United States Secretary of State John Kerry addresses the 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) on April 27. The United States, along with the UK, and Canada, rejected the draft agreement. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 23 2015 (IPS)

After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies.

“The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS.“This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for leadership or action is futile." -- Ray Acheson

She said it contained no meaningful progress on nuclear disarmament and even rolled back some previous commitments.

But, according to several diplomats, there was one country that emerged victorious: Israel, the only nuclear-armed Middle Eastern nation, which has never fully supported a long outstanding proposal for an international conference for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

As the Review Conference dragged towards midnight Friday, there were three countries – the United States, UK, and Canada (whose current government has been described as “more pro-Israel than Israel itself”) – that said they cannot accept the draft agreement, contained in the Final Document, on convening of the proposed conference by March 1, 2016.

As Acheson put it: “It is perhaps ironic, then, that three of these states prevented the adoption of this outcome document on behalf of Israel, a country with nuclear weapons, that is not even party to the NPT.”

The Review Conference president’s claim that the NPT belongs to all its states parties has never rung more hollow, she added.

Joseph Gerson, disarmament coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) told IPS the United States was primarily responsible, as in the 2005 review conference, for the failure of this year’s critically important NPT Review Conference.

“The United States and Israel, that is, even if Israel is one of the very few nations that has yet to sign onto the NPT,” he pointed out.

Rather than blame Israel, he said, the U.S., Britain and Canada are blaming the victim, charging that Egypt wrecked the conference with its demands that the Review Conference’s final declaration reiterate the call for creation of a Middle East Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone.

But, the tail was once again wagging the dog, said Gerson, who is also the AFSC’s director of Peace and Economic Security Programme.

He said that Reuters news agency reported on Thursday, the day prior to the conclusion of the NPT Review Conference, that the United States sent “a senior U.S. official” to Israel “to discuss the possibility of a compromise” on the draft text of the Review Conference’s final document.

“Israeli apparently refused, and (U.S. President) Barack Obama’s ostensible commitments to a nuclear weapons-free world melted in the face of Israeli intransigence,” said Gerson.

John Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, told IPS the problem with NPT Review Conference commitments on disarmament made over the last 20 years is not so much that they have not been strong enough. Rather the problem is that they have not been implemented by the NPT nuclear weapon states.

Coming into the 2015 Review Conference, he said, many non-nuclear weapon states were focused on mechanisms and processes to ensure implementation.

In this vein, the draft, but not adopted Final Document, recommended that the General Assembly establish an open-ended working group to “identify and elaborate” effective disarmament measures, including legal agreements for the achievement and maintenance of a nuclear weapons free world.

Regardless of the lack of an NPT outcome, this initiative can and should be pushed at the next General Assembly session on disarmament and international security, this coming fall, said Burroughs, who is also executive director of the U.N. Office of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA).

Acheson told IPS that 107 states— the majority of the world’s countries (and of NPT states parties)—have endorsed a Humanitarian Pledge, committing to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons.

The outcome from the 2015 NPT Review Conference is the Humanitarian Pledge, she added.

The states endorsing the Pledge now and after this Conference must use it as the basis for a new process to develop a legally-binding instrument prohibiting nuclear weapons.

“This process should begin without delay, even without the participation of the nuclear-armed states. The 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has already been identified as the appropriate milestone for this process to commence.”

Acheson also said a treaty banning nuclear weapons remains the most feasible course of action for states committed to disarmament.

“This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for leadership or action is futile,” she said.

This context requires determined action to stigmatise, prohibit, and eliminate nuclear weapons.

“Those who reject nuclear weapons must have the courage of their convictions to move ahead without the nuclear-armed states, to take back ground from the violent few who purport to run the world, and build a new reality of human security and global justice,” Acheson declared.

Gerson told IPS the greater tragedy is that the failure of the Review Conference further undermines the credibility of the NPT, increasing the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation and doing nothing to stanch new nuclear arms races as the nuclear powers “modernize” their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems for the 21st century continues apace.

He said the failure of the Review Conference increases the dangers of nuclear catastrophe and the likelihood of nuclear winter.

The U.S. veto illustrates the central importance of breaking the silos of single issue popular movements if the people’s power needed to move governments – especially the United States – is to be built.

Had there been more unity between the U.S. nuclear disarmament movement and forces pressing for a just Israeli-Palestinian peace in recent decades, the outcome of the Review Conference could have been different, noted Gerson.

“If we are to prevail, nuclear disarmament movements must make common cause with movements for peace, justice and environmental sustainability.”

Despite commitments made in 1995, when the NPT was indefinitely extended and in subsequent Review Conferences, and reiterated in the 2000 and 2010 Review Conference final documents to work for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, Obama was unwilling to say “No” to Israel and “Yes” to an important step to reducing the dangers of nuclear war, said Gerson.

“As we have been reminded by the Conferences on the Human Consequences of Nuclear War held in Norway, Mexico and Austria, between the nuclear threats made by all of the nuclear powers and their histories of nuclear weapons accidents and miscalculations, that we are alive today is more a function of luck than of policy decisions.”

The failure of Review Conference is thus much more than a lost opportunity, it brings us closer to nuclear cataclysms, he declared.

Burroughs told IPS debate in the Review Conference revealed deep divisions over whether the nuclear weapon states have met their commitments to de-alert, reduce, and eliminate their arsenals and whether modernisation of nuclear arsenals is compatible with achieving disarmament.

The nuclear weapon states stonewalled on these matters.

If the nuclear weapons states displayed a business as usual attitude, the approach of non-nuclear weapon states was characterised by a sense of urgency, illustrated by the fact that by the end of the Conference over 100 states had signed the “Humanitarian Pledge” put forward by Austria.

It commits signatories to efforts to “stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons in light of their unacceptable humanitarian consequences”.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Saudi Arabia’s unyielding opposition to last week’s interim nuclear agreement with Iran has triggered speculation about its own projection of military power in the Middle East.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi ambassador to the United States, warned in 2011 that nuclear threats from Israel and Iran may force Saudi Arabia to follow suit. Credit: cc by 2.0

As the Wall Street Journal pointed out early this week, the Saudis may conclude that international acceptance of a nuclear programme of any kind by Iran may compel them “to seek their own nuclear weapons capability through a simple purchase.”

The likely source: Pakistan, whose nuclear programme was partly funded by the Saudis.

But this is viewed as a worst case scenario, particularly if the longstanding political and military relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia continues to deteriorate.

The initial hint of Saudi nuclear ambitions surfaced back in 2011 when Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi ambassador to the United States, warned that nuclear threats from Israel and Iran may force Saudi Arabia to follow suit.

Speaking at a security forum in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, he was quoted as saying, “It is our duty toward our nation and people to consider all possible options, including the possession of these weapons.”

Whether this was a serious or an empty threat will depend in part on the evolving negotiations with Iran to terminate its nuclear weapons capability when the current six-month interim agreement expires.

That agreement was between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, namely the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus Germany (P5+1).

Hillel Schenker, co-editor of the Jerusalem-based Palestine-Israel Journal, who has been tracking nuclear developments in the Middle East, told IPS Saudi criticism is also based on the assumption that the Geneva agreement is a bad deal.

Yet if it proves to be a building block towards an arrangement for preventing Iran from going nuclear militarily, Riyadh won’t feel the need to obtain its own nuclear counterweight, he added.

In addition, he said, “just as Israel will lobby for the idea that Iranian support for [the Lebanese militant group] Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad be dealt with in the final agreement, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States [predominantly Sunnis] will lobby for American guarantees for their security against Iranian Shiite aspirations in the region.”

Asked if the deal might spur other Middle Eastern states to develop or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons, Shannon N. Kile, senior researcher heading the Project on Nuclear Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-proliferation at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told IPS, “I think this will depend on the shape of a long-term agreement.”

That long-term agreement is expected to be finalised at the end of the current six-month interim agreement.

At the moment, said Kile, it is unclear to what extent Iran is willing to limit or reduce its sensitive nuclear fuel cycle activities in exchange for a lifting of Western sanctions, or whether the U.S. and its European Union (EU) partners will agree to lift sanctions without a near-total dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

Assuming that a deal can be reached that will involve significant technical limitations on Iran’s nuclear programme, accompanied by enhanced verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency – in particular, Iran’s accession to the Additional Protocol – to provide assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear activities in Iran, this should help allay U.S., Israeli, and Arab worries by making it more difficult for Iran to build a nuclear weapon, Kile said.

In doing so, it would actually serve to ease nuclear proliferation incentives and pressures in the Middle East, he said.

Besides Saudi Arabia, there has also been speculation about the nuclear ambitions of another Middle Eastern nation, Egypt, currently in political turmoil.

Schenker told IPS that while the Egyptians may also be unhappy with a possible Iranian-Western rapprochement, and consider themselves in competition with Iran for hegemony in the region, they are currently immersed in their own internal issues.

“If the final agreement is a reasonable one from their point of view, there is no chance that they themselves will decide to go nuclear militarily,” he predicted.

However, both deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and the successor military regime announced interest in reviving the dormant Egyptian programme to build a nuclear energy power plant, perhaps as a counterpoint to the Iranian nuclear energy programme.

In addition, a solid final deal with the Iranians will only increase Egyptian determination to promote a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, and a desire to place the Israeli nuclear programme on the table as well, he noted.

“It seems to me that the pessimism about last weekend’s deal between Iran and the P5+1 states coming from Israel, Saudi Arabia and in some quarters of the U.S. Congress is understandable given that the Iranians have been less-than-fully forthcoming, and in some cases actively deceitful, about their nuclear activities in the past,” Kile told IPS.

However, the deal is an important first step toward addressing international concerns about the scope of Iran’s nuclear programme and, as such, should be welcomed by even those who are sceptical of Tehran’s nuclear intentions, he added.

The agreement reached in Geneva imposes technical constraints and verification requirements that make it virtually impossible for Iran to use its nuclear facilities to make progress toward building a nuclear weapon during this period.

He said it also lengthens the amount of time that Iran would need if it were to later decide to build a weapon.

“These are important achievements that should not be overlooked or dismissed,” Kile added.

As Palestinian-Israeli peace talks and nuclear talks on Iran’s disputed nuclear programme continue, a unique international conference, “A Middle East without Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)”, was held in Jerusalem.

The topic is taboo because Israel maintains a veil of “studied ambiguity” on its alleged nuclear arsenal.

At the Notre Dame hotel in Jerusalem, the singular get-together took place: Ziad Abu Zayyad, former head of the Palestinian delegation to the Arms Control and Regional Security (ACRS) multilateral talks; Dan Kurtzer, former peace mediator and former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt; and young and veteran activists against the proliferation of WMDs.

Mordechai Vanunu, also present, is forbidden to speak to foreigners or leave Israel.“The nuclear issue is Israel’s last taboo.”

Invoking his opposition to WMDs, the former nuclear technician revealed in 1986 details of his country’s alleged nuclear weapons programme to the British Sunday Times. Abducted by Mossad intelligence agents, the Israeli whistleblower spent 18 years in an Israeli jail, including more than 11 in solitary confinement.

“Ten years ago, we couldn’t even have a conference disembodied from reality,” notes an enthused Kurtzer.

This is no longer pie in the sky, but a very public event on an issue forcibly kept out of the public eye in Israel.

The conference was organised by the Palestine-Israel Journal (PIJ), a joint civil society publication dedicated to the quest for peace in the region.

“Track-Two diplomacy will have an effect on Track One, formal diplomacy,” explains the diplomat who is now a professor of Middle East policy studies at Princeton University. “If not this year – next year or the year after.”

The conference was held just a few days prior to the start of Round Two on Thursday Nov. 7 between Iran and the P5+1 group of six major powers (Britain, China, France, Russia and the United State, plus and Germany). Round One ended on a positive note.

Notwithstanding the persistent suspicion that Iran is racing towards nuclear arms, the only major player in the Middle East which, allegedly, possesses a nuclear arsenal is Israel.

Allegedly, because reports on the issue – all from foreign sources – have neither been confirmed nor denied by Israel. Maintaining its veil of “studied ambiguity”, Israel hasn’t signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Israel’s nuclear policy is defined in one sentence: ‘Israel won’t be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East.’

“If Israel won’t be the first, it won’t be the second either,” quips Israeli non-conventional weapons expert Reuven Pedatzur.

Vanunu knows well the consequences of breaking the strict censorship code on the issue. Public debate is nonexistent. “The nuclear issue is Israel’s last taboo,” says Pedatzur.

A presentation on “Fissile Material Controls in the Middle East” by Princeton University’s Senior Research Physicist Frank von Hippel proposes a ban on plutonium separation and use; an end to the use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel; an end to enrichment of uranium above six percent; and no additional enrichment plants.

It’s only natural that Israel’s nuclear programme would take centre stage. The Dimona nuclear plant is scrutinised. “Freeze, declare, and then step-by-step reduction of Israel’s stocks of plutonium and HEU,” is what Israel must give in return for von Hippel’s global proposal.

Yet despite across-the-board harmony on the need to free the world’s most volatile region from the most volatile weapon, the speakers failed to reach a consensus on the practicality of focusing on the region’s one and only country believed to have nuclear arms.

“This excellent proposal is premature,” comments Pedatzur. “Dealing with Israel’s nuclear programme is a non-starter. If the U.S. will exert pressure on Israel, maybe; unfortunately, I don’t see any U.S. incentive.”

Kurtzer chimes in: “The U.S. is specifically interested in stopping nuclear weapons proliferation. Regarding Israel, we’re back to the question of non-declared status, and the U.S.’ strong bilateral relationship, a fact of life.”

Following the Madrid Peace Conference (1991), Israel participated in the ACRS multilateral talks.

Israel focused on the regional security component; Arab states (led by Egypt) on the arms control component – that is, on controlling Israel’s suspected nukes. The talks collapsed in 1995.

Secure in its don’t-talk-about-it comfort zone, Israel is ready to discuss a WMD-free zone and thus forgo the ultimate deterrent against its so-called eternal enemies, but only within a comprehensive peace settlement with all of its neighbours, including Palestine, Syria and Iran.

That’s a state of affairs as hypothetical as it is improbable.

“Israel wants the international community to agree de facto to its nuclear status,” bemoans Abu Zayyad. “Assuming it’s out of it, Israel isn’t against a nuclear-free Middle East. That’s ridiculous.”

Abu Zayyad reflects the traditional Palestinian position. Both the nuclear weapons issue and the peace vision must be approached “correlatively, not sequentially.”

Is there a linkage between or amongst these issues?

“The formal answer of diplomats is ‘No’,” says Kurtzer. “But surely, as the debate takes place in a civil society forum like this one without being cut off – here’s the linkage.”

Israel rejects any linkage between its nuclear programme and the nascent regional détente.

“A Russian-American agreement to move the chemical weapons from Syria; Iranian and U.S. presidents speaking for the first time since 1979; Palestinian-Israeli negotiations,” enumerates Hillel Schenker, PIJ co-editor with Abu Zayyad. “This creates a constructive background for moving forward toward a WMD-free Middle East,” he concludes.

Eager to pour cold water on the conference’s optimism, Pedatzur enumerates inversely: “Chemical weapons use in Syria’s civil war; failure till now to resolve Iran’s nuclear crisis; Israel’s continued possession of nuclear weapons and occupation of Palestine. A WMD-free Middle East can’t be established any time soon.”

Kurtzer says “To the extent the U.S. is ready to exercise its influence and power, a regional security breakthrough can occur which will ease the way for us not only to have a discussion on the possibility of a WMD-free Middle East, but to actually start engaging on these issues.”

Abu Zayyad advocates a global arrangement. “When you speak about Israel, Israel speaks about Iran; Iran about Pakistan; Pakistan about India, etc.” – the nuclear chain.

The conference may have succeeded in breaking through the censorship surrounding Israel’s assumed nuclear weapons, but not the taboo on Israel effectively creating a WMD-free Middle East.

Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, says her country faces a triple nuclear threat literally at her doorstep, from India, China and Pakistan. Credit: UN Photo/JC McIlwaine

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 3 2013 (IPS)

The General Assembly’s first-ever high-level meeting on nuclear disarmament closed last week on a predictable note: the longstanding proposal for the elimination of nuclear weapons remains firmly in the realm of political fantasy.

The one-day meeting, referred to by insiders as the HLM, provided no concrete assurances from any of the world’s five declared nuclear powers – the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia – for a world free of nuclear weapons."The greatest impact comes when there is popular pressure...for nuclear disarmament and abolition." -- Joseph Gerson of the American Friends Service Committee

Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, told delegates her country was perhaps the only country facing a triple nuclear threat literally at her doorstep. The South Asian nation lives in dangerous proximity to not one but three nuclear powers: India, China and Pakistan.

She rightly pointed out that her country has “good reasons to worry about these vicious weapons”.

Hasina called for the establishment, as an interim measure, of nuclear-free zones in South Asia and the Middle East.

But a long-delayed international conference on the creation of a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East was postponed last year and remains in limbo, mired in the politics of the region.

Asked if last week’s high-level meeting produced anything concrete, Joseph Gerson of the American Friends Service Committee, a strong anti-nuclear advocate, told IPS “one cannot expect miracles or enormous breakthroughs at the HLM or similar multinational disarmament forums”.

“The greatest impact comes when there is popular pressure, and social movement demands from below, for nuclear disarmament and abolition, as we saw in the 1950s, early 60s, and the freeze era of the late 1970s and early ’80s.”

That said, the fact that the HLM was held, with 74 heads of state, foreign ministers, ambassadors and other foreign ministry personnel speaking, reflects the continuing commitment of the vast majority of the world’s nations to achieve a nuclear weapons free world, as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Gerson pointed out.

“These demands and the increasing isolation of the United States and Israel in such forums is something those of us who are U.S. Americans need to be teaching our compatriots,” he added.

Until the HLM, he said, the U.S. and other P5 states (Britain, France, China and Russia) had boycotted such multilateral disarmament conferences, most recently the Oslo Conference on the Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons.

“So, tiny and incremental as it may be, the fact that the administration [of U.S. President Barack Obama] was represented in the HLM, albeit by low-level officials and defensively, reflects the reality that it cannot indefinitely ignore the demands of the majority of the world’s nations,” he added.

Jayantha Dhanapala, a former U.N. under-secretary-general for disarmament affairs, told IPS last month that unless disarmament becomes a priority for possessor states, “speeches and meetings alone are not going to change the stark dangers posed by this most destructive weapon of mass destruction”.

A decision to outlaw nuclear weapons in the same way as biological and chemical weapons is essential, he stressed, and the time to start negotiations on a Nuclear Weapon Convention is not tomorrow but now.

Long before the meeting concluded, delegates were readying for two key upcoming meetings early next year.

Firstly, an international conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons scheduled to take place in Mexico in February 2014.

And secondly, a ministerial meeting of the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative (NPDI) to be held in Hiroshima, Japan in April 2014.

Ray Acheson, director of Reaching Critical Will, a programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS the HLM provided an opportunity for governments to be bold and visionary in a way that other fora dealing with nuclear issues do not.

She said governments aren’t constrained by having to adopt a consensus outcome or negotiate an agreement. Rather, they can say exactly what they think.

In that sense, she said, what would have been a good outcome for the HLM was a series of forward-looking statements condemning the continued possession of and reliance on nuclear weapons and calling for their banning and elimination.

This could help governments – especially those free of nuclear weapons – to mobilise more effectively against nuclear weapons, she added.

Outside of the HLM, foreign ministers and high-level representatives from the 183 member states who are parties to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) issued an urgent call last week to the eight remaining states – China, North Korea, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and the United States – to sign and ratify the CTBT.

According to guidelines of the CTBT, ratification by these eight countries is necessary for the treaty’s entry into force.

Gerson told IPS the HLM also provided non-nuclear states an opportunity to continue pressing the U.S. and other nuclear powers to fulfill their Article VI Nuclear Non-Proliferating Treaty (NPT) obligations and to fulfill the obligations agreed in the Action Plan of the 2010 NPT Review Conference.

This includes a commitment to hold a conference on the creation of a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, as well as planning among themselves – most impressively by the Nonaligned Movement – ways to exert greater pressure on the nuclear powers.

On the sidelines, the HLM drew civil society and disarmament activists from across the U.S. and internationally to New York.

This “provid[ed] us the opportunity to share information to develop plans for the remainder of the Obama administration, especially as we approach the Mexico Follow-On Conference on the Human Consequences of Nuclear Weapons, the 100th anniversary of the First World War, and the 2015 NPT Review Conference,” said Gerson.

The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel possess a total of approximately 19,000 nuclear weapons. Credit: Courtesy ICAN

By Baher Kamal
MANAMA, Mar 11 2013 (IPS)

After a week of activities in Oslo during the Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, major anti-nuclear campaigners moved Monday to the Bahraini capital, Manama, in yet another step towards the abolition of atomic weapons.

“Nuclear weapons – the most inhuman and destructive of all tools of war – are at the peak of a pyramid of violence in this increasingly interdependent world,” said campaigners during the presentation of an anti-nuclear exhibition, promoted by the Bahraini and Japanese ministries of foreign affairs, on Mar. 11 in Manama.

“The threat of atomic weapons is not in the past,” the organisers said. “It is a major crisis today.”

Co-organised by the Bahrain Centre for Strategic, International and Energy Studies (Derasat), Soka Gakkai International (SGI), the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the United Nations Information Center (UNIC) and Inter Press Service (IPS), the exhibition — “From a Culture of Violence to a Culture of Peace: Towards a World Free from Nuclear Weapons” — will be held in Manama from Mar. 12-23.

“This exhibition –the first ever in an Arab country – (represents another) step toward making the human aspiration to live in a world free from nuclear weapons a reality,” SGI’s executive director for peace affairs, Hirotugu Terasaki, told IPS.

“The very existence of these weapons – the most inhuman of all – implies a major danger,” said Terasaki, who is also the vice president of this Buddhist organisation that promotes international peace and security, with more than 12 million members globally.

Asked about the argument used by nuclear powers that the possession of such weapons is a guarantee of safety and security – the so-called “deterrence doctrine” – Terasaki said, “The world should now move beyond this myth.”

“Security”, he said, begins with basic human needs: shelter, clean air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat. People need to work, to care for their health, to be protected from violence, according to the SGI exhibition.

Terasaki believes nuclear weapons differ from “conventional” weapons in two main regards.

“First is their overwhelming destructive power. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 delivered a blast equivalent to about 13 kilotons of TNT,” he said.

Some 140,000 people lost their lives just at the end of that year, he said.

“Since then nuclear weapons with yields of more than 50 megatons have been developed, several thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”

Whereas conventional weapons can, at least to some degree, distinguish between military and civilian targets, nuclear weapons kill indiscriminately, destroying all life on a massive scale, according to Terasaki.

“The second point to emphasise is the radioactivity they leave behind. After fires caused by the explosion are extinguished and silence returns, radioactivity (lingers on) for months and can cause leukaemia or other diseases, even affecting people who only enter the area after the bombing. These diseases are often inherited by sufferers’ offspring.”

Before moving to Bahrain, the SGI exhibition had toured 230 cities in 29 countries, and had been translated into eight languages including, now, Arabic.

Among its key objectives in Bahrain is to contribute to the discussion on a Middle East nuclear weapons free zone.

“What we celebrate today reflects a sincere expression of the true spirit of Islam,” Bahraini Minister for Foreign Affairs Ghanim bin-Fadl Al-Buainain said at a press conference Monday.

“The pure meaning of Islam is ‘peace’,” he said, “but unfortunately Islam’s image and principles have (today) been distorted…”

Al-Buainain also referred to the third nuclear test carried out by North Korea last month, saying that the biggest threat to “international peace and security is the global and regional arms race, especially nuclear arms”.

He also called attention to Iran’s nuclear programme, “which maintains its peaceful functions”. However, this programme has “far-reaching effects on the environment, wildlife and marine life…as well as security risks in the Gulf region if it transforms into a militaristic nuclear programme,” added the Bahraini minister.

Speaking at the same press conference, Japan’s ambassador in Manama, Shigeki Sumi, reaffirmed Japan’s commitment to abolishing nuclear weapons, since “Japan has been the sole country that suffered from the catastrophic human consequences of nuclear bombing during World War II”.

Nasser Burdestan, ICAN’s regional campaigner in Bahrain who played a key role in organising the anti-nuclear exhibition, stressed the need to advance the effort of so-called “human diplomacy”.

“Biological weapons were prohibited in 1975; chemical weapons in 1997; land mines in 1999, and cluster bombs in 2010. It is now time to abolish nuclear weapons,” said Burdestan.

Two major anti-nuclear events in Oslo preceded this historic exhibition: the ICAN Civil Society Forum (Mar. 2-3) that brought together more than 500 campaigners, experts, scientists and physicians, followed by an inter-governmental conference (Mar. 4-5), organised by Norway, which drew representatives from 127 states, the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, in addition to civil society.

Notable at the Oslo conference was the complete absence of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

At the start of 2012 eight states possessed approximately 4,400 operational nuclear weapons, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

“Nearly 2,000 of these are kept in a state of high operational alert. If all nuclear warheads are counted—operational warheads, spares, those in both active and inactive storage, and intact warheads scheduled for dismantlement—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel together possess a total of approximately 19,000 nuclear weapons,” SIPRI reported.

Meanwhile, SGI’s president and eminent Buddhist leader, Daisaku Ikeda, has launched a global peace proposal, a blueprint consisting of three concrete proposals that will serve as a launching point for the larger goal of total global disarmament by the year 2030.

The proposal expresses the hope that NGOs and forward-looking governments will establish an action group to initiate, before the year’s end, the process of drafting a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) outlawing nuclear weapons, which swallow some 105 billion dollars annually.

In a study entitled “Don’t Bank on the Bomb”, ICAN reported that more than 300 banks, pension funds, insurance companies and asset managers in 30 countries have invested heavily in nuclear arms producers, while 20 companies are involved in the manufacture, maintenance and modernisation of U.S., British, French and Indian nuclear forces.

(END)