UN Security Council Meets on Maintenance of Peace and Security of Ukraine. October 2022. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Joseph Gerson
NEW YORK, Nov 3 2022 (IPS)

On November 1, a statement of solidarity with Russians opposed to the Ukraine War was published. It was signed by more than 1,000 U.S. men and women who had opposed the U.S. invasions of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

At a time when the Ukraine War increasingly resembles the trench warfare of the First World War and the spiraling escalation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, leading U.S. peace organizations co-sponsored the statement, which also called for negotiations to end the catastrophic Ukraine War.

The announcement was first sent to a friend in St. Petersburg Russia who must remain unnamed. He is a humble and dedicated scientist who lost his job years ago after revealing independent radiation measurements that he took following the Chernobyl meltdown.

On the day following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this man had signed and was publicizing a petition signed by more in a million Russians condemning the imperial invasion of Ukraine and calling for those who had ordered it to be tried as war criminals. In public and discrete ways, he and others continue to oppose the war despite the risk of serious imprisonment.

The second person to receive our statement was a Russian psychologist who fled Russia shortly before the war. She uses social media to connect with and organize people left behind and others in the Russian diaspora. And, before the statement went to the press and out via social media, it went to Yurii Sheliazhenko, a courageous Ukrainian professor and pacifist who has been speaking inconvenient truths about the futility of war and who had earlier translated our statement into Russian and Ukrainian.

Despite the risks involved, each committed to share the statement, especially among the estimated 500,000 men who have risked fleeing Putin’s increasingly militarized Russia.

What is the value of an expression of solidarity, even one as modest as a computer click?

For many across the world, there was immediate identification with the images of the hundreds of thousands of Russian young men fleeing to impoverished and remote countries like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as to Kazakhstan and Germany to avoid the war.

They left families and careers behind, possibly never to return. They face the challenges of finding places to sleep and to finding work to feed themselves in unknown nations and cultures. And we have learned to our sorrow and outrage across the West, desperate refugees are not always welcomed or long tolerated.

Yet, as one Russian woman wrote from exile, she suffers under the weight of people thinking that all Russians support Russia’s aggression. It helps, she wrote, to know that she and other Russians are being recognized as different. That makes it easier for her to face the demands of each uncertain day. To this, I would add, it illustrates the potential for peaceful and mutually beneficial relations between our peoples.

Of course, more than solidarity is needed. Our statement also called for a ceasefire and “negotiations leading to a just peace, including respect for Ukrainian sovereignty as a neutral state”. As we did in the early years of our opposition to the nationally self-destructive invasions of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the statement was designed to add weight to growing calls for a national policy change.

The Biden and Zelensky commitments to fight this war to the last Ukrainian in order to weaken Russia (which will remain a nuclear power) and to retake all of historic Ukraine including Crimea are worse than futile. The savaging of Ukraine begins to resemble Beirut and Grozny at the end of those civil wars.

And Russian nuclear doctrine informs us that it can resort to nuclear attacks when the survival of the state – read Putin’s political career – is in jeopardy. Pressing for diplomacy to stop the killing and to prevent the war’s spiraling escalation, as well as expressing solidarity, has become imperative.

Our solidarity initiative has roots in experiences and lessons that some of us took from the Vietnam War as from Margaret Mead’s dictum that a small group of people can change the world. The initiative grew from a collaboration of veterans of the Vietnam era peace movement, Terry Provance, now of the United Church of Christ and Doug Hostetter, a Mennonite pastor and Pax Christi International’s Associate UN Representative, and me.

It was during the Vietnam War that I first experientially learned the value of solidarity. After considering a Canadian exile, I became a draft resister facing possible imprisonment and served as a leading organizer against the war in the intellectual and moral wasteland of what was then the Phoenix Valley.

Talk about isolation and alienation. I was an aspiring East Coast intellectual disoriented and making his way in Barry Goldwater’s Arizona. That was before fax machines, before the Internet, and when Phoenix was dominated by a John Birch Society extreme right-wing monopoly newspaper that limited and distorted what people could know, and which used its pages to instruct its readers where to find our small community of war opponents and how to beat us.

Back then, despite constitutional guarantees, it was possible to be arrested and to suffer what more recently has become known as the Eric Garner chokehold at the hands of the police and be sentenced to six months in jail for the “crime” of distributing anti-war flyers on the public sidewalk – an action ostensibly protected by the Constitution.

We and other war resisters experienced the salve and inspiration of solidarity in many forms, from local religious leaders who demonstrated that they cared, from activists back East who sent bail money, and from the distant moral courage of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme whose courageous denunciation of the war made its way around the world – even to the Arizona desert.

Since then, I have learned the sustaining value of even small expressions of human solidarity: from Palestinians whose homes were demolished in illegal Israeli collective punishments; from the suffering and courageous of Japanese, Marshall Islanders, and U.S. downwinder A-bomb survivors, and from Okinawans who have endured and resisted eight decades of Japanese and U.S. military colonialism. In each case, international support and solidarity have played critical roles in their continuing struggles for justice.

Is solidarity enough? Of course not! Thus, our call urges U.S. policy change. It is possible to support Ukrainians without urging and funding another war without end. In recent weeks, we have been reminded of Gandhi’s truth that “When the people lead, the leaders will follow.” The withdrawal of the letter signed by thirty members of Congress urging President Biden to make negotiations a priority will long stand as a profile in cowardice.

Except for several members of Congress including Ro Khanna and Jamaal Bowman who stood their ground, others who support Ukraine but also diplomacy, lacked confidence that they had public backing and withered in the face of threats from Speaker Pelosi.

Our solidarity statement is but one of ways that people are beginning to break the silence, opening the way for rational and humane discourse, and providing off ramps for bellicose U.S., Russian, Ukrainian and European leaders.

A Cuban Missile Crisis redux or a replay of World War I redux must be avoided. Negotiations may not bring an immediate end to the war, but we should have learned from the diplomacy that avoided nuclear annihilation over Russian missiles in Cuba fifty years ago, which brought us the armistice the ended the First World War, and that led to arms control agreements during the last Cold War that war is not the answer.

Pope Francis, U.N. Secretary General Guterres and a growing number of people have it right: human solidarity and diplomacy!

Dr. Joseph Gerson is President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security and author of With Hiroshima Eyes and Empire and the Bomb.

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: US government

By Joseph Gerson
NEW YORK, Jun 9 2021 (IPS)

A new report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—focusing on nuclear weapons spending– following on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recent decision that their Doomsday Clock, should be set as close as it has ever been to nuclear catastrophe. should serve as a wake up calls for humanity.

Preparations for genocidal or omnicidal nuclear war are undeniably suicidal madness. Worse, with provocative military actions by the U.S., Russia, and China in the Baltic, Black, South and East China Seas, and in relation to Ukraine and Taiwan, an accident or miscalculation could all too easily trigger a life ending nuclear cataclysm.

At a time when scientific, financial, and diplomatic cooperation are desperately needed to stanch and reverse the climate emergency and to overcome and prevent the current and future pandemics, 21st century nuclear arms races are already claiming lives and threatening our future with national treasures being wasted in preparations to end all life as we know it.

There had been hope that US President Joe Biden would apply the brakes to the massive $1.7 trillion U.S. upgrade of its nuclear arsenal and its triad of delivery systems.

Instead, the Biden budget released last week reflects no change from the Trump era nuclear weapons buildup, including funding for the first strike “money pit” ICBM replacement missiles, “more usable” battlefield weapons to be deployed in Europe, and SLBM’s and so-called missile defenses to the Asia-Pacific.

Those, in turn, are leading China to increase the size of its deterrent nuclear forces and to reconsider its no first use doctrine.

How to remove the existential nuclear threat?

Disarmament! popular movements, like those which brought the Treaty for Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) into being, and which in the United States, are pressing to halt spending for new nuclear weapons and for the Biden Administration to adopt a no first use doctrine, are essential.

In the very near -term political leaders and civil society must press Presidents Biden and Putin not to waste the opportunity inherent in their forthcoming summit. They should rise to their historic and existential responsibilities and emulate the 1989 Malta Summit in which Presidents Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly declared an end to the Cold War.

Among the actions that the two presidents should take are:

• Declare that nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
• Commit to adopting no first use nuclear doctrines and near-term negotiation of verifiable agreements to eliminate the danger of first strike nuclear war fighting.
• Restore the INF Treaty limitations and prohibit deployment of “more usable” battlefield nuclear weapons.
• Renew their commitments to Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and publish a timeline for the fulfillment of commitments made during previous NPT Review Conferences.
• Announce commencement of negotiations to eliminate the danger of cyber hacking of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and their infrastructures essential for human security.
• Halt provocative military U.S., NATO, and Russian military exercises in the Baltic and Black Seas and the Arctic Ocean and along the NATO/Russian border.
• Halt shipment of arms supplies to the warring parties in Ukraine and renew their commitments to fulfilling the Minsk agreements.
• Commit to jointly provide vaccines and necessary materials for more than a billion Covid-19 shots via COVAX, and to future joint research for pandemic prevention.
• Commit to joint initiatives to reverse climate change.

More than five decades ago, at the height of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, two moral and intellectual paragons of the 20th century, Lord Russell and Albert Einstein warned that “We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?”

Their answer: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”

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Credit: United Nations

By Joseph Gerson
NEW YORK, Apr 26 2021 (IPS)

Despite the negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), we are confronted by the increasing dangers of great power war, even nuclear war.

Instead of making necessary investments to ensure public health, reverse climate change and ensure the security of their peoples, trillions of dollars are being wasted to construct new nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, including new hypersonic delivery systems.

The U.S. and Russia are the lead drivers of this race to annihilation, with more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. The U.S. is in the process of upgrading all its nuclear weapons and deploying an entirely new and more deadly nuclear triad at an estimated cost of two trillion dollars.

Faced with U.S. conventional supremacy and the expansion of NATO to its borders, Russia has increased its reliance on nuclear weapons and is deploying new and more exotic nuclear weapons.

We face the existential danger that escalation of the conflict in Ukraine and accidents and miscalculations as the two powers confront one another in the Baltic and Black Seas, could escalate beyond control.

In each case, in addition to the drive for imperial power, military-industrial complexes contribute to the nuclear crisis. There also demands coming out of Ukraine to the effect that if it is not allowed to join NATO, it should construct its own nuclear arsenal.

Potentially more dangerous is the new U.S.-Chinese Cold War. Here the Thucydides Trap, the historic dynamic of inevitable conflict between rising and declining powers, is driving this dimension of the nuclear arms race. In its effort to retain its regional (and global) hegemony, the U.S. is moving to deploy standoff nuclear-armed cruise missiles targeted against China.

It is also pressing increased deployments of its “missile defenses” which can serve as shields for U.S. first-strike swords along China Asia-Pacific periphery. These, in turn, lead Chinese policy makers to serious consider increasing the size of their much smaller nuclear arsenal and the possibility of abandoning their no first use doctrine.

The explosion of spending for nuclear weapons and their delivery systems is not limited to the great powers. The Johnson government in Britain has just shocked the world with the announcement that it will increase the size of its nuclear arsenal by roughly 30%.
France is deploying new nuclear armed submarines designed to threaten nuclear war throughout the 21st century. Pakistan is in the process of trying to match India’s nuclear triad. Israel is secretly expanding it Diamona nuclear weapons site.

And having been repeatedly threatened by U.S. conventional and nuclear attacks, North Korea has publicly announced it will continue manufacturing more nuclear weapons and diversifying their delivery systems which threaten South Korea, neighboring nations and even the United States.

This is suicidal madness. Here in the United States, as Tax Day and Congressional debates over the national budget approach, popular movements and the Congressional Defense Spending Reduction Caucus are demanding significant reductions in military spending. Funding for the replacement of the nation’s ground based and first strike ICBMs and “more usable” low-yield battlefield weapons are thought to be most vulnerable to funding cuts.

As the Russell-Einstein Manifesto warned the world at the height of the first Cold War in 1955, humanity faces the choice of life or death for our species. They appealed to the world to press for nuclear disarmament, to “remember your humanity and forget the rest.”

Fifty years ago, the nuclear powers committed in Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete elimination of their nuclear arsenals.

The world’s nuclear powers must be held to the NPT commitments. Governments won’t deliver us the nuclear free world humanity requires for survival. It can only be achieved by popular pressure.

I encourage people around the world to join the International Peace Bureau initiated Global Days of Action on Military Spending, now under way and continuing to May 17 and to press on beyond to stanch the existential nuclear danger with nuclear disarmament actions and demands for Common Security diplomacy.

*Dr Joseph Gerson’s books include Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World and With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination.

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By Joseph Gerson
NEW YORK, Jul 22 2020 (IPS)

In the words of (ret.) Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of Defense Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, the Trump Administration has been dangerously “poking China in the eye.”

After sending aircraft carriers and destroyers to the precincts of the Taiwan Strait, last week the Pentagon dispatched two aircraft carrier strike groups – including escort cruisers and destroyers, 120 warplanes and 12,000 troops — to South China Sea waters claimed by China. China responded by deploying fighter jets to its near-by base on Woody Island and reminding the world of its anti-aircraft carrier missile capabilities.

Such a massive U.S. fleet has not been deployed to this intensely contested region since 2014. It is only the second time in two decades that such a bellicose show of force has been provocatively displayed in the Asia-Pacific.

This comes midst President Trump’s efforts to deflect attention from his catastrophic Covid-19 failures by blaming and scapegoating China. We had Trump’s “Wuhan virus” rebranding. On July 13, Secretary of State Pompeo issued a statement which appears to lay the legal foundations for war with China.

And, Chinese students and researchers in the United States have all been labeled as spies and potential spies. Ignoring the possible consequences or an unpredictable war, Trump appears to be pushing China to the brink, seeking a military incident that can be used to rally Americans around an actual wartime president and save his failing reelection campaign.

Joseph Gerson

Two thousand five hundred years ago, the revered Greek historian Thucydides wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. His analysis of the inevitable tensions between rising and declining powers which frequently – but not always – result in catastrophic war, became known as the Thucydides Trap.

In the South China Sea, President Trump is playing dangerously with the trap’s trigger. Even as we decry Beijing’s human rights abuses and provocative actions to create its version of the Monroe Doctrine in the South China Sea, we have an urgent responsibility to prevent war and to press for diplomatic initiatives to pull the two nuclear powers back from the brink.

COMPETING CLAIMS

The crisis has been brewing for decades. The South China Sea, portions of which are claimed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei extends across 1.3 million square miles of the western Pacific.

Its sea-bed is thought to contain up to 17.7 billion tons of crude oil (making it the world’s fourth largest oil reserve), massive amounts of natural gas, and other minerals.

It also lies astride the sea lanes over which 40% of the world’s trade transits, including fossil fuels that power the Chinese, Japanese and South Korean economies. Its waves lap against China’s most vulnerable frontier – it’s coastal economic powerhouse from Shanghai to Guangzhou.

Much like the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf throughout the second half of the 20th century, the South China Sea functions as the jugular vein of the world’s most dynamic capitalist economies.

Were the Malacca Strait on the South China Sea’s western perimeter or its other sea lines of communication to be blockaded, the region’s economies would face disaster. The South China Sea can thus be understood as this century’s geostrategic center of the struggle for world power.

In 1949 both China and Taiwan first laid their claims to the U-shaped so-called “nine dot line”, consisting of roughly 80% of the entire South China Sea and its mineral-rich sea-beds.

Credit: United Nations

By the late 1990s, with the Soviet Union consigned to memory and China’s “reform and opening” well under way, geo-strategists in Washington began their obsession with managing or containing China’s rise.

Given China’s growing economic power and its proud legacy of being the world’s most advanced and powerful nation for most of recorded history, they understood that the Middle Kingdom would inevitably test and challenge U.S. regional and global hegemony.

Taiwan, seen by China as a “renegade province” was the first and most obvious flashpoint. It took decades for the Pacific Ocean, an “American Lake” since the defeat of Japan in 1945, to once again become a focal point of great power tensions.

After Chinese leaders completed national boundary negotiations with their northern and western neighbors – excepting India – the South China Sea on its eastern and southern Pacific shores remained vulnerable. In addition to providing access to sea-bed riches the coast remained military fault line.

In the mid-19th century, in two “Opium Wars” fought to enforce British (and U.S.) rights to deluge the Middle Kingdom with addictive opium and thus rectify massive balance of payment inequalities, British naval and land forces invaded China from the coast, defeated China, and precipitated the subsequent collapse of the Qing Dynasty.

Then, beginning in 1895, Japan’s invasions of China came from the sea.

Competing territorial claims lie at the ostensible core of South China Sea tensions. The oil-rich fishing waters around the Parcel Islands, claimed by China, Taiwan and Vietnam, are in the northern reaches of the South China Sea, just south of China’s Hainan Island and its new and massive naval and air force bases.

To the south are the Spratly Islands, claimed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. And, close to the Philippines, in waters named the West Philippine Sea by many Filipinos, is the Scarborough Shoal, claimed by China, Taiwan and the Philippines.

As early as 1974, when international attention focused on U.S.-Chinese triangulation against the Soviets, China seized a Vietnamese garrison on a western Parcel Island and transformed it into a Chinese military base.

To the south, Fiery Cross, built on a rock in 1988, is the most important of China’s Spratly Island bases. Its construction was followed by others at Subi and Mischief Reefs. And, with Coast Guard and naval deployments China has functionally seized the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines.

U.S. RESPONSES

The U.S. is not a party to these territorial disputes, but the enemy of an enemy often serves as a friend. The U.S. became a colonizing Pacific power with its brutal turn of the 20th century conquests of the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, and its annexation of Hawaii – in large measure to gain privileged access to the potentially enormous China market.

Its Pacific empire was later expanded and consolidated with Japan’s defeat in World War II. To preserve this imperial domain, the U.S. has since encouraged resistance to China’s South China Sea territorial claims and has conducted provocative “freedom of navigation,” naval and air forays in close proximity to the disputed islands. A record number were held in 2019, with Trump apparently on track to set another record in 2020.

Even before the Barack Obama – Hillary Clinton “Pivot to Asia,” with its commitment to to deploy 60% of U.S. naval and airpower to the Pacific and Asia, President G.H.W. Bush began the U.S. Asia-Pacific build up to contain China’s rise. To reinforce U.S. military power, Bush, Obama and the Pentagon have since focused on reinforcing U.S. alliances, arms sales and deliveries, along with their military bases that encircle much of China.

Despite Trump’s disregard for the United States’ Japanese and South Korean allies and his withdrawal from the Transpacific Partnership, which was designed to limit China’s economic influence, the military build up continues apace.

U.S. military power still far exceeds that of China. Fueled by a military budget four time greater than Beijing’s, a campaign to increase the size of the U.S. Navy, upgrade the Air Force, restore U.S. nuclear primacy, and maximize cyber warfare capabilities, the commitment to containing China includes numerous and often provocative joint military exercises, not the least of which are the “freedom of navigation” deployments.

With the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) claimants unable to compete with China militarily, their primary means of asserting their territorial claims have been via diplomatic forums and the court of international public opinion.

Rooting their claims in the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, they have pursued multilateral negotiations with China to create South China Sea codes of conduct, two of which have been agreed upon, but they have yet to be fully implemented. Encouraged by Washington, they also took their case to the U.N. Court of Permanent Arbitration where they prevailed.

Relying on its historical claims and the U.S. tradition of understanding international law being what those who have the power to enforce it say it is, China rejected the Arbitration Court’s findings.

Reinforcing the economic leverage Beijing exercises over ASEAN nations which are economically dependent on China, the Communist Party’s hardline newspaper The Global Times warned that those who persist in challenging China’s claim should “mentally prepare for the sounds of cannons.”

But, as the two imperial elephants struggle for geopolitical advantage, the Pacific ants remain steadfast in their claims and pursuit of diplomatic solutions.

MEETING CHINA HALFWAY

In his book Destined for War, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison reminds us that while the Thucydides trap has often resulted in war, great power conflagrations have also been avoided. War with China is not inevitable.

A case in point was the 20th century U.S-Soviet contest for dominance. At the height of the Cold War, Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme convened elite figures from Europe, North America and the Soviet Union to prevent potentially omnicidal nuclear war.

Drawing on the truism that neither individuals nor nations can be secure unless their rivals simultaneously enjoy security they created the Common Security approach to diplomacy.

The Commission advised that we “must achieve security not against the adversary but together with him,” recognizing that when nations develop and deploy new weapons and military doctrines to counter perceived threats, their actions are seen by their rivals as escalating threats. This, in turn, leads the newly threatened nation to respond in kind, resulting in a spiraling arms race and to increased dangers of deadly miscalculations.

The Commission went on to suggest diplomatic steps that in time resulted in the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) Treaty that functionally ended the Cold War.

In this tradition, Lyle J. Goldstein, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, has enumerated ten “cooperation spirals” in his landmark volume Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry. One of Goldstein’s spirals of mutual and sequential diplomacy focuses on reducing tensions and stabilizing relations across the South China Sea.

He acknowledges that such negotiations will be difficult, will require patience, and could likely be improved upon. Most important is creating will on both sides of the Pacific to coexist despite our differences.

Clearly, and most urgently, those with influence on President Trump must press him to reverse course in the South China Sea, as he did with his “fire and fury” threat against North Korea. His aircraft carrier fleets must be recalled. “Freedom of Navigation” provocations must be halted.

And, it is past time to signal a U.S. commitment to pursue common security diplomacy with China and the nations of the Asia-Pacific.

Goldstein concedes that there might be better ways to meet China halfway in the South China Sea, but the mutual and sequential steps that he outlines provide a pathway that begins with small trust-building steps and which lead to coexistence that should be seriously considered, debated and improved upon. He recommends:

Step 1: The U.S. invites China to join the annual CARAT (Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training) exercises in Thailand. This modest step can provide a “bridge between the two powers.” In response, China would propose a “regional antipiracy patrol”, focused on the critically important Malacca Strait. This would provide a vehicle for “building trust and confidence.”

Step 2: The U.S. proposes a Southeast Asia-Pacific Coast Guard Forum. With its Coast Guard focus, it will contribute to demilitarizing maritime security issues and improve the working relationships of U.S., Chinese and other regional leaders.

In response, China would invite ASEAN defense officials for annual tours of PLA (People Liberation Army) facilities, including Hainan Island. This would allow for greater transparency and trust building between China and its rival South China Sea claimants.

Step 3: The U.S. reduces its provocative surveillance activities along the Chinese coast and Hainan Island. The surveillance can be conducted from satellites and by other technical means, reducing the possibility of potentially dangerous military incidents as China takes military counter measures. (Serious incidents occurred in 2001, 2009 and 2014.)

In response, China would clarify its still ambiguous South China Sea territorial claims, making them consistent with the Law of the Sea. In doing so, “China’s U-shaped line may continue to exist but in ‘harmonized” form, to accord with greater peace and stability….”

Step 4: In response to China’s concession of clarifying its SCS claims, the U.S., which until Pompeo’s provocative July statement had remained neutral about the competing South China Sea claims, would “endorse’ China’s role as a claimant to the Spratley/Nansah Islands.

This would not be an endorsement of China’s claims, but it suggests that China’s claim is on a par with others’ claims. China, in response would move to finally “operationalize its policy of ‘joint development’” for South China Sea resources, with a 50-50 split serving as the basis.

Step 5: The U.S. ceases joint military operations with Vietnam, the only claimant nation that – given its long history of tensions with China – may wish to see the U.S. “embroiled in a confrontation with China.” Beijing, in response, would cease military cooperation with the Philippines and Indonesia as a way to stabilize the region.

In 1964, before the U.S. and China were economically integrated and before cyber warfare could threaten the implosion of national infrastructures, U.S. intelligence reported that China was on the verge of testing its first nuclear warhead.

In response U.S. and Soviet leaders considered the possibility of joining together in a preemptive attack to derail Beijing’ nuclear program. Wisely, President Johnson was led to reconsider and cancel what would have been a catastrophic war.

Eight years later, President Nixon was Mao Tse-Tung’s guest in Beijing. A U.S.-China war must be averted. Peace and coexistence, despite our differences, are possible.

Excerpt:

By Joseph Gerson
NEW YORK, Oct 12 2017 (IPS)

There is much to celebrate in the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s decision to award this year’s prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

Sculpture depicting St. George slaying the dragon. The dragon is created from fragments of Soviet SS-20 and United States Pershing nuclear missiles. Credit: UN Photo/Milton Grant

While the negotiation of the Nuclear Weapons Prohibition Treaty has raised hopes around the world, Donald Trump (it is painful to refer to him as president) and his “madman” approach to North Korea give lie to the myth that the P-5’s nuclear arsenals are in “safe hands.”

With his denunciation of diplomacy, and simulated nuclear bomber attacks and tweets asserting that North Korea understands only one thing, Trump has returned humanity to the brink of nuclear catastrophe on the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The ten months since Trump’s inauguration have almost inured us to surprise, but this week midst Trumpian chaos we learned that in July Trump urged a ten-fold increase in the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and that this may have been the outrage that led Secretary of State Tillerson to describe his boss as a “f…..g moron.”

The reality of the “moron” having his finger on the nuclear trigger is indeed sobering and is the reason legislation has been introduced in Congress to prevent Trump from launching a nuclear war on his own authority.

Time dulls memory and sensibilities. Recall that a year ago Trump didn’t know what the nuclear triad was and suggested that Japan and South Korea should become nuclear powers. He asked why we can’t use nuclear weapons and threatened to use them against “terrorists” (likely including Kim Jung-un. He has also said “I can’t take anything off the table.”

In his first conversation with Vladimir Putin, before labeling the New START treaty a “bad deal”, he had to ask his advisors what it was. Since then, he has pledged to “greatly strengthen and expand” the U.S. nuclear arsenal, called for a nuclear arms race, and launched a Nuclear Policy Review targeted against Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, while Congressional forces press for deployment of land-based nuclear armed cruise missiles in Europe that would sink the INF Treaty.

Compounding these dangers Trump humiliated his Secretary of State’s efforts to pursue diplomacy with North Korea, even when the “Freeze for Freeze” option provides the obvious path back from the nuclear brink. With its B-1 bomber simulated nuclear attacks on North Korea, increased tempo of U.S. so-called “freedom of navigation” naval exercises in the South China, as well as others in Black and Baltic Seas, Trump and the Pentagon have increased the danger that unintended incidents or miscalculations could escalate beyond control.

Midst it all, we have the Ban Treaty. As we see with the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Treaty further stigmatizes nuclear weapons as it seeks to outlaw their use, threatened use, development, testing, production, manufacture, acquisition, possession or stockpiling of nuclear weapons, or their transfer and deployment.

The Treaty’s greatest potential appears to be in Europe. I hope that I am wrong, but my fear is that, like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Ban Treaty will give us one more agreement that the nuclear powers refuse to respect.

Two trains are running in opposite directions. One, with the support of most of the world’s governments and international civil society, is racing toward a nuclear weapons-free world. The other, with the additional fuel of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and Trump at the helm in Washington, is burning unimaginable fortunes as it speeds toward nuclear Armageddon.

In addition to further stigmatizing nuclear weapons, the Treaty’s most important contributions may be reminding people around the world of the imperative of nuclear weapons abolition, and the encouragement it gives to people and governments who are working for nuclear disarmament.

That said, the Treaty will be recognized as international law by only those states that sign and ratify it. All the nuclear powers boycotted the ban treaty negotiations. The US, UK, France, and Russia denounced it, falsely claiming that nuclear deterrence kept the peace for 70 years. (Ask the Vietnamese, Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, Congolese and so many others about that!) Led by the US, each of the nuclear powers is upgrading and/or expanding its nuclear arsenal. With NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders, its nuclear weapons, and with the West’s conventional, high-tech and space weapons superiority, Moscow is “modernizing” its nuclear arsenal.

With increased Japanese and South Korean anxieties resulting from Pyongyang’s nuclear threats and growing doubts about reliability of the U.S, “nuclear umbrella,” there are mounting calls from sectors of their elites for their governments to become nuclear powers. We thus could be entering an era of nuclear weapons proliferation, not abolition.

Our future depends on how people and governments respond, and it dictates a global division of labor among nuclear weapons abolitionists. States that negotiated the ban treaty obviously must sign and ratify it as quickly as possible. And, they can do more.

As Professor Zia Mian reminds us, Article 12 requires states parties to make their treaty commitments “part of their political engagement with the nuclear weapon states.” They can dispatch delegations to encourage others to join the treaty, and they can initiate sanctions and boycotts to pressure the nuclear powers.

But winning nuclear weapons abolition still requires building mass movements within the nuclear weapons and “umbrella” states. These nations and our disarmament movements still lie at the crux of the struggle.

The Ban Treaty certainly reinforces popular understanding of the righteousness of Jeremy Corbyn’s and our movements’ commitments to a nuclear weapons free world. Imagine the global reverberations of Britain, led by Prime Minister Corbyn, deciding not to fund Trident replacement. And, across the channel, if just one or two NATO or other umbrella states are led by their people reject the strictures of their nuclear alliances, they could begin to unravel world’s nuclear architecture and unleash a global disarmament dynamic.

For those of us in the world’s nuclear weapons states, the imperative of resistance remains. This includes doing all that we can to prevent war with North Korea and steadfast education about the human costs, preparations for, and dangers of nuclear war that can be brought on by miscalculation and accident, as well as intentionally. We need to highlight the deceit and deficiencies of “deterrence,” and teach about the forces that led to and won the ban treaty.

But good ideas and truth rarely prevail on their own. Frederick Douglass, the 19th century U.S. anti-slavery abolitionist, was right: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

More recently, on the eve of the 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, then U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon advised that governments alone will not deliver us into a nuclear weapons-free world. We can only reach that promised land with massive popular pressure from below, from international civil society.

For the moment, our best near-term hope may lie in Jeremy Corbyn and the possible Scottish succession from what was once Great Britain. Corbyn has said he will not push the nuclear button, and he has long opposed nuclear weapons and understands the need to invest in social uplift.

The loss of the Faslane on the Scottish coast could leave London without a nuclear weapons base. What the British movement does will thus be critical for human survival and to our struggles in the other nuclear weapons and umbrella states.

ICAN is not the first advocate of a nuclear weapons-free world to receive Nobel Peace Laureate. It was proceeded by the Quaker American Friends Service Committee which protested the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki within days of the nuclear attacks; by Joseph Rotblat, the only Manhattan Project senior scientist who resigned because of his moral considerations, and by Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA who denounced nuclear double standards.

Years ago, speaking in Hiroshima, Robblat cut to the quick when he said that humanity faces a stark choice. We can either eliminate nuclear weapons, or we will see their global proliferation and the nuclear wars that will follow. Why? Because no nation will tolerate what it experiences as an unjust hierarchy of power, in this case nuclear terror.

*Dr. Joseph Gerson is author of Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World, and With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination.

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United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addresses the 2010 High-level Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) on May 3, 2010. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Joseph Gerson
NEW YORK, Apr 22 2015 (IPS)

On the eve of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference five years ago, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that governments alone will not rid the world of the specter of nuclear annihilation.

Addressing an assembly of movement and civil society activists, he expressed heartfelt sympathy and appreciation for our efforts, urging us to remain steadfast in our outreach, education, organising and in pressing our demands.Practicing the double standard of holding one set of parties accountable to a contract while others flaunt its terms is its own kind of extremism. C. Wright Mills called it “crackpot realism.”

As if to prove the secretary-general’s critique of governments correct, anyone who has been paying attention knows that this year’s Review Conference is in trouble before it starts. It could fail, jeopardising the future of the treaty and – more importantly – human survival.

In the tradition of diplomatic understatement, U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Angela Kane has explained that this is “not the best of times for disarmament.”

Apparently not understanding the meaning and purpose of treaties, and with remarkable disregard for the vast majority of the world’s nations which have long been demanding that the nuclear powers fulfill their NPT Article VI obligation to engage in good faith negotiations to eliminate their nuclear arsenals, lead U.S. Non-Proliferation negotiator Adam Scheinman warned that “countries not pursue extreme agendas or place unrealistic demands on the treaty.”

Practicing the double standard of holding one set of parties accountable to a contract while others flaunt its terms is its own kind of extremism. C. Wright Mills called it “crackpot realism.”

Joseph Rotblat, the realist Nobel Laureate and single senior Manhattan Project scientist to quit the nuclear bomb project for moral reasons, put it well years ago while speaking in Hiroshima. He explained that the human species faces a stark choice.

We can either completely eliminate the world’s nuclear weapons, or we will face their global proliferation and the omnicidal nuclear wars that will follow. Why? Because no nation will long tolerate what it perceived to be an unequal balance of power, in this case nuclear terror.

Blinded by the arrogance of power, Schienmen and his Nuclear Nine comrades are apparently oblivious to the mounting anger and loss of trust by the world’s governments in the face of the nuclear powers’ disregard for their Article VI obligations, traditional humanitarian law, and the dangers to human survival that follow.

As a U.S. American, I had something of an Alice in Wonderland “through the looking glass” experience observing the U.N. High Level Conference on Disarmament debate in 2013.

After the opening formalities, Iranian President Rouhani spoke on behalf of both his country and the Non-Aligned Movement, stressing three points: Iran does not intend to become a nuclear weapons state.

The P-5 Nuclear Powers have flaunted their refusal to fulfill their Article VI NPT obligation to commence good faith negotiations for the elimination of their nuclear arsenals. And, the United States had refused to fulfill its 2010 NPT Review Conference commitment to co-convene a conference on a Middle East Nuclear Weapons and WMD-Free Zone.

What was remarkable was not Rouhani’s speech. It was the succession of one head of state, foreign minister and ambassador after another who rose to associate his or her government with the statement made by President Rouhani on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The U.S. response? A feeble and arrogant “trust us”, followed by the announcement that under Chinese leadership the P-5 had almost completed work on a glossary of terms.

Similar dynamics followed at the International Conferences on the Human Consequences of Nuclear Weapons in Mexico and Austria, which were attended by the vast majority of the world’s nations.

The tiny New START Treaty reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, which leaves them still holding more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenals – more than enough to inflict Nuclear Winter many times over – won’t pacify the world’s nations.

Nor will the recent U.S.-Iran deal which the U.S. Congress has placed in jeopardy. On the eve of the 2015 Review Conference the inability of other nations to trust commitments made by the United States are one more reason the Review Conference and the NPT itself could fail.

Add to this the new era of military confrontations, resumption of nuclear (and other) arms races, and continuing nuclear threats from the simulated U.S. nuclear attack on North Korea to the U.S. and Russian nuclear “exercises” over Ukraine.

What are other nations to think when the U.S. is on track to spend a trillion dollars for new nuclear weapons and their delivery systems and every other nuclear power is following suit?

Clearly Ban Ki-moon was right.

And as anti-slavery abolitionist Fredrick Douglas observed more than a century ago, “Power concedes nothing without a struggle. It never has, and it never will.”

This is why nuclear abolitionists, peace, justice and environmental advocates – including 1,000 Japanese activists carrying five million abolition petition signatures in their suitcases – are returning to New York from across the United States and around the world for the Peace & Planet mobilisation on the eve of this year’s NPT review conference.

We’re anything but starry eyed.

Recognising that change will only come from below, our international conference at The Cooper Union and our rally, march and festival in the streets will press our central demand: Respect for international law.

The Review Conference must mandate the beginning of good faith negotiations for the abolition of the world’s nuclear weapons. And, being the realists that we are, we will be building the more powerful and issue-integrated (abolition, peace, economic and social justice and climate change) people’s movement needed for the longer-term and urgent struggle ahead.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

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