additionally, over 200 Japanese parliamentarians wrote to reassure Obama that, contrary to assertions by U.S. military hawks, Japan would not seek the possession of nuclear weapons were the United States to declare a “sole use” limitation on its nuclear arsenal.

These promising anti-nuclear positions come at an important political moment. Obama has been expected shortly to deliver to Congress a new nuclear posture review setting forth U.S. policy for the use of nuclear weapons. Originally scheduled for a January release, the review has been delayed several times. News of conflicting views among the drafters and of Obama’s dissatisfaction with the most recent version, which promotes the status quo on outdated Cold War nuclear policies, has been prominently reported in the mainstream press.

Pentagon Pushback

Gates has defended existing nuclear policy and expressed dissatisfaction with our NATO allies. At a meeting to discuss NATO’s 21st Century Strategic Concept — and on the heels of the Dutch government’s collapse over the decision to extend its troop deployment in Afghanistan — Gates stated that:

The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.

At the same meeting, U.S. National Security Advisor General James Jones said, “NATO must be prepared to address, deny, and deter the full spectrum of threats, whether emanating from within Europe at NATO’s boundaries, or far beyond NATO’s borders.”

Clinton, furthermore, urged the exponential growth of “missile defense throughout the world and warned that:

[N]uclear proliferation and the development of more sophisticated missiles in countries such as North Korea and Iran are reviving the specter of an interstate nuclear attack. So how do we in NATO do out part of ensure that such weapons never are unleashed on the world?

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, commenting on the new NATO strategic concept, raised Russia’s deep concerns that NATO’s assertion of a right to use military force globally violated the UN Charter. Russia views U.S. plans to ring Europe with missiles in Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania, with a missile command center in the Czech Republic, as a threat. The Obama-Medvedev negotiations on the first round of nuclear arms cuts on START (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) have been delayed repeatedly by disagreements on U.S. plans for missile proliferation.

Momentum Builds

Nevertheless, there is extraordinary momentum behind calls to abolish nuclear weapons. Thousands of international visitors are expected to join U.S. citizens to assemble, march, and rally in New York during the NPT Review Conference in May. Mayors for Peace is working to enroll 5,000 mayors in its Vision 2020 Campaign to complete negotiations on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons by 2020. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and the Abolition 2000 Network are committed to work for a nuclear weapons convention regardless of the NPT outcome. Norway, host of the successful Oslo process to ban cluster bombs, noted that the Oslo and Ottawa processes banning landmines could be replicated to move forward on a nuclear disarmament based on “powerful alliances between civil society and governments.” There has been an unprecedented media focus on U.S. nuclear policy and debate about whether Obama can make good on his pledge and earn his Nobel Peace Prize.

Nearly 25 years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev unleashed the forces of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union. These forces kindled people’s aspirations for freedom, resulting in the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet empire. Despite the formidable array of powerful interests lawlessly brandishing their missiles and refurbishing their nuclear arsenals, Obama and Medvedev’s call for a nuclear-weapons-free world may similarly have unleashed forces that will transform the 20th-century paradigm of perpetual war and terror.

Alice Slater is New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and serves on the Coordinating Committee of Abolition 2000. She is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

Scripture tells us: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Pro. 29:18). One must also say that where there is no courage, the vision perishes. In his Prague speech, President Obama offered a courageous vision of a world released from the Cold War bondage of nuclear weapons and the mutually assured destruction they exist to ensure: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Moreover, he specifically committed to a transformational change in US nuclear weapons policy, “to put an end to Cold War thinking” and said “we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy and urge others to do the same.” And he committed to making this vision a global reality by stating “as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.” It was this vision of a nuclear free world that animated the Nobel Committee to award him the Peace Prize: “The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

Soon the Administration will present its first Nuclear Posture Review. The congressionally mandated review will set the role nuclear weapons will play in overall U.S. security policy, how many nuclear weapons the United States needs to fulfill those roles, and whether the United States should produce new nuclear warheads. Its effects will be felt for the next decade.

The Bush Administration stunned the world in 2002 when portions of its Nuclear Posture Review leaked to the press revealed a dramatic expansion of the role that nuclear weapons would play in US national security policy. It expanded that role beyond preventing the use of nuclear weapons against the US to include deterring biological and chemical attacks as well as conventional threats to vital US interests. In an unprecedented move, it provocatively named 7 specific targets including Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya which do not even possess nuclear arsenals. (The nuclear states cited were Russia, China and North Korea) The Bush guidance also embraced preemptive strikes, expanding the longstanding US policy of retaining the option to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a crisis. And in an ominous, post-911 move, the Bush Nuclear Posture Review proposed the development of smaller, more usable nuclear warheads. The goal here was to widen the capabilities of our arsenal to meet ongoing conventional challenges like destroying deeply buried targets and providing the Administration with the capacity to engage in limited nuclear attacks. Two years later the Bush Administration partially realized this goal with the introduction of Global Strike, a newly established mission for Strategic Command that gave the White House the ability to deliver a limited nuclear strike against any target on the planet within hours of the order to do so.

The Bush Review set the stage for increased nuclear weapons spending, expanded roles for the nuclear arsenal and the development of new weapons to meet those roles. It foreshadowed the invasion of Iraq—justified by the Administration as a counter-proliferation measure, and set the tone for our approach to Iran’s nuclear program.

The 2010 Nuclear Posture Review will necessarily be interpreted against this backdrop and will set the trajectory of US policy for the next five to ten years. It must also be linked to the Nonproliferation Treaty Review (NPT) Conference set for May. Bush’s Nuclear Posture Review in 2002 set the stage for the collapse of the 2005 NPT Review when Administration representatives dismissed all past obligations that the US had made in prior NPT reviews. President Obama’s vision of a US-led process to eliminate nuclear weapons hangs in the balance as powerful forces in the US nuclear weapons complex line up to endorse the status quo and hold on to their formidable power. It will take real courage to reverse the Bush era policies. It will take a transformational approach to truly align the Posture Review with the vision the President set forth in Prague and make the NPT Review a step in that direction.

What must the Nuclear Posture Review do? Minimally it has to do three things. First, it must truly commit the United States to fulfilling it longstanding obligations under the NPT. The Posture Review needs to embrace the vision set forth in Prague with a concrete policy declaration orienting US nuclear weapons policy toward the goal of global elimination under a negotiated, verifiable ban on development, testing and possession of nuclear weapons. Second, it must build a firewall around the role of the US deterrent during the period of negotiations on a verifiable ban. In so doing it needs to renounce the expanded roles for nuclear weapons formalized under the Bush Administration. Finally, it must envision a nuclear posture that embraces global elimination. Rather than continuing to spend over $50 Billion each year to maintain and deploy both the existing warheads and the scientific-industrial capacity to build new weapons, the United States must shrink and reorient the nuclear weapons complex to focus on the tasks of accelerating the dismantling of warheads, safely destroying their toxic nuclear material, and enhancing the technical capacities for global verification of nuclear disarmament.
In essence the Posture Review needs to change the trajectory of US nuclear weapons policy and spending. It must break from a reliance on indefinite deterrence and embrace elimination. It must limit the role that US nuclear weapons play in the interim by rejecting all uses of nuclear weapons first, all uses of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states and must reject any use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear threats. And it must reject language that declares the US nuclear deterrent a cornerstone of US security—a declaration that other nations have pointed to as justification for developing nuclear weapons for themselves.

The Vatican has been crystal clear on all of this. Mons. Francis Chullikat, Deputy Head of the Holy See delegation to the UN, addressing the first session of the Preparatory Committee for the 2005 review conference of the NPT, reminded the Conference that the 2000 Review Conference yielded commitments by the US to, “An unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament to which all states parties are committed under Article VI.”
Mons. Chullikat continued by declaring: “There can be no moral acceptance of military doctrines that embody the permanence of nuclear weapons.…Those nuclear weapon states resisting negotiations should therefore be strongly urged to finally come to the negotiating table… In fact, in clinging to their outmoded rationales for nuclear deterrence, they are denying the most ardent aspirations of humanity as well as the opinion of the highest legal authority in the world. In this regard, my Delegation wishes to reaffirm its well-known position: nuclear weapons are incompatible with the peace we seek for the 21st century; they cannot be justified.”

The Vatican again addressed the continued reliance on nuclear deterrence in 2005. In his address to the delegates at the NPT Review Conference, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, Vatican U.N. ambassador, condemned the ongoing investments to maintain and upgrade the nuclear weapons states’ nuclear deterrents: “When the Holy See expressed its limited acceptance of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War, it was with the clearly stated condition that deterrence was only a step on the way toward progressive nuclear disarmament. The Holy See has never countenanced nuclear deterrence as a permanent measure, nor does it today when it is evident that nuclear deterrence drives the development of ever newer nuclear arms, thus preventing genuine nuclear disarmament.”

President Obama said in Prague that “as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.” The Posture Review is a good place to start it. The NPT Review Conference in May will bring together all the nations of the world with the notable exceptions of Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea. That’s where the US can lead it. The Nobel Committee echoed the deepest hopes of a world that is ready to follow. It is up to President Obama to fulfill the promise of his esteemed Prize.

The reduction and elimination of fissile materials and control of
their production is critical to nuclear weapons disarmament, to
halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and to ensuring that
terrorists do not acquire nuclear weapons.

The blog tracks key developments in production and use of plutonium
and highly enriched uranium, industrial and political decisions
concerning these materials, as well as their impacts on international
security, safety, environment, and economy.

The blog is maintained by members of the International Panel on
Fissile Materials (IPFM), including Alexander Glaser, Yves Marignac,
Zia Mian, Pavel Podvig, M.V. Ramana and Mycle Schneider. Opinions
expressed in this blog are those of the authors of the posts and do
not necessarily represent positions of the IPFM.

The blog can be found at http://www.fissilematerials.org/blog. To
follow the blog, use the RSS feed, Twitter, or Facebook links at the
site.

The International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), is an independent
group of arms-control and nonproliferation experts from seventeen
countries: Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, the
Netherlands, Mexico, Norway, Pakistan, South Korea, Russia, South
Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Panel
is co-chaired by Dr. R. Rajaraman, Professor Emeritus of Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi, India and Professor Frank von Hippel of
Princeton University.

Since 1995, when more than 170 nations voted to extend the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, civil society has been calling for the establishment of an international agency to promote renewable energy sources to take the place of fossil fuels without resorting to nuclear power.

Recognizing the “inextricable link” between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, Abolition 2000, a global

Click on image to read more about how IRENA will promote renewable energy worldwide in this report: Founding an International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

network for the elimination of nuclear weapons, drafted a model statute for the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and lobbied nations around the world to institute it. [1] Joining with other grassroots networks working to avoid catastrophic climate change through a transition to sustainable energy, activists spoke up at numerous international meetings and conferences and conferred with national environmental departments, seeking support for an energy agency focused solely on clean, safe, renewable energy.

In January 2009, one year ago, Germany, Denmark, and Spain launched the founding meeting for IRENA in Bonn, Germany. [2] A year later, 142 of the 192 member states of the United Nations, as well as the European Union, have signed the IRENA statute. The agency has opened headquarters in Abu Dhabi and branch offices in Bonn and Vienna, and its interim-director general, Helene Pelosse, a former French environmental minister who held positions in trade and finance as well, is determined to hire a staff comprised of at least 50 percent women.

IRENA is committed to becoming a principal driving force in promoting a rapid transition toward the sustainable use of a renewable energy on a global scale. It has a mandate to promote all forms of renewable energy produced in a sustainable manner, including solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower, ocean, and appropriate bio energy. It will provide practical advice and support for both industrialized and developing countries, helping them to build capacity and improve their regulatory frameworks.

This year, “IRENA will focus on building a network of international renewable energy experts, starting to map the global potential of renewables, and build up a comprehensive database of policies to promote renewable energy,” said Pelosse. It “will become a one-stop-shop for up-to-date and relevant information on renewable energy.” [3] As a pilot project, IRENA will help develop renewable energy for a number of islands within the Kingdom of Tonga that lack basic electricity. [4]

Every 30 minutes, enough of the sun’s energy reaches the Earth’s surface to meet global energy demand for an entire year. Wind can satisfy the world’s electricity needs 40 times over, and meet all global energy demands five times over. The geothermal energy stored in the top six miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times the energy of the world’s known oil and gas resources. Tidal, wave, and small hydropower can also provide vast stores of energy everywhere on earth, abundant and free for every person on our planet, rich and poor alike. [5]

While the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been committed to promoting nuclear power and the International Energy Agency (IEA) was established in the 1970s to handle the crisis in fossil fuel distribution, only IRENA will be solely dedicated to promoting clean, safe, renewable energy from the abundant energy resources of our planet.

As a derivative of the Greek word eirene, meaning “peace,” IRENA is particularly well-named. The rapid development of renewable energy will enable us to forego our reliance on fossil and nuclear fuels, the continued misuse of which will lead inevitably to climate catastrophe, nuclear proliferation, and perpetual resource wars. Universal reliance on sustainable energy will instead create a promising path toward creating peace on earth.

Alice Slater wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Alice is the NY Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Convener of the Abolition 2000 Sustainable Energy Working Group.

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Sources
1.    www.abolition2000.org/?page_id=153
2.    www.irena.org
3.    www.ameinfo.com/221385.html
4.    www.irena.org/downloads/newsletter/IRENA_Newsletter_Web.pdf
5.    www.abolition2000.org/a2000-files/sustainable-now.pdf

COUNTRIES NOT YET SIGNATORY STATES OF IRENA, 11/09 (55 nations)

Andorra
Bahamas
Barbados
Belgium
Belize
Bhutan
Bolivia
Botswana
Brazil
Burma
Burundi
Canada
China
Columbia
Comoros
Croatia
Cuba
Czech Republic
Dominica
El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea
Guyana
Haiti
Holy See
Hungary
Jamaica
Korea, North
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Macedonia
Malaysia
Marshall Islands
Mexico
Mozambique
Myanmar
Namibia
New Zealand
Qatar
Russia
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
San Marino
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
South Africa
Suriname
Taiwan
Thailand
Trinidad and Tobago
Turkmenistan
Tuvalu
Ukraine
Venezuela
Vietnam