DISARMAMENT: Vatican Warns of Nuclear Terrorism Risks

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 21 1998 (IPS) - The Vatican, stepping up its global campaign against nuclear weapons, has warned the United Nations of potential new risks through terrorism and accidents.

“The continued existence of 30,000 nuclear weapons almost a decade after the end of the Cold War poses a grave danger to humanity,” Archbishop Renato Martino, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, told delegates Tuesday.

“This is further worsened by the fact that 5,000 of these weapons are on alert status – meaning they are capable of being fired on 30 minutes’ notice.”

Addressing the U.N. Committee on Disarmament and International Security, Archbishop Martino argued that the danger of a nuclear catastrophe through accident or terrorism is a growing but “unacceptable risk.”

He said that testing of nuclear weapons by States which stand outside the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) exacerbates the dangers caused by a weak non-proliferation regime. ‘Nuclear testing by any nation is to be deplored, criticism of those who test, however, does not deal adequately with the central problem.”

This is the determination of nuclear weapon States to carry their nuclear weapons into the 21st century, despite their obligation under the NPT to negotiate nuclear disarmament, he told delegates.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that, given the potential devastation from the use of even a single nuclear weapon, global nuclear disarmament must remain at the top of the U.N. agenda.

“It would be the height of folly to take for granted that such weapons were too terrible ever to be used and that States would keep them for deterrent purposes only,” he said.

As long as some states had developed such weapons, and as long as states stocked such weapons, there always remained the risk that they might resort to using them, Annan said.

Addressing a seminar on “The De-Alerting of Nuclear Weapons” in Stockholm last week, Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs Jayantha Dhanapala, said the present nuclear stalemate has made “de-alerting” especially attractive to the disarmament community.

“Progress on this front would at least help in increasing the safety of nuclear stockpiles even if we are not getting rid of them at a rate most of humanity would wish,” he noted.

“De-alerting,” without question, has become a subject of political debate in many countries, and clues about the reasons for the delay in implementing such proposals might well be found in the arguments of its critics, he added.

Dhanapala said the most principal one appears to be that de- alerting would erode deterrence. Since deterrence depends upon a country’s ability to ensure swift retalisation, de-alerting not only delays retaliation but also creates enticing new targets, including storage facilities for downloaded warheads or other critical components of de-alerted forces.

Another argument is simply that de-alerting proposals fail to consider problems of political acceptability and implementation in the “real world.”

One such problem, is the spectre that de-alerting will unleash a destabilising “regeneration-of-arms race” – whereby each side in a nuclear deterrent relationship will compete to ensure that it will be able, if need be, to regenerate its forces faster than its adversary, he added.

A third problem, Dhanapala said, concerns the alleged new dangers of sabotage or theft of warheads that have been removed from de-alerted forces and stored in central storage areas.

In a U.S. television network interview last year, Alexander Lebed, a decorated Soviet war hero and a former national security chief under President Boris Yeltsin, said there are about 100 suitcase-sized Russian nuclear weapons missing and unaccounted for.

The Russian secret intelligence agency, the KGB, is said to have acquired an unspecified number of small nuclear weapons, each weighing less than 75 pounds, that were never included in any post- Cold War inventory on global disarmament.

John Pastore, Secretary of the International Physicans for the Prevention of Nuclear War, said that ever since the break up of the former Soviet Union, the world continues to face the threat of “loose nukes”.

The danger continues to grow every day, he says, because the Russian military has been deteriorating under the weight of “neglect, poverty, inadequate civilian control, and poor morale.”

How much damage could be done by a terrorist who get his hands on a loose nuke? “Massive casualties, on a scale unseen since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would result from a nuclear explosion of a major city,” Passtore warned.

A Hollywood movie titled “The Peacemaker”- partly shot outside the United Nations last year – dramatised the story of a disgruntled Bosnian diplomat who acquires a backpack-sized nuclear weapon and brings it to New York to blow it outside U.N. headquarters.

Meanwhile, a U.N. Adhoc Committee, comprising all 185 member states, is currently formulating a new U.N. convention specifically aimed at nuclear terrorists. The proposed treaty is titled Convention on the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism.