How Not to Think About Nuclear Weapons
Or: The Elephant in the Closet
Peter Weiss
In a recent article James Surowiecki, the business columnist of The New Yorker, reported that people who work in the insurance industry don’t like to think about really big disasters, like tsunamis, for two main reasons: (1) they are too painful to think about and (2) it’s too difficult to figure out what to do about them. This describes, rather accurately, the current state of the world’s involvement with the nuclear weapons issue.
There have been times, to be sure, when this issue held the attention of significant numbers of people; enough, one would have thought, to bring about significant changes in the way the issue was approached. At the very beginning of the Nuclear Age there was the Baruch Plan, which foundered on being mistaken for a plan for world government. It is worth recalling its author’s opening words in his address to the Atomic Energy Commission of the United Nations:[1]
“We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead. That is our business.
Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work our salvation. If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of Fear. Let us not deceive ourselves: We must elect World Peace or World Destruction.”
In 1962, at the height of the cold war there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, later described by one of its participants, historian Arthur Schlesinger, as the most dangerous moment in human history.
But the end of the Cold War – which shows signs of reviving following the frosty exchange between Presidents Bush and Putin in Bratislava on February 24, 2005 – has lulled world opinion into a state of resigned acceptance. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the prescient subtitle of Dr. Strangelove, has evidently become the mantra of the new age, at least in the nuclear weapon states and their allies, with only one qualification: Keep the thing out of the hands of terrorists.
Throughout this period the diplomats have been busy cooking up their alphabet soup of multilateral and bilateral treaties aimed at reining in the nuclear beast, some in force, some not yet or no longer, including AT, PTBT, OST, NPT, ABM, SALT I and II, TTBT, START I, II and III, CTBT, and the various Nuclear Free Zone Treaties, as well as, lately, in the antitreaty age inaugurated by the United States, Security Council Resolution 1540 and PSI.[2] Has this assemblage of hard-negotiated agreements served to reduce the nuclear danger? Probably, to some extent, but at the same time it has served to contribute to the feeling that something is being done about nuclear weapons and that the nuclear weapon states are honoring their NPT Article VI and ICJ obligation to negotiate in good faith for total nuclear disarmament, which, as we know, they have not the slightest intention of doing.
In the meantime, the Bush administration has used the image of the mushroom cloud over Manhattan, in the immortal words of Condoleezza Rice, to undermine the whole structure of international law and to stand the United Nations Charter on its head. The concept of self-defense in the Charter, an instrument that was to “save future generations from the scourge of war”, has been stretched beyond all recognition and legitimacy to justify military action based upon the perception – or misperception – of some danger in the indeterminate future. Iran and North Korea are not to be bombed or invaded just yet, but “all options are on the table.” Other countries “must” give up their nuclear ambitions, but the United States and the other nuclear powers need not give up their nuclear possessions, because the situation has changed since the NPT was enacted. In a frightening analogy to the rendition of detainees to countries where they will be tortured, the American President has announced that he would not be greatly disturbed if another country took out Iran’s nuclear weapon sites.
It stands to reason that so long as the nuclear weapon states hold on to their nukes as guarantors of their security, there will always be other countries that will seek to acquire nukes for the same reason or for simple old-fashioned blackmail. It stands to reason that so long as no serious effort is made to corral “loose nukes”, or to end the production of the base materials from which nukes are made, the danger of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists will be ever present and, incidentally, will not be deterrable by the weapons possessed by the nuclear weapon states. But reason is in short supply in the councils of the nuclear weapon states. Where it occasionally raises its timid head, as in certain initiatives by members of the US Congress, it is quickly put down again. “For to him who has will more be given; and from him who has not, even more will be taken away.”[3]
In this situation, what is our brave band of brothers and sisters to do, those of us who remain committed to the clear vision of the absolute necessity of ridding the world of “the ultimate evil?”[4] Let me suggest a few things:
1. Let us not settle for crumbs from the table, but keep our eyes on the prize. “Back to Basics,” as Xanthe Hall from IPPNW Germany puts it. Nobody wants to see the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty fall apart, but to put our wisdom and energy at the service of this goal to the detriment of the goal of abolition is to play the game of the nuclear powers; they would like nothing better.
2. The US has decided that treaties are too cumbersome an instrument for international lawmaking in the 21st century and has opted instead for lawmaking through the Security Council, as in Resolution 1540. But the promise of Article VI of the NPT will never be fulfilled without a treaty like those governing chemical and biological weapons. The model Nuclear Weapons Convention,[5] a joint project of INESAP, IALANA and IPPNW,[6] is an excellent beginning for the negotiation of such a treaty. It has been on the table since April 1997. It is obviously not being offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, but rather as a demonstration that such a convention is not too difficult to achieve from either a legal, political, or technical point of view. It is the product of three years of consultation and role playing by a group of legal and technical experts. It says to the nuclear weapon states, “Here, start with this, or start with your own draft, but start!”
3. The best place for such a negotiation would obviously be the moribund, but revivable, Conference on Disarmament, but there are other possibilities, e.g. a special conference established by the UN General Assembly, or an NPT amendment conference, or, as a last resort, an Ottawastyle process. But the failure of the nuclear weapon states to agree to even some sort of beginning is a moral and legal scandal, and the hypocrisy underlying this point needs to be driven home to the world community.
4. History moves in strange ways its wonders to perform. One year a two state solution for Israel/Palestine seems out of the question; the next year a clear majority of Israelis as well as American Jews favors it. At the beginning of the Vietnam war, most Americans believed in it and those who didn’t were regarded as traitors. A few years later, the chorus of anti-war voices drowned out the pro-war voices by far. A recently published book describes how twelve men in a printing shop started the anti-slavery movement.[7]
We have such men and women among us. They can be found in, inter alia, Abolition 2000, the Mayors for Peace, IALANA, IPPNW, the Middle Powers Initiative, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and last but not least INESAP, which has played a crucial role in the abolition movement through its unrivaled technical expertise combined with its moral commitment. No one knows exactly what puts such movements over the top. All we know is that if they keep moving toward a goal whose time has come, they will eventually reach that goal.
