The Abolition 2000 Report Cards
Measuring Our Progress Toward a Nuclear-Free World
Janet Bloomfield and Pamela S. Meidell 
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 Janet Bloomfield, Joseph Rotblat, and Pamela S. Meidell |
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Since 1996, we have written an annual Report Card on progress towards a nuclear-free world. That first year, we were asked to assess the work of the Abolition 2000 network [1], formed a year earlier in the Hague (during the historic International Court of Justice hearings on the threat or use of nuclear weapons). We chose to measure the year's events using the 11 points of the Abolition Statement as our criteria, using the form commonly used in schools to grade students, a "report card." We released it during the annual Disarmament Week at the UN in New York, on October 24, United Nations Day, in recognition of the vital role that the UN plays in disarmament and global security. In 1997, we included the Moorea Declaration in our criteria, recognizing the need for decolonization to go hand-in-hand with denuclearization. Since then, we have continued to release these Report Cards as an Atomic Mirror contribution to the larger efforts of Abolition 2000. We have written them to be an annual overview of the world situation regarding nuclear weapons, using a succinct form that we hope is useful to busy activists. Over the years, the reports have changed from straightforward report cards marking progress on nuclear abolition to more indepth analysis of where we are and what can be done to capture the imagination of the people and decision-makers for the cause of a nuclear-free world.
In 2003, it is sobering to look back at the last eight years and review these Report Cards. The most striking observation is the failure, in the late 1990s, to seize the remarkable opportunity to make irreversible progress towards the abolition of nuclear weapons. While President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair were in office simultaneously from 1997 to 2000, they could have led the world to start negotiations for a nuclear weapons convention. So many favorable factors were present:
- The Cold War was over and Russia was becoming a strategic partner rather than a strategic rival to the West.
- The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty were all in place, forming a framework for further action.
- Senior military and political figures increasingly recognized the lack of utility of nuclear weapons.
- Nuclear weapons had been declared "generally illegal" by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
- Non-governmental organizations and "middle power" states had formed an alliance to promote the full implementation of Article VI of the NPT. [2]
- Policy makers as well as the world's peoples increasingly recognized that transnational global security threats, such as global warming, disease, and poverty, were the real problems, rather than traditional state-to-state conflict.
What went wrong? Lack of political courage and a lack of widespread public concern combined to keep the issue of nuclear abolition on the back burner. The media didn't help by continually ignoring nuclear issues. Thus, we found ourselves in 2000 with a major shift in the 'election' of an assertive right-wing administration in the United States. Then came 9/11. The world watched in horror as the Bush administration and Co. seized their opportunity to launch their 'War on Terror,' starting in Afghanistan, and leading ultimately to the disaster of the second Gulf War in Iraq.
The realistic prospects for nuclear abolition are now zero. With the Bush administration came a new Nuclear Posture Review, reversing years of steady work toward a disarmed world. We, the people, are now back to resisting new nuclear developments like "bunker busters" and "low-yield battlefield nukes" and striving to save the test ban and the NPT.
Since 1996, we have continually stressed the need for political will to make nuclear abolition a reality. The current US government and its ally, Tony Blair, have bucket loads of the stuff: lots of political will but no wisdom, no patience, no compassion.
How do we, in such dark times, generate the political will to revive the nuclear abolition project? We suggest that we need to re-engage with a public opinion that is now sensitized to issues of war and peace as never before. In the UK, a consortium of groups including Pugwash, Greenpeace, the Atomic Mirror, the Oxford Research Group, Quakers, and CND, have been working to launch a major nuclear weapons awareness and education program next year. This effort will be based on rigorous research into public opinion rather than on vague notions of what people think based on the issues that activists care about!
In re-reading all of reports since 1996, one passage particularly stands out. In a speech in 1998, President Nelson Mandela reminded the world that the very first resolution of the UN General Assembly, adopted in January 1946, sought to address the challenge of "the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction." He went on to say: "We must face the fact that after countless initiatives and resolutions, we still do not have concrete and generally accepted proposals supported by a clear commitment by the nuclear-weapons States to the speedy, final and total elimination of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons capabilities... We must ask the question, which might sound naive to those who have elaborated sophisticated arguments to justify their refusal to eliminate these terrible and terrifying weapons of mass destruction – why do they need them anyway? In reality, no rational answer can be advanced to explain in a satisfactory manner what, in the end, is the consequence of Cold War inertia and an attachment to the use of the threat of brute force, to assert the primacy of some States over others."
Mandela clearly articulates the heart of the problem. The world situation he described in 1998 has only gotten worse. The nuclear weapon states may be committed on paper to nuclear elimination but in reality they still find an advantage in possessing the means to destroy the world. This is the grim and underlying truth of our situation. The hopeful lesson of the last eight years is that the vast majority of the world's states and people, when alerted to the real dangers facing our planet, are prepared to act for peace and justice. They have acted for the cancellation of debt, for the amelioration of the effects of globalization and against pre-emptive war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The question we must ask ourselves is: What are we going to do in the coming years to encourage them to act for nuclear abolition?
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[Footnotes added by editor]
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Copies of the Atomic Mirror Report Card "Here There Be Dragons – Nuclear Politics Writ Large in the Unknowne Waters of The Post 9/11 World" and all past Report Cards, are available on the Abolition 2000 website (http://www.abolition2000.org/reports/Dragons_v2.pdf). |
