Humanity must soon rediscover Peace, not War. The test of the good ruler in ancient China was to maintain peace within the four corners of the kingdom. What is your test for your ruler? It is the responsibility of a nation-state to demonstrate good governance globally. There must be sustained re-education of elites and strong public participation for that to occur.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse portrayed by Albrecht Durer in his woodcutting appeared often during the Cold War. Their names in the Book of Revelation: Pestilence, War, Famine and Death can now be substituted by the likely consequences of Pandemic (Deadly Disease), Terror, Climate Change and Nuclear Proliferation.
Regarding nuclear proliferation and it’s probable consequences, the focus is on Iran and N. Korea rather than the entire earth. There was less controversy in Britain over the Iraq War, and the Environment and Globalization, than in renewing Britain’s nuclear weapons capability.
Non-debate on Trident renewal: In 2005, Prime Minister Tony Blair told the new Parliament any decision would not be taken without ‘an open and continual discussion in the House and elsewhere, but Silence followed. A year later, the Commons Defense Committee said it was ‘surprised and disappointed’ that the Ministry of Defense had refused to cooperate with its inquiry regarding the future of Trident. The exchange of letters between Tony Blair and President Bush confirmed U.S. support for the British deterrent, and did not mention the need for parliamentary approval.
If Britain’s are asked whether they should renew their nuclear deterrent or not, their opinion is equally divided. But if a poll is conducted in Scotland where the Trident nuclear submarine fleet is based the answer is always no.
The British reasoning for Trident renewal is based on special circumstances or reasons applying to Britain, but NOT to ANY WOULD-BE nuclear state, which justify the retention of such weapons (This sounds like hypocrisy);the second reason being these weapons are here to stay and will never be got rid of. None of this initiated significant national debate.
50 years ago when Harold Macmillan claimed Britain needed to test the hydrogen bomb to possess the same ‘massive’ weapon’ as the US and Soviet Union to be able to ‘discuss’ on equal terms with them.
Russian President Vladimir Putin asserts ‘it is impossible to discuss many issues, including international security issues, without Russia, which is a nuclear power’
The way General de Gaulle restored France’s greatness was by mainly by acquiring nuclear weapons.
This motivated Mao Zedong who in 1960 maintained that ‘money, steel and atom bombs’ were the key to gaining respect.
For the United States, nuclear weapons are an indispensable part of the claim of ‘unprecedented and unequalled strength and influence in the world’
France affirms its commitment to nuclear disarmament, but focuses on measures to be taken to prevent further proliferation by others
A speech by US Ambassador Christina Rocca to the 2006 UN Conference on Disarmament in which she questioned nuclear disarmament. “How can we create the environment necessary to complete the process of nuclear disarmament?” Her disappointing answer was hopefully someday a better world where ‘the lessening of international tension and the strengthening of international trust would make it possible’ for nations to give up their nuclear weapons voluntarily. *Maybe the nation with the first to create and proliferate, and with the most, to act first giving them up, thus providing moral fortitude to the rest by removing the “security dilemma” they were the first to create.
Ambassador Rocca’s suggestion that it is up to sovereign states to behave appropriately is like telling the fox who is guarding the hen house to behave appropriately. This is a dream world of sweetness and light, and is particularly bizarre to hear this vision set out by the United States which basically regards the world as a very evil place.
How can some nuclear powers claim to be more legitimate than others (or non-nuclear powers?) I say they can’t. Human behavior is human behavior and is the same everywhere. We still face a nuclear crisis no different than during the Cold War, though when the term is used now, it is applied to Iran, N. Korea, or the hypothetical ‘terrorist bomb’. Yet there are current warnings statesmen and strategists who believe we’re at a ‘nuclear tipping point’.
One of these statesmen was Jimmy Carter. Regarding the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty he said the ‘treaty must be ‘reconfirmed and subsequently honored by leaders who are inspired to act wisely and courageously by an informed public’. The steps necessary were: to adopt a Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, to conclude negotiations on a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, to reduce reliance on nuclear arsenals, adopt a policy of ‘no-first-use’, and refrain from new missile defense systems which could undermine the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
After that was the election of George W. Bush and 9/11, and no further progress was made.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had no doubt. He warned in his final statement before stepping down that the 2005 failure was a ‘terrible signal’ for the future: “The world [stands] at a crossroads … One path … can take us to a world in which the proliferation of nuclear weapons is restricted and reversed through trust, dialogue and negotiated agreement. The other leads to a world in which a growing number of States feel obliged to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, and in which non-State actors acquire the means to carry out nuclear terrorism.
N. Korea is now a de facto nuclear power, and can be expected to maintain covert capability even if the six-power negotiations succeed in limiting further development.
Iran has become the touchstone in everyday discussion of nuclear crisis, as if its alleged (though unproved) nuclear aspirations minimized every other concern possible. In April 2007, senior US defense official, Eric Edelman, tried to justify his government’s plan to install missile defenses in Poland / Czech Republic almost entirely as a response to a completely hypothetical Iranian ballistic missile threat by 2015.
Nuclear achievements are a matter of national pride, starting with the U.S., Britain, Soviet Union, and onward. What is wrong with a nation desiring to join that prestigious list. If it is not a prestigious list, what is keeping the other nations from giving up their power and taking their names off the list? (What is good for the goose is good for the gander.) As energy supplies diminish, there is must support for clean, efficient nuclear fuel. Yet technology of enrichment of uranium to provide that fuel can be used to make bombs.
The annual call by IAEA Director-General Mohamed El Baradei for a diplomatic effort to rid the Middle East of all weapons is ignored as frequently as it is made. Well, yeah. Why would anyone give up what little power they do have as it will always be less than the hegemon who has imperialistic intentions towards that region.
What is more frightening is new and great willingness to threaten pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons, (such as the U.S. 2005 ‘Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations’.), loss of interest in the concept of no-first-use (only China still declares it will not use nuclear weapons first, and some Chinese strategists have cast doubt on that), continued modernization and miniaturization of nuclear weapons which blurs the distinction between strategic and tactical use, and increases the temptation to take pre-emptive action, the spread of ballistic missile technologies and the development of missile defense systems, the maintenance of nuclear weapon systems at a high state of readiness, with many warheads on ‘hair-trigger alert’, the proliferation of nuclear energy programs which could produce weapon usable material: 40 states now have capacity to build a bomb.
It is an old concept that a world at peace must be well-governed. “The emperor must ensure that ‘all the common people prosper’ according to Chinese historian Sima Qian 2000 years ago.
As Globalization shoots across the boundaries of nations, new obligations and duties are imposed on governments to provide human security and good governance across the whole world based collective interest as well as morality for there to be peace ‘across the four seas’. The invisible connections between inequality, deprivation, exploitation, hunger, migration, environmental degradation, militarization, arms expenditure, conflict and war are now clearly seen. In the early 1990s, there were great expectations that the proceeds of peace would be spent for the benefit of humankind. This was not achieved and renewed pessimism has set in. Issues of war and peace are disconnected from the effort to take care of global basic human needs.
Older campaigners for nuclear disarmament in the 1960-70s may remember the Marxist argument that ‘we have to get rid of capitalism before we can abolish the bomb’. Now the argument is we have to get rid of poverty, inequality and oppression first, with global warming recently added.
Kofi Annan warned before leaving office that progress need to be made on both fronts – non-proliferation and disarmament – at once’. This means agreement between people who put non-proliferation first and those who put disarmament first.
Work on the non-proliferation front needs agreement to: universal adherence to the IAEA additional protocol; restrictions on the behavior of states who withdraw from the treaty; nuclear fuel to be supplied solely by an international fuel-service regime; effective enforcement mechanisms against nuclear proliferators.
Work on the disarmament front needs agreement to: extension of international controls over those nuclear states outside the NPT; ratification of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty; conclusion of a verifiable Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty; acceptance of the principle of no-first-use.
Development and aid packages shouldn’t be used to patch wounds caused by war and violence, but to prevent wounds from being made – Iraq being the example. The policies chosen by the international community made the second war more likely. Sanctions came first, humanitarian aid last. Hans von Sponeck (former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq) said ‘the civilian population [was held] accountable for the acts of armament of their Government and therefore became a tool for the punishment of innocent people for something they had not done’. The small amount of aid that was given only ensured the survival of S. Hussein and his group. It would have been wiser and more humane kill Saddam’s regime kindness, flooding his country with international aid to reduce the power of his elites. Negating evil with good – a novel, efficient idea? Should have been the same strategy used on N. Korea instead of the “grudging drip-feed of aid which kept Kim Jong Il’s elite healthy but the rest of his people barely alive.”
The failure of the rich and developed nations to provide adequate aid and support for countries and peoples who are poor and disadvantaged is a history of many failures.
The Alma Ata Declaration of 1977 where the world committed to health care for all people by the end of the century, but in 2000, millions of poor people died of pandemic and other diseases, most easily preventable and treatable. The 1990 Summit on Children the world committed to universal primary education by 2000, but failed. Generally the developed world has failed, and continues to fail, to reach its mark. The United Nations’s review of the Millennium Development Goals in 2006, almost halfway through the period in which they were to be met found that the absolute number of people across the world suffering from chronic hunger continued to increase, and the goal of reducing by 50% the amount of people without access to basic sanitation and clean drinking water by 2015 was not going to be met.
Bertha von Suttner’s main point was if we really want peace, we should expect it, we should prepare for it. Instead we prepare for human cruelty, torture, terror, violence and bloodshed.
President Eisenhower said thermonuclear weapons are tremendously powerful but not ‘as powerful as is world opinion today’.
What would it take today to renew public opinion in favor of nuclear disarmament? Who remembers Hiroshima that is alive today? Would it require a nuclear button being pushed before we “remember” the lessons we’ve already learned. It is not hard to imagine the scene of a “pre-emptive” strike on Iran.
And don’t forget the permanent risk of a nuclear launch by accident or misinterpreted data.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock “minute hand” has been moved forward from seven to five minutes before midnight due to: North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed, U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on earth.
How are we going to put peace and disarmament back into our media headlines?
Kenneth Boulding, leading peace theorist says serious work in the field of peace studies gets less attention than the huge writings of war studies, and is harder to find in the bookshops. There was never a problem in writing editorial comment on the wars and conflicts of the 1990s … much harder to find a place for UN reform, non-proliferation,
human development.
Recommendations from John Gittings:
1) We need to balance studies of Peace and War, intensify peace research, promote peace education especially in school curricula. (John Burton asks if conflicts are caused by inherent human aggressiveness, or ‘the emergence of inappropriate social institutions and norms that would seem reasonably easy to alter. It means delving far back into history to examine the evolution of peace and violence – to study peaceful cultures to learn what makes
them peaceful, as well as why they did not last.
2) We need to admit the true history of the Cold War, not the revised version that the West shared no blame for its crises, downplays the risk involved: the nuclear threats, alarms, accidents and near catastrophes of that period should be part of our historical consciousness rather than airbrushed out of the record. Robert McNamara reminds us ‘we came within a hair’s breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions’, yet film, literature and print downplay the dramas
3) We need to take seriously the warnings of senior former political and military leaders who have seen the system working, or failing to work, whose fears for the future are disregarded. General Lee Butler, once head of US Strategic Air Command, said the leaders of the nuclear weapon states today ‘risk very much being judged by future historians as having been unworthy of their age … of reigniting nuclear arms races around the world, of condemning mankind to live under a cloud of perpetual anxiety’. In 2007, the Global Security Institute in Washington warned: ‘Current efforts by the administration to stem proliferation fail precisely because they do not uphold the principal bargain of the non-proliferation treaty, a clear commitment to nuclear disarmament in exchange for non-proliferation’.
4) Educate our public in the relative order of magnitude expressed in our budgets for war preparation, and budgets for peaceful development. A sixth of the world’s population subsists on the equivalent of less than one US dollar a day: including them, more than half lives on less that two dollars a day. Three million children are living with HIV/AIDS and four million more have died of it since the epidemic began. In a world where global military spending reached one trillion US dollars in 2003, the problem needs to be stated in starker terms. When we support the call for the doubling of development aid to meet the Millennium Goals, we should be demanding the cutting in half of all military expenditures as it is unlikely one can be achieved without the other.
5) We need to rescue the internationalist values of the United Nations from the cynicism and despair into which they have been cast because of the way its authority has been undermined. Remember Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace, written on the instructions of a special summit of the Security Council in 1991. It urged that the new opportunity offered by the end of the Cold War to achieve the ‘great objectives’ of the UN Charter ‘must not be squandered. Ten years later, the follow-up Brahimi Report commissioned by Kofi Annan admitted that the UN had ‘repeatedly failed to meet the challenge’ of protecting people from war, and that it could ‘do no better today’. This is not a judgment on the UN, whatever its organizational shortcomings, but on the member states who have failed to bolster U.N. authority or who have defied it. We should not abandon core issues such as reform of the Security Council or the establishment of a permanent peacekeeping force just because so far they have been impeded.
From David Davies, who argued so passionately in favor of the League of Nations and for the establishment of an international police force in his writing in the 1920s of his metaphor for the collapse of civilization by the reoccurrence of world war: How thin and meager is the partition which divides sheer barbarism from modern civilization! The one is as far removed from the other as the basement of a New York skyscraper is from its roof-garden, but it only requires a bomb of sufficient magnitude to shatter the entire edifice. A new world war, waged with the weapons which ‘applied’ science has now placed at the disposal of man, may easily produce the wholesale annihilation of man within the space of a few months … Internationally we walk along the edge of a precipice.
From Gittings: We are still walking on the edge of that precipice, and are threatened by vastly more powerful weapons that could destroy humanity not within months but within
days – or even hours.
From me: It’s not the countries trying to compete with the hegemon I fear. It is the country that has already used nuclear weapons, is using them now to manipulate and control others, and the ones that feel they will be inclined to need them in the future. It’s that greedy, elitist mentality I fear most.
Science, Technology & Inequality 