DISARMAMENT-US: Canadians Attempt a Citizen’s Inspection

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 4 1998 (IPS) - A delegation of Canadian activists, led by Parliamentarian Libby Davies, launched a new drive toward disarmament this week by trying to inspect a Trident submarine construction facility in Groton, Connecticut.

The team not surprisingly was barred from the actual construction site but the move showed that “citizens do have a role to play in the verification of weapons of mass destruction”, said Davies, who represents Vancouver East in the Canadian House of Commons.

Their experience pointed to the disparity between U.N. inspections of suspected weapons sites in Iraq and the large arsenal of uninspected weapons in the United States.

“It seemed obvious to us that, although Iraq is a small potential threat…the biggest stockpiles of nuclear weapons and chemical weapons were south of the Canadian border,” argued Peter Coombes, president of the Canadian group ‘End the Arms Race’.

The team, comprising 10 disarmament activists, visited the Electric Boat Corporation in Groton on Monday afternoon to inspect the construction facilities where Trident nuclear missile- launching submarines are built. After a brief meeting with company officials, however, the group was refused permission to enter the plant and settled for an aerial inspection by helicopter.

The event, which was attended by some 40 other disarmament supporters, succeeded in drawing attention to the existence of nuclear weaponry at the Groton plant, Davies said. She noted that the activists were able to unfurl a banner, which said, “Warning: This Site Contains Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

Before visiting Groton, the team met U.N. Under-Secretary- General for Disarmament Jayantha Dhanapala in New York to assure him that the inspection would be done lawfully, and was intended to focus civil society’s attention on the ongoing need for disarmament.

Davies said the meeting was “encouraging”, and that Dhanapala supported an increased role for civil society in strengthening government commitments to non-proliferation.

“Inspection of nuclear weapons facilities by citizens groups can play a very useful role in educating the public about the existence and dangers of these facilities,” added David Morgan, president of the Vancouver-based Veterans Against Nuclear Arms, in a letter he delivered to Dhanapala.

Davies noted that the Groton inspection was the second time that she and a group of citizens attempted to look inside a US weapons site.

Earlier this year, a similar group was prevented from entering a zone where Trident submarines were being built in Bangor, Washington, and opted in that case as well to fly over the site instead – much as inspectors from the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) have done when denied access to Iraqi installations.

The second inspection’s focus on the Electric Boat Corporation kept the spotlight on the ongoing construction of Trident submarines for the US government.

“The Electric Boat Corporation is better shielded from public scrutiny than (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein’s presidential palaces,” Davies said, in a reference to a standoff this winter in which UNSCOM inspectors were denied access to those palaces until Hussein and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan brokered an agreement in February. “The public is not allowed to scrutinise the (Groton) production facility, yet they produce the world’s largest delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction.”

According to Alyn Ware, executive director of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and a participant in the Monday inspection, each Trident missile can carry a nuclear warhead boasting ten times the explosive force of the 1945 blast which struck Hiroshima. Each Trident missile-carrying submarine, he added, can carry 96 such warheads.

As a result, Ware said, the Trident weapons system violated an advisory opinion delivered two years ago by the International Court of Justice at the Hague, which declared the threat or use of nuclear weapons as “generally illegal”.

Both the production of Trident submarines during peacetime, and the Trident weapons system’s “huge explosive power”, go against the Court’s ruling that any use of nuclear weapons must still conform to the norms of international humanitarian law, Ware contended.

In addition, he said, the nuclear powers – under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – are obliged to conclude at some point negotiations on disarmament. Inspections by citizen groups can help to determine whether companies that make nuclear-capable weaponry are in fact preparing for disarmament, or whether they are simply conducting business as usual, Ware argued.

“If we believe that countries should be law-abiding, then we also believe that they should abide by the treaties they sign,” said Clayton Ramey, peace and disarmament programme coordinator of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a US-based religious group.