Cloud from an atmospheric nuclear test conducted by the United States at Enewetak Atoll, Marshall Islands, in November 1952. Photo credit: US Government

By Ramesh Jaura
HIROSHIMA, Aug 28 2015 (IPS)

A three-day landmark U.N. Conference on Disarmament Issues has ended here – one day ahead of the International Day Against Nuclear Tests – stressing the need for ushering in a world free of nuclear weapons, but without a consensus on how to move towards that goal.

The Aug. 26-28 conference, organised by the Bangkok-based United Nations Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Asia and the Pacific (UNRCPD) in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of Japan and the city and Prefecture of Hiroshima, was attended by more than 80 government officials and experts, also from beyond the region.

It was the twenty-fifth annual meeting of its kind held in Japan, which acquired a particular importance against the backdrop of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the founding of the United Nations.“In order to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons, it is extremely important for political leaders, young people and others worldwide to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and see for themselves the reality of atomic bombings. Through this, I am convinced that we will be able to share our aspirations for a world free of nuclear weapons” – Fumio Kishida, Japanese Foreign Minister

Summing up the deliberations, UNRCPD Director Yuriy Kryvonos said the discussions on “the opportunities and challenges in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation” had been “candid and dynamic”.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) Review Conference from Apr. 27 to May 22 at the U.N. headquarters drew the focus in presentations and panel discussions.

Ambassador Taous Feroukhi of Algeria, who presided over the NPT Review Conference, explained at length why the gathering had failed to agree on a universally acceptable draft final text, despite a far-reaching consensus on a wide range of crucial issues: refusal of the United States, Britain and Canada to accept the proposal for convening a conference by Mar. 1, 2016, for a Middle East Zone Free of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).

Addressing the issue, Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida joined several government officials and experts in expressing his regrets that the draft final document was not adopted due to the issue of WMDs.

Kishida noted that the failure to establish a new Action Plan at the Review Conference had led to a debate over the viability of the NPT. “However,” he added, “I would like to make one thing crystal clear. The NPT regime has played an extremely important role for peace and stability in the international community; a role that remains unchanged even today.”

The Hiroshima conference not only discussed divergent views on measures to preserve the effective implementation of the NPT, but also the role of the yet-to-be finalised Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in achieving the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons, humanitarian consequences of the use of atomic weapons, and the significance of nuclear weapon free zones (NWFZs) for strengthening the non-proliferation regime and nuclear disarmament.

Speakers attached particular attention to the increasing role of local municipalities, civil society and nuclear disarmament education, including testimonies from ‘hibakusha’ (survivors of atomic bombings mostly in their 80s and above) in consolidating common understanding of the threat posed by nuclear weapons for people from all countries around the world regardless whether or not their governments possess nuclear weapons.

UNRCPD Director Kryvonos said the Hiroshima conference had given “a good start for searching new fresh ideas on how we should move towards our goal – protecting our planet from a risk of using nuclear weapons.”

Hiroshima Prefecture Governor Hidehiko Yuzaki, the city’s Mayor Karzumi Matsui – son of a ‘hibakusha’ father and president of the Mayors for Peace organisation comprising 6,779 cities in 161 countries and regions – as well as his counterpart from Nagasaki, Tomihisa Taue, pleaded for strengthening a concerted campaign for a nuclear free world. Taue is also the president of the National Council of Japan’s Nuclear-Free Local Authorities.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki city leaders welcomed suggestions for a nuclear disarmament summit next year in Hiroshima, which they said would lend added thrust to awareness raising for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Though foreign ministry officials refused to identify themselves publicly with the proposal, Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, who hails from Hiroshima, emphasised the need for nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear weapon states to “work together in steadily advancing practical and concrete measures in order to make real progress in nuclear disarmament.”

Kishida said that Japan will submit a “new draft resolution on the total elimination of nuclear weapons” to the forthcoming meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. Such a resolution, he said, was “appropriate to the 70th year since the atomic bombings and could serve as guidelines for the international community for the next five years, on the basis of the Review Conference”.

The next NPT Review Conference is expected to be held in 2020.

Mayors for Peace has launched a 2020 Vision Campaign as the main vehicle for advancing their agenda – a nuclear-weapon-free world by the year 2020.

The campaign was initiated on a provisional basis by the Executive Cities of Mayors for Peace at their meeting in Manchester, Britain, in October 2003. It was launched under the name ‘Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons’ in November of that year at the 2nd Citizens Assembly for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons held in Nagasaki, Japan.

In August 2005, the World Conference endorsed continuation of the campaign under the title of the ‘2020 Vision Campaign’.

Foreign Minister Kishida expressed the views of the inhabitants of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when he pointed out in a message to the UNRCPD conference: “… the reality of atomic bombings is far from being sufficiently understood worldwide.”

He added: “In order to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons, it is extremely important for political leaders, young people and others worldwide to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and see for themselves the reality of atomic bombings. Through this, I am convinced that we will be able to share our aspirations for a world free of nuclear weapons.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

By Jan Oberg
LUND, Sweden, Aug 7 2015 (IPS)

It’s absolutely necessary to remember what happened 70 years ago in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see the movies from then, listen to the survivors, the hibakusa. But it isn’t enough for us to rid the world of these crimes-against-humanity weapons. And that we must.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are history and are also the essence of the age you and I live in – the nuclear age. If the hypothesis is that by showing these films, we create opinion against nuclear weapons, 70 years of ever more nuclearism should be enough to conclude that that hypothesis is plain wrong.

Jan Oberg

There is a need for a frontal attack on not only the weapons but on nuclearism – the thinking/ideology on which they are based and made to look ‘necessary’ for security and peace.

Nuclear weapons – only for terrorists

At its core, terrorism is about harming or killing innocent people and not only combatants. Any country that possesses nukes is aware that nukes can’t be used without killing millions of innocent people – infinitely more lethal than Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and so.

Since 9/11 [attack on the Twin Towers in New York], governments and media have conveniently promoted the idea that terrorism is only about small non-governmental groups and thus tried to make us forget that the nuclear ‘haves’ themselves practise state terrorism and hold humanity hostage to potential civilisational genocide (omnicide).

Dictatorship

No nuclear state has ever dared to hold a referendum and ask its citizens: “Do you or do you not accept to be defended by a nuclear arsenal?” Nuclear weapons with the omnicidal ‘kill all and everything’ characteristics is pure dictatorship, incompatible with both parliamentary and direct democracy. And freedom.

Citizens generally have more, or better, morals than governments and do not wish to see themselves, their neighbours or fellow human beings around the world burn up in a process that would make the Holocaust look like a cosy afternoon tea party. In short, nuclear weapons states either arrange referendums or must accept the label dictatorship.“Citizens generally have more, or better, morals than governments and do not wish to see themselves, their neighbours or fellow human beings around the world burn up in a process that would make the Holocaust look like a cosy afternoon tea party”

The idea that a few hundred politicians and military people in the world’s nuclear states have a self-appointed right to play God and decide whether ‘project humankind’ shall continue or not belongs to the realm of the civilisational perverse or the Theatre of the Absurd. Such people must run on the assumption, deep down, that they are Chosen People with a higher mission. Gandhi rightly called Western civilisation diluted fascism.

Unethical

Why? Because – simply – there can be no political or other goal that justifies the use of this doomsday weapon and the killing of millions of people, or making the earth uninhabitable.

Possession versus proliferation

The trick played on us all since 1945 is that there are some ‘responsible’ – predominantly Christian, Western – countries that can, should, or must have nuclear weapons and then there are some irresponsible governments/leaders elsewhere that must be prevented by all means from acquiring them. In other words, that proliferation rather than possession is the problem.

However, it is built into the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that those who don’t have nuclear weapons shall abstain from acquiring them as a quid pro quo for the nuclear-haves to disarm theirs completely.

That is, the whole world shall become a nuclear-weapons-free zone (NWFZ).

Those who have nuclear weapons provoke others to get them too. Possession leads to proliferation.

The recent negotiations with Iran is a good example of this bizarre world view: the five nuclear terrorist states, sitting on enough nukes to blow up the world several times over and who have systematically violated international law in general and the NPT in particular, tell Iran – which abides by the NPT and doesn’t want nuclear weapons – that it must never obtain nuclear weapons.

Simultaneously, they turn a blind eye to nuclear terrorist state, Israel’s 50+ years’ old nuclear arsenals.

And it is all actively assisted by mainstream media which seem to lack the knowledge and/or intellectual capacity to challenge this whole set-up – including the racist belief structure that “we have a God-given right and are more responsible than everybody else – particularly non-Christians…”

But what about deterrence?

You’ve heard the philosophical nonsense repeatedly over 70 years: nuclear weapons are good to deter everyone from starting the ‘Third World War’. That nukes are here to never be used. That no one would start that war because he/she would know that there would be a mass murder on one’s own population in a second strike, retaliation. But think! Two small, simple counterarguments:

• You cannot deter anyone from doing something unless you are willing to implement your threat, your deterrent. If A knows that B wouldnever use his nukes, A would not be afraid of the retaliation. Thus, every nuclear weapons state is ready to use nukes under some defined circumstance; if not there is no deterrence whatsoever

• The United States has long ago done two things (as the only one on earth): decided on a doctrine in which the use of small nukes in aconventional role is fundamental, thus blurring the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons; and said that its missile defence (which it also wants in Europe) is about preventing a second strike back – shooting down retaliatory missiles – so it can start, fight and win a nuclear war without being harmed itself. Or so it can hope.

Hope

Let’s rid the world of this civilisational mistake. Nuclearism and nuclear deterrence are the world’s most dangerous ideologies comparable to slavery, absolute monarchy and cannibalism that we have decided – because we are humans and civilised and can think and feel – to put behind us.

There is no co-existence possible between nuclear weapons on the one hand and democracy, peace and civilisation on the other.

It’s time to regain hope by looking at all the – civilised – non-nuclear countries and follow their example. Thus, 99 percent of the southern hemisphere landmass is nuclear weapons-free with 60 percent of its 193 states, with 33 percent of the world’s population, included in this free zone.

The West, the United States in particular, which started the terrible Nuclear Age, should now follow the great majority of humanity, apologise for its nuclearism and move to zero.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Michael Kirby, Chair of the Commission of Inquiry on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), briefs the press about the Commission's report which documents wide-ranging and ongoing crimes against humanity. Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 25 2014 (IPS)

Has the world reached a stage where nuclear weapons may be used as bargaining chips in international politics?

So it seems, judging by the North Korean threat last week to conduct another nuclear test – if and when the 193-member U.N. General Assembly adopts a resolution aimed at referring the hermit kingdom to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for human rights abuses.

“If North Korea begins a game of nuclear blackmailing,” one anti-nuclear activist predicted, “will Russia not be far behind in what appears to be a new Cold War era?”

Dr. Rebecca Johnson, author of the U.N.-published book ‘Unfinished Business’ on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) negotiations, told IPS the larger danger – exemplified also by some of the rhetoric about nuclear weapons bandied around the crisis in Ukraine – is that nuclear weapons are not useful deterrents but are increasingly seen as bargaining chips, with heightened risks that they may be used to “prove” some weak leader’s “point”, with catastrophic humanitarian consequences.

She pointed out North Korea’s recent threat to conduct another nuclear test – its fourth – is unlikely to deter U.N. states from adopting a resolution to charge the regime of Kim Jong-un with crimes against humanity.

“North Korea’s nuclear sabre-rattling appears to draw from Cold War deterrence theories, but a nuclear test is not a nuclear weapon,” she added.

South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-Se told the Security Council last May North Korea is the only country in the world that has conducted nuclear tests in the 21st century.

Since 2006, it has conducted three nuclear tests, the last one in February 2013 – all of them in defiance of the international community and the United Nations.

The resolution on North Korea, which is expected to come up before the U.N.’s highest policy making body in early December, has already been adopted by the U.N. committee dealing with humanitarian issues, known as the Third Committee.

The vote was 111 in favour to 19 against, with 55 abstentions in the 193-member committee. The vote in the General Assembly is only a formality.

Alyn Ware, a member of the World Future Council, told IPS: “Nuclear weapons should not be used as threats or as bargaining chips.”

Their use, after all, would involve massive violations of the right to life and other human rights.

However, he noted, this applies also to the other nuclear-armed states in the region (China, Russia and the United States) and states under extended nuclear deterrence doctrines (South Korea and Japan).

“The nuclear option should be taken off the table by establishing a North East Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zone,” he said.

And the states leading the human rights charges against North Korea should make it crystal clear that such charges are not an attempt to overthrow the North Korean government, he added.

The tensions between countries in the region, and the fact that the Korean War of the 1950s has never officially ended (only an armistice is in place), makes this a very sensitive issue, said Ware. If the General Assembly adopts the resolution, as expected, it is up to the 15-member Security Council to initiate ICC action on North Korea.

But both Russia and China are most likely to veto any attempts to drag North Korea to The Hague.

In an editorial Sunday, the New York Times said North Korea’s human rights abuses warrant action by the Security Council.

“Given what is in the public record, it is impossible to see how any country can defend Mr Kim and his lieutenants or block their referral to the International Criminal Court,” the paper said.

“As confidence in the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) continues to erode, has the time come to ban all nuclear weapons?” asked Dr Johnson.

She said “a comprehensive nuclear ban treaty would dramatically reduce nuclear dangers and provide much stronger international tools than we have today for curbing the acquisition, deployment and spread of nuclear weapons.”

The status some nations attach to nuclear weapons would soon be a thing of the past, nuclear sabre-rattling would become pointless, and anyone threatening to use these weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) would automatically face charges under the International Criminal Court, said Dr. Johnson, who is executive director and co-founder of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy.

“This might not stop nuclear blackmail overnight, but it would make it much harder for North Korea and any others to imagine they could gain benefits by issuing nuclear threats.”

As North Korea withdrew from the NPT over 10 years ago, and has already conducted three nuclear tests, it is unlikely that a threatened fourth test would be an effective deterrent, said Dr Johnson.

The U.N. resolution has been triggered by a report from a U.N. Commission of Inquiry on North Korea which recommended that leaders of that country be prosecuted by the ICC for grave human rights violations.

The commission was headed by Michael Kirby, a High Court Judge from Australia.

In a statement before the Third Committee last week, the North Korean delegate said the report of the Commission “was based on fabricated testimonies by a handful of defectors who had fled the country after committing crimes.

“The report was a compilation of groundless political allegations and had no credibility as an official U.N. document,” he added.

Ware told IPS, “I have a lot of respect for my colleague Michael Kirby from Australia, who led a year-long U.N. inquiry into human rights abuses which concluded that North Korean security chiefs, and possibly even Kim Jong Un himself, should face international justice for ordering systematic torture, starvation and killings.

“I find the response of the North Korean authorities to try to discredit his report due to his sexual orientation to be reprehensible,” he added. “Nor do I find credible the North Korean counter-claims that their human rights violations are non-existent, while the real human rights violator is the U.S. government.”

Ware said there are indeed human rights violations in the United States, but they pale in comparison to those in North Korea.

There is a body of U.S. civil rights law and legal institutions that provide protections for U.S. citizens even if it is not fully perfect nor implemented entirely fairly, he pointed out.

But there is a lack of such protection of civil rights in North Korea, with the result that the North Korean administration inflicts incredibly egregious violations of human rights with total impunity, according to Kirby’s report.

“I do not believe that the threat of a nuclear test by North Korea should deter the United Nations from addressing these human rights violations, including the possibility of referral to the International Criminal Court,” Ware declared.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands, triggering health and environmental problems which still plague the nation. Credit: Christopher Michel/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 12 2014 (IPS)

When the Foreign Minister of Marshall Islands Tony de Brum addressed a nuclear review Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) meeting at the United Nations last month, he asked whether anyone in the room had witnessed a nuclear explosion.

The question was met, not surprisingly, with resounding silence.

As a nine-year-old boy, the minister vividly remembered seeing the white flash of the Bravo detonation on Bikini atoll, six decades ago. It was 1,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima, he told PrepCom delegates, mostly proponents of nuclear disarmament.

A two-week-long meeting of the PrepCom for the upcoming 2015 review conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ended in predictable disappointment.

John Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and the U.N. Office of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA), told IPS the PrepCom succeeded in adopting an agenda for the 2015 conference.

But “to no one’s surprise, it did not accomplish anything else,” he added.

Burroughs, a member of the international legal team for Marshall Islands, said the most dramatic development of the PrepCom was the announcement of the Marshall Islands filing on Apr. 24 of lawsuits against the nine nuclear-armed states: the five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council, namely the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia, along with Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.

The cases, before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, claim those states have failed to meet obligations of nuclear disarmament and cessation of the nuclear arms race under the NPT and general international law, said Burroughs.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands triggering health and environmental problems which still plague the nation with a little over 68,000 people.

The NPT, which came into force in 1970, requires a review conference to be held every five years. The last review conference took place in 2010.

The only nuclear powers which have refused to join the treaty are India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea (which joined and later withdrew from the NPT).

South Korea’s Foreign Minister Yun Byung-Se, who chaired a meeting of the Security Council on Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), pointed out last week that North Korea “is the only country in the world that has conducted nuclear tests in the 21st century.

“Notwithstanding the efforts of the international community, North Korea has continued to develop its nuclear weapons over the last two decades, and is now threatening its fourth nuclear test,” he added.

If North Korea succeeds in acquiring nuclear weapons, he said, it will seriously undermine the NPT regime and exacerbate tension and instability in Northeast Asia.

Ambassador Enrique Roman-Morey of Peru, who chaired the PrepCom, admitted the meeting was unable to agree on an action plan for NPT.

“But this was due to lack of time, not lack of political will,” he said, pointing out the PrepCom does not negotiate.

Asked about the difficulties facing negotiators, he said when nuclear issues are discussed there are problems “from the first letter to the last letter” in the negotiated document.

A “working paper” resulting from the PrepCom will be the basis for future negotiations at the Review Conference.

Under the treaty, all parties to the NPT pledge not to transfer nuclear weapons or assist or encourage any non-nuclear weapon state to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons.

Similarly, each non-nuclear-weapon state undertakes not to receive the transfer of nuclear weapons or manufacture or otherwise acquire them.

Burroughs told IPS the PrepCom, like previous such meetings in the years prior to review conferences, could not reach consensus on recommendations to the 2015 conference.

Many states rejected the effort of the PrepCom chair to craft a compromise document.

The NPT nuclear-weapon states effectively maintained that commitments made by the 2010 Review Conference relating to nuclear arms control and disarmament should be carried forward into the next five-year period, he added.

He said the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and other groupings of non-nuclear weapon states held that the 2015 conference should adopt a more far-reaching plan of action that leads to verified, timebound elimination of nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future.

Many non-nuclear weapon states also said the proposed recommendations should have taken much fuller account of the conferences on humanitarian consequences of nuclear explosions, the last two held in Norway and Mexico, as well as the first-ever High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament held in the General Assembly in September 2013.

Burroughs said the debate at the PrepCom set the stage for consideration of a crucial question going into next year’s Review Conference: “Should non-nuclear weapon states insist, even if doing so results in no agreed outcome, that the conference set in motion multilateral negotiations on achieving a world free of nuclear weapons?”

A serious effort to that end was made in the 2010 conference but was rejected by the nuclear weapon states.

“Or, should they once again, as in the 1995, 2000, and 2010 conferences, agree to lesser commitments that have gone largely unfulfilled?” he said.

Still, most of those commitments remain valid and relevant whatever the 2015 conference does.

Thomas M. Countryman, U.S. assistant secretary at the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, told PrepCom delegates that in 2015, Washington will “look to build upon the success of the 2010 NPT Review Conference, where the conference approved a comprehensive, 64-item Action Plan, the first of its kind in the NPTs 44-year history.”

He said the United States will issue a national report on the steps taken so far to implement key elements of the 2010 Action Plan that uses a common framework agreed by all five nuclear weapon states.

“We will also highlight our contributions to International Atomic Energy Agency programmes harnessing the peaceful uses of nuclear energy for efforts like fighting disease, improving food security, and managing water resources,” he added.

A Patriot interceptor missile is launched from Omelek Island Oct. 25, 2012 during a U.S. Missile Defense Agency integrated flight test. Credit: U.S. Navy

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 25 2014 (IPS)

The tiny Pacific nation state of Marshall Islands – which depends heavily on the United States for its economic survival, uses the U.S. dollar as its currency and predictably votes with Washington on all controversial political issues at the United Nations – is challenging the world’s nuclear powers before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, is being described as a potential battle between a puny David and a mighty Goliath: a country with a population of a little over 68,000 people defying the world’s nine nuclear powers with over 3.5 billion people."The United States should defend the case and widen the opportunity for the Court to resolve the wide divide of opinion regarding the state of compliance with the disarmament obligations." -- John Burroughs

John Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and the U.N. Office of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA), told IPS the Marshall Islands and its legal team strongly encourage other states to support the case, by making statements, and by filing their own parallel cases if they qualify, or by intervening in the case.

Burroughs, who is a member of that team, said the ICJ, in its 1996 advisory opinion, held unanimously that there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations on nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.

And these cases brought by the Marshall Islands nearly 18 years after the ICJ advisory opinion “will put to the test the claims of the nine states possessing nuclear arsenals that they are in compliance with international law regarding nuclear disarmament and cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date.”

The nine nuclear states include the five permanent members (P5) of the U.N. Security Council, namely the United States, the UK, France, China and Russia, plus India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

Burroughs said three of the respondent states – the UK, India, and Pakistan – have accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the Court, as has the Marshall Islands.

For the other six states, he said, the Marshall Islands is calling on them to accept the Court’s jurisdiction in these particular cases.

“This is a normal procedure but the six states could choose not to do so,” said Burroughs.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests, triggering health and environmental problems which still plague the island nation.

Tony de Brum, the foreign minister of Marshall Islands, was quoted as saying, “Our people have suffered the catastrophic and irreparable damage of these weapons, and we vow to fight so that no one else on earth will ever again experience these atrocities.”

The continued existence of nuclear weapons and the terrible risk they pose to the world threaten us all, he added.

The suit also says the five original nuclear weapon states (P5) are continuously breaching their legal obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Article VI of the NPT requires states to pursue negotiations in good faith on cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and nuclear disarmament.

India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are not parties to the treaty.

But the lawsuit contends that all nine nuclear-armed nations are still violating customary international law.

Far from dismantling their weapons, the nuclear weapons states are accused of planning to spend over one trillion dollars on modernising their arsenals in the next decade.

David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which is strongly supportive of the law suit, said, “The Marshall Islands is saying enough is enough.”

He said it is taking a bold and courageous stand on behalf of all humanity, “and we at the foundation are proud to stand by their side.”

In a statement released Thursday, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa said, “The failure of these nuclear-armed countries to uphold important commitments and respect the law makes the world a more dangerous place.

“We must ask why these leaders continue to break their promises and put their citizens and the world at risk of horrific devastation. This is one of the most fundamental moral and legal questions of our time,” he added.

Burroughs told IPS the United States maintains that it is committed both to the international rule of law and to the eventual achievement of a world free of nuclear weapons.

“The United States should defend the case and widen the opportunity for the Court to resolve the wide divide of opinion regarding the state of compliance with the disarmament obligations,” he added.

The other five states which have not accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the Court are being asked to do likewise.

As to the case against the UK, a key issue is whether the UK has breached the nuclear disarmament obligation by opposing General Assembly efforts to launch multilateral negotiations on the global elimination of nuclear weapons, said Burroughs.

For India and Pakistan, because they are not parties to the NPT, the case will resolve the question of whether the obligations of nuclear disarmament are customary in nature, binding on all states.

He said it will also address whether the actions of India and Pakistan in building up, improving and diversifying their nuclear arsenals are contrary to the obligation of cessation of the nuclear arms race and the fundamental legal principle of good faith.

Faith leaders gathered at the United States Peace Institute to solidify a common stance on nuclear disarmament. Credit: Courtesy of SGI

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Apr 25 2014 (IPS)

On the eve of next week’s meeting at the U.N. headquarters in New York on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), more than 100 representatives of 11 faith groups from around the world have pledged to step up their efforts to seek the global abolition of nuclear weapons.

Gathered at the U.S. Institute of Peace here Thursday, the participants, composed of influential representatives of the Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths, among others, said their traditions teach that the threat posed by nuclear weapons was “unacceptable and must be eliminated”.“Nuclear deterrence theory does not work like it used to. In order to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons, the only way is to create an era in which there are no nuclear weapons.” -- Hirotsugu Terasaki

Soka Gakkai International, a global grassroots Buddhist organisation based in Japan, hosted the event.

“The continued existence of nuclear weapons forces humankind to live in the shadow of apocalyptic destruction,” according to a statement issued at the end of the one-day conference.

“The catastrophic consequences of any use of nuclear weapons cannot be fully communicated by numbers or statistics; it is a reality that frustrates the power of both rational analysis and ordinary imagination.”

Signatories of the statement include representatives from the Muslim American Citizens Coalition and Public Affairs Council, the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Pax Christi International.

The conference, the latest in a series on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, came as delegates from around the world prepared to convene in New York for the NPT PrepCom, set to run Apr. 28 through May 9. That meeting will help lay the groundwork for the 2015 Review Conference, also slated for New York, on implementing the NPT’s goals of non-proliferation and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.

“Nuclear deterrence theory does not work like it used to. In order to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons, the only way is to create an era in which there are no nuclear weapons,” Hirotsugu Terasaki, vice-president of Soka Gakkai and executive director of Peace Affairs of Soka Gakkai International, told IPS.

“The president of our organisation has said, ‘Nuclear weapons are not a necessary evil, they are an absolute evil.’”

Prodding the process

One goal of Thursday’s symposium was to flesh out the fatal consequences of nuclear weapons, including ramifications that go well the immediate fallout of a nuclear strike.

For instance, keynote speaker Dr. Andrew Kanter, former director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, told the participants of scientific findings that even a small detonation could cause a widespread deadly famine by accelerating climate change and disrupting global agriculture.

Others discussed the need to engage the Permanent Five members of the U.N. Security Council in the broader conversation. As a first step, Thursday’s statement will be presented next week to the chair of the NPT PrepCom.

“We need to think again about what we mean by security and how we experience security,” Marie Dennis, co-president of Pax Christi International, said. “As faith-based communities, we are in a position to ask those kinds of questions.”

Since 1970, when the NPT became effective, its regular review conferences have produced few successes other than the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bars all nuclear explosions – including those, such as took place in the Marshall Islands, for testing purposes.

Additionally, the five nuclear-armed signatories have met annually since 2009. Last week, they met in Beijing where they reaffirmed past commitments and solidified a reporting framework to share national progress on meeting treaties.

Also present at Thursday’s symposium was Anita Friedt, an official on nuclear policy at the U.S. State Department. She described some of the reasons that nuclear abolition has been such a frustratingly slow process.

More than 100 representatives of 11 faith groups from around the world have pledged to step up their efforts to seek the global abolition of nuclear weapons. Credit: Courtesy of SGI

“Why can’t we just stop and give up nuclear weapons? This is really hard work,” Friedt said.

“If we just say today we’re just going to give up nuclear weapons, there’s no incentive for other countries to do so, necessarily. Unfortunately, it is more complex than it may seem at the surface.”

There are also significant bureaucratic challenges to the ongoing NPT negotiations. The U.S. Congress, for instance, failed to ratify the CTBT in 1999 and only barely ratified President Barack Obama’s New START Treaty – a strategic arms-reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia – in 2010.

“It’s a slower pace than I would like; it’s a slower pace than our president would like,” Friedt said.

Yet SGI’s Terasaki says global faith communities are well placed use their broad leverage to try to influence, and speed up, this process. Thursday’s event, he noted, was the first time such a discussion had come to the United States.

“We want to help re-energise the voice of faith communities,” he said, “and explore ways to raise public awareness of the inhumane nature of nuclear weapons.”

Obligation to disarm

The conference occurred on the same day that the Marshall Islands filed an unprecedented lawsuit before the International Court of Justice against the United States and eight other nuclear-armed countries for not upholding their commitments to the NPT and international law.

“Article VI [of the NPT] defines an obligation to negotiate in good faith for an end to nuclear arms and disarmament,” David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a consultant to the Marshall Islands lawsuit, filed Thursday, told IPS.

“This lawsuit indicates that each of the nuclear armed states are modernising their nuclear arsenal. You can’t modernise your arsenal and say you’re negotiating in good faith.”

Five countries are currently party to the NPT: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. However, the Marshall Islands is also suing India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan, claiming that those countries are bound to the same nuclear disarmament provisions under international law.

The small island nation, in Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean, is not suing for monetary compensation. Rather, its government wants the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare the nine countries in breach of their treaty obligations and to issue an injunction ordering them to begin negotiating in good faith.

Krieger says the Marshall Islands have “suffered gravely” as a result of nuclear testing carried out by the United States between 1946 and 1958.

“They don’t want any other country or people to suffer the consequences that they have,” he said, noting that the residents of the Marshall Islands have suffered health effects in the generations since the testing stopped, including stillborn babies and abnormally high rates of cancer.

Out of the nine nuclear-armed countries, only the United Kingdom, India and Pakistan accept the ICJ’s jurisdiction. The other six countries, including the United States, are not to be invited to the court in order to state their reasons for not fulfilling their obligations under the NPT.

Still, just to be sure that the United States answers for its responsibility to the NPT, the Marshall Islands has also filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court in San Francisco.

U.S. Permanent Representative Samantha Power (left) speaks with Russia's Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov (right), and Vitaly Churkin (back to camera), Russia's Permanent Representative, in happier times, prior to a unanimous vote by the Security Council on Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 22 2014 (IPS)

The growing tension between the United States and Russia over Ukraine has threatened to unravel one of the primary peace initiatives of the United Nations: nuclear disarmament.

As they trade charges against each other, the world’s two major nuclear powers have intensified their bickering – specifically on the eve of a key Preparatory Committee (PrepCoM) meeting on a treaty to stop the proliferation of these weapons of mass destruction (WMD)."The spectre of war in Europe may give new impetus to efforts to ban the bomb." -- Alice Slater

The “Thirteen Steps” agreed upon at a review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2000 and the 64-point Action Programme, together with the agreement on the Middle East WMD Free Zone proposal at the 2010 Conference, had augured well for the strengthened review process, former U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs Jayantha Dhanapala told IPS.

But he warned that, “However the actual achievements, the return to Cold War mindsets by the U.S. and Russia and the negative record of all the nuclear weapon states have converted the goal of a nuclear weapon free world into a mirage.

“Unless the Third Prepcom reverses these ominous trends, the 2015 Conference is doomed to fail, imperiling the future of the NPT,” warned Dhanapala, who is also president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.

The Third PrepCom for the upcoming 2015 Review Conference of the NPT is scheduled to take place at the United Nations Apr. 28 through May 9.

But a positive outcome will depend largely on the United States and Russia, along with the other declared nuclear powers, Britain, France and China, who are also the five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council.

Ray Acheson, director of Reaching Critical Will, a programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS next week’s PrepCom is being held at a time of high tensions between the two countries with the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

She said neither of these countries has fulfilled their obligation to negotiate the elimination of these weapons and in fact, both spend billions of dollars upgrading them and extending their lives into the indefinite future.

“Nuclear weapons are inherently dangerous and the risk of their use by accident or on purpose warrants urgent action on disarmament,” Acheson added.

During 2014, she pointed out, the NPT nuclear-armed states must report on their concrete activities to fulfill the disarmament-related actions of the 2010 NPT Action Plan.

The extent to which the nuclear-armed states can report the achievement of meaningful progress in implementing their commitments will be a strong indicator of their intention to serve as willing leaders and partners in this process, she noted.

But “none of the public releases issued thus far by the nuclear-armed states has given any reason to expect they have given serious consideration to the implementation of most of those commitments.”

Alice Slater, New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, told IPS there is “alarming sabre rattling on the eve of the NPT PrepCom.”

She said the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) builds up its military forces to “protect” Eastern Europe. The media reports only part of the story, justifying NATO war games based on events in Ukraine; former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compares Putin to Hitler; and the New York Times front page blares “Cold War Echo, Obama Strategy Writes Off Putin”.

“Yet there’s little reporting on Russia’s security fears as NATO expands up to its borders, inviting even Ukraine and Georgia to join,” said Slater, who also serves on the Coordinating Committee of Abolition 2000.

This, she said, despite President Ronald Reagan and President George Bush’s promises to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that NATO would not expand beyond East Germany.

Nor is it reported how the U.S., in 2001, quit the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Treaty, planting missiles in Poland, Romania and Turkey, she added.

In his closing statement as president of the historic 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference, which extended the treaty for an indefinite duration, Dhanapala said, “The permanence of the Treaty does not represent a permanence of unbalanced obligations, nor does it represent the permanence of nuclear apartheid between nuclear haves and have-nots.

“What it does represent is our collective dedication to the permanence of an international legal barrier against nuclear proliferation so that we can forge ahead in our tasks towards a nuclear weapons-free world.”

Slater told IPS that deteriorating U.S.-Russian relations bodes poorly for progress at the paralysed NPT process, which even before this latest eruption of enmity failed to implement the many promises for nuclear disarmament since 1970.

But this new crisis may motivate nations to press more vigorously for the process that began in Oslo (at the 2013 conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons), addressing the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and urging their legal ban.

With 16,000 nuclear bombs in Russia and the U.S., non-nuclear weapons states must step up their efforts for a ban treaty, she added.

The P-5 nuclear powers boycotted these meetings in Oslo (in 2013) and Mexico (February 2014) while Indian and Pakistan joined 127 nations in Oslo and 144 in Mexico. This year, Austria will host a follow-up.

This new process raises a contradiction highlighting the growing reality gap in the “nuclear umbrella” states, Slater said.

They ostensibly support nuclear disarmament and deplore the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war in this burgeoning new global conversation about its humanitarian effects, while continuing to rely on lethal nuclear deterrence, she noted.

Article VI of the NPT requires all treaty parties to be responsible for its fulfillment.

“The spectre of war in Europe may give new impetus to efforts to ban the bomb,” warned Slater.

Acheson told IPS that unlike the other weapons of mass destruction – chemical and biological weapons – nuclear weapons are not yet subject to an explicit legal prohibition.

“Now is the time to address this anomaly, which has been allowed to persist for far too long. History shows that legal prohibitions of weapon systems, their possession as well as their use, facilitate their elimination.”

She said weapons that have been outlawed increasingly become seen as illegitimate.

They lose their political status and, along with it, the money and resources for their production, modernisation, proliferation, and perpetuation.

In the context of rising tensions between two countries with nuclear weapons it is more imperative than ever that non-nuclear weapon states take the lead to ban nuclear weapons, Acheson stressed.

Vitaly I. Churkin (left), Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN, addresses the Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine on Mar. 13, 2014. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 14 2014 (IPS)

The U.S.-Russian confrontation over Ukraine, which is threatening to undermine current bilateral talks on North Korea, Iran, Syria and Palestine, is also in danger of triggering a nuclear fallout.

Secretary of State John Kerry told U.S. legislators early this week that if the dispute results in punitive sanctions against Russia, things could “get ugly fast” and go “in multiple directions.”"Any confrontation between nuclear armed states runs the risk of escalating to the use of nuclear weapons, whether by inadvertence, accident, or bad decision-making." -- Dr Tilman Ruff

Perhaps one such direction could lead to a nuclear impasse between the two big powers.

According to a state agency news report from Moscow, Russia has threatened to stop honouring its arms treaty commitments, and more importantly, to block U.S. military inspections of nuclear weapons, if Washington decides to suspend military cooperation with Moscow.

These mostly bilateral treaties between the United States and Russia include the 1994 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), the 2010 new START, the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and the 1970 international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

A nuclear tug-of-war between the two big powers is tinged in irony because post-Soviet Ukraine undertook one of the world’s most successful nuclear disarmament programmes when it agreed to destroy all its weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Dr. Rebecca E. Johnson, executive director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament and Diplomacy, told IPS, “Clearly the situation between Ukraine and Russia is deeply worrying.

“Without going into the politics of the situation on the ground, as I don’t have the kind of regional expertise for that, this is not a place for issuing nuclear threats or scoring nuclear points,” she said.

“I’ve been disgusted to see some British and French representatives try to use Ukraine’s crisis to justify retaining nuclear weapons in perpetuity.”

Russia is not directly threatening to attack Ukraine with nuclear weapons, and no one believes it would be useful for the United States and countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to threaten Russia with a nuclear attack, no matter what they do, said Johnson.

Ukraine, which was once armed with the third largest nuclear arsenal after the United States and Russia, and possessed more nukes than France, Britain and China, dismantled and shipped its weapons to Russia for destruction beginning in 1994.

Dr. Ira Helfand, co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), said Ukraine is commendable in being one of the few states to have given up its nuclear weapons peacefully, and the people of Ukraine should not have to fear nuclear weapons ravaging their country.

“Any war involves a terrible and lasting human toll, risks spreading and harming people’s health in the region and beyond,” he warned.

In a statement released last week, IPPNW said it underscores the absolute imperative to avoid the possibility of use of nuclear weapons.

“This danger exists with any armed conflict involving nuclear armed states or alliances, which could escalate in uncontrollable, unintended and unforeseeable ways,” it warned.

Dr Tilman A. Ruff, co-chair, International Steering Group and Australian Board member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, told IPS the current agreements (e.g. START, New START and INF) are probably most important in that they demonstrate that verified reductions and elimination of whole classes of nuclear weapons are feasible, and hopefully reduce the risk of nuclear war between Russia and the United States.

However, continuing massive nuclear arsenals on both sides; the retention of almost 1,800 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert missiles, ready to be launched within minutes; the aggressive eastward expansion of NATO, contrary to what Russian leaders were promised; and the rapid escalation of tension over recent events in Ukraine demonstrate the Cold War has not been firmly laid to rest.

“Any confrontation between nuclear-armed states runs the risk of escalating to the use of nuclear weapons, whether by inadvertence, accident, or bad decision-making,” said Dr Ruff, who is also an associate professor at the Nossal Institute for Global Health, School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne.

He said currently all the nuclear-armed states are massively investing in keeping and modernising their nuclear arsenals, and show no serious commitment to disarm, as they are legally bound to do. As long as nuclear weapons exist and are deployed, and policies countenance their possible use, the danger they will be used is real and present.

“The dangerous and unstable situation in Ukraine highlights this starkly, and should dispel any notion that nuclear danger ended 20 years ago with apparent end of the Cold War,” he said.

Dr Johnson told IPS Russian and U.S. nuclear weapons in the region are demonstrably not contributing to deterrence.

“If anything, their presence complicates the current dangers, with the attendant risks of crisis instability and potential military or nuclear escalation or miscalculations, though I’d hope no one would be mad enough to actually use them,” she said.

Politicians that want to keep French or British nuclear weapons need to stop making arguments that undermine the NPT and encourage proliferators, she pointed out.

“It is extraordinarily irresponsible to jump on the bandwagon of this dangerous regional crisis and make Ukrainians feel that they were wrong to rid their newly independent country of nuclear weapons in 1992 and join the NPT as non-nuclear-weapon states,” Johnson said.

It is clearly unacceptable for states armed with nuclear weapons to threaten non-nuclear nations, but this cannot be turned into a rationale either for risking nuclear war between Russia and NATO or for the non-nuclear countries to pull out of the NPT and start arming themselves with nuclear arsenals of their own, she noted.

As brought to the forefront through the recent Oslo and Nayarit conferences on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons need to be stigmatised, banned and eliminated, she added.

“Only by removing these weapons of mass destruction from all countries’ arsenals will we be able to fairly address the security needs and aspirations of all peoples – whether in non-nuclear or nuclear-armed countries,” she added.

If psychosis is a loss of contact with reality, the current status of nuclear disarmament can best be described as psychotic.

On the one hand, the nuclear issue is beginning to creep out from under the rug where it has lain dormant for several decades. On the other hand, the commitment of the nuclear weapon states to a nuclear weapons-free world is honoured more in the breach than in the observance.U.S. policy on nuclear disarmament is at best a mixed bag; that of the other eight nuclear armed powers is not much better.

Let us begin by adding up the pluses and the minuses of nuclear disarmament.

On the plus side, we have a president of the United States, which is central to the problem, who has spoken out repeatedly on the subject, albeit in a decelerating mode. In a speech at Purdue University on Jun. 16, 2008, he said, “It’s time to send a clear message to the world: America seeks a world without nuclear weapons … we’ll make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy.”

There was no reference to how long it might take. A year later, in the famous Prague speech of May 6, 2009, Obama said, “I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”, but he added,“This goal will not be reached quickly – perhaps not in my lifetime.”

He was 48 at the time. Four years later, on Jun. 19, 2013, in Berlin, Obama said, “Peace with justice means pursuing the security of a world without nuclear weapons – no matter how distant that dream may be.”

In all fairness, the trajectory to abolition announced in Prague has either been implemented or blocked through no fault of the president: A substantial reduction in nuclear arms has been negotiated with Russia and the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy has been lessened.

The ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the negotiation of a Fissile Materials Treaty, both of which the Obama administration favours, have been held up, one by the U.S. Senate, the other by another country.

But reduction is not elimination and the Defence Department (DOD) and Department of Energy continue to pursue policies that are clearly incompatible with nuclear disarmament, to wit:

The Nuclear Employment Strategy of the United States, issued by the DOD on Jun. 19, 2013, states that nuclear weapons will be used only in extreme circumstances, but that it is too early to limit their employment strictly to deterrence.

The Assessment of Nuclear Monitoring and Verification Technologies, released by the Defence Science Board in January 2014, concedes that for the first time since the beginning of the nuclear age the United States needs to be concerned not only with horizontal proliferation, i.e. to countries not possessing nuclear weapons, but also with vertical proliferation, i.e. in nuclear weapons countries.

But the 100-page report makes no reference to monitoring and verification requirements in a nuclear weapons free world.

On Feb. 6, in an apparent violation of at least the spirit if not the letter of the Nonproliferation Treaty, the U.S. announced that it had conducted a successful impact test (not involving an explosion) of the B-61 nuclear bomb. Donald Cook, deputy administrator for defence at DOE , said that engineering on the new bomb had commenced and that this would make it possible to replace older models “by the mid or late 2020s.”

Thus, U.S. policy on nuclear disarmament is at best a mixed bag; that of the other eight nuclear armed powers is not much better.

Now for the good news. Last year saw more encouraging action by non-nuclear powers than most previous years:

• In February the Foreign Ministry of Germany, a member of NATO, hosted a Forum on Creating the Conditions and Building a Framework for a Nuclear Weapons Free World.convened by the Middle Powers Initiative. It was attended by 26 governments and a number of civil society organisations.

• In March, the Foreign Ministry of Norway, another NATO country, convened in Oslo a Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, attended by 128 governments, and numerous civil society organisations.

• On Oct. 21, Ambassador Dell Higgie of New Zealand delivered to the First Committee of the U.N. the statement adopted by 125 countries, many of whom had attended the Oslo conference. It declared that the only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons will never be used again is hrough their total elimination.

• A Governmental Open Ended Working Group on Nuclear Disarmament met for the first time in May in Geneva and produced in August a report to the General Assembly which outlined a variety of approaches to reaching nuclear disarmament, including a section on the role of international law.

• Also for the first time, on Sep. 26, the General Assembly held a high level meeting on nuclear disarmament in which country after country, represented by Presidents, Foreign Ministers and other high officials, called for prompt and effective progress toward a nuclear weapons free world.

• Finally, and most importantly, during the follow up conference to Oslo held in Nayarit, Mexico, Feb. 13 and 14, Sebastian Kurz, the foreign minister of Austria, announced that he would convene a conference in Vienna later this year because “the international nuclear disarmament efforts require an urgent paradigm shift.”

The Vienna conference will not be simply a third rehearsal of the unspeakable horrors of nuclear weapons. It will get down to serious business, perhaps even the commencement of drafting a convention banning the use and possession of these weapons, as suggested by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

But there is a problem: The countries which have nuclear weapons have boycotted both Oslo and Nayarit. What if they boycott Vienna as well? That is the question. It is also the challenge facing the growing anti-nuclear weapons community, both official and unofficial. Embarrassment can be a tool of diplomacy.

The Nonproliferation Treaty, to which the nuclear powers pay lip service, requires good faith efforts by all states to achieve a nuclear weapons free world. This is a good time to remind the nuclear states, and particularly the big five, of that all important obligation.

Peter Weiss is President Emeritus of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy.

*The story that moved on Feb. 25 incorrectly identified Ambassador Dell Higgie as being from Norway rather than New Zealand.

Hirotsugu Terasaki, vice-president of Soka Gakkai and executive director of Peace Affairs of Soka Gakkai International, speaking in Nuevo Vallarta on progress towards a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. Credit: Courtesy of Kimiaki Kawai

By Emilio Godoy
NUEVO VALLARTA, Feb 15 2014 (IPS)

Countries in favour of nuclear disarmament have reached the point where they are ready to set a date for the start of formal negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons, a decision that could be taken in Austria at the end of this year.

This was the general sense at the close on Friday Feb. 14 of the two-day Second Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, held in the tourist centre of Nuevo Vallarta in western Mexico. Delegates from 146 nations and over 100 non-governmental organisations from all over the world were in attendance."We are more advanced than the nuclear powers in acknowledging that there should be no weapons.” -- Hirotsugu Terasaki, vice-president of Soka Gakkai International

Participants denounced the humanitarian effects of possession and use of nuclear arsenals and sent a powerful message in favour of the destruction of all nuclear warheads, 19,000 of which are still in the possession of China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

“It’s a step towards a road map for the objective of prohibition, and I assume that the third conference will provide the road map for that aim. We are more advanced than the nuclear powers in acknowledging that there should be no weapons,” Japanese Hirotsugu Terasaki, vice-president of Soka Gakkai and executive director of Peace Affairs of Soka Gakkai International, a pacifist Buddhist organisation, told IPS.

“It’s about the creation of an environment for abolition [because] the nuclear powers defend non-proliferation, but they maintain their arsenals,” he said at the conference.

The Austrian government announced on Thursday Feb. 13 that they would host the third conference at the end of the year. It will precede the 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the main binding international instrument for limiting atomic armaments, which has made no progress for the past 15 years.

Héctor Guerra, the coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which has a membership of 350 organisations from 81 countries, told IPS that the process “is ready for the next steps and for the transition” to a “binding international instrument for the elimination” of nuclear weapons.

Ideally, “the entire international community” would participate, but if the nuclear powers abstain, “there is no problem,” said Guerra. In his view, the new treaty “would establish international regulations that would facilitate the delegitimisation of the weapons in international negotiations.”

As with the Oslo conference in 2013, the five nuclear powers authorised by the NPT (U.S., China, France, U.K. and Russia) were not present at Nuevo Vallarta.

Pakistan, however, was present, although like Israel and India it has not signed the NPT, which currently has 190 states parties.

Since the Oslo conference, the abolitionist movement has made headway in the denunciation of humanitarian impacts. In May 2013 the preparatory committee for the NPT Review Conference highlighted this angle, as did the General Assembly of the United Nations a few months later in New York.

At Nuevo Vallarta the factors of human error and technological failure in the maintenance and management of nuclear arsenals came under scrutiny, illustrated in detail by journalist Eric Schlosser in his book “Command and Control”.

“Many times the arms were almost used due to miscalculation and mistakes,” Patricia Lewis, the head of international security research for the London-based NGO Chatham House, told IPS.

“The probability is greater than what we know and we have to consider what we don’t know. Today’s situation is even riskier,” she said.

Lewis presented the findings of a study in which she and her team reviewed nuclear incidents in tests, military exercises and potential risk alerts between 1962 and 2013, involving the U.S., the former Soviet Union, the U.K., France, Israel, India and Pakistan.

Among its results, the study found lax physical and operational security practised at all levels by the U.S. air force.

Until all warheads are eliminated, Lewis recommended avoidance of large-scale military exercises at times of high political tension, and slowing the triggering of attack threat alerts.

Terasaki concluded that “nuclear weapons have made humanity their hostage.”

In Guerra’s view, a ban on nuclear weapons should be in place by 2020. “The political conditions are becoming ripe for negotiations,” which should be carried out in the U.N. framework, he said.

Yasuaki Yamashita at the Second Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
NUEVO VALLARTA, Mexico, Feb 14 2014 (IPS)

For decades, Yasuaki Yamashita kept secret his experiences as a survivor of the nuclear attack launched by the United States on the Japanese city of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

Yamashita, a 74-year-old artist who settled in Mexico in 1968, broke his silence in 1995 and told the story of what happened that morning to change the fate of Nagasaki and of the whole world.“I don’t know how many generations it will take for this to end." -- Yasuaki Yamashita

“I was six years old, and we lived 2.5 kilometres away from ground zero (where the bomb detonated). Usually I went to the nearby mountains to catch insects with my friends, but that day I was alone in front of my house, near my mother, who was cooking the day’s meal,” Yamashita, a white-haired, soft-spoken man with fine features, told IPS.

In 1968, he came to Mexico as a correspondent covering the Olympic Games, and he stayed in this Latin American country. Today he digs deep into his past to recall how his mother called him to go into the shelter they had in their home.

“As we ran into it for cover there was a tremendous blinding light. My mother pulled me to the ground and covered me with her body. There was a tremendous noise, we heard lots of things flying over us,” he said.

They were surrounded by desolation. Everything was burning, there were no doctors, nurses or food. It was just the beginning of an endless tragedy that still endures.

At the age of 20, Yamashita started work at the Nagasaki hospital that treated atomic bomb survivors. He resigned years later.

His story greatly moved the participants of the Second Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, being held Feb. 13-14 in Nuevo Vallarta, a tourist centre in the northwestern state of Nayarit, and attended by delegates from 140 countries and more than 100 non-governmental organisations from around the world.

The goal of the two-day conference, which follows the previous conference in Oslo in March 2013, is to make progress towards the abolition of nuclear weapons, which are an economic, humanitarian, health and ecological threat to humanity and to the planet.

There are at least 19,000 atomic warheads in existence, most of them in the hands of China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – states authorised to possess them under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons – as well as India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.

The Mexican foreign ministry estimates that there are over 2,000 nuclear weapons on “high operational alert,” ready for launching within minutes.

“These weapons are unacceptable. They must be banned, like biological and chemical weapons. There is no response capability, nationally or internationally, that can deal with the potential damages,” Richard Moyes, of Article 36, a UK-based not-for-profit organisation working to prevent unnecessary harm caused by certain weapons, told IPS.

In February 2013, Article 36 published a study of the likely impact of a 100 kilotonne bomb detonated over Manchester, UK. The broad urban area of Greater Manchester is home to 2.7 million people.

The blast and thermal effects would kill at least 81,000 people directly and injure 212,000 more. Bridges and roads would be destroyed and the health services would be seriously incapacitated, hampering efforts at remedial action. The long term impact on the fabric of UK society “would be massive,” the Article 36 study says.

The Mexico City Metropolitan Area, with a population of over 20 million, carried out a similar theoretical exercise. It found that a 50 kilotonne bomb would affect up to 66 kilometres away from ground zero and some 22 million people, as the damage would extend to areas in the centre of the country beyond the metropolitan area itself.

“The consequences would be severe: loss of operational capacity of the emergency services, loss of rescue workers and health workers, hospitals, clinics,” Rogelio Conde, the coordinator of civil defence at the interior ministry, told IPS.

“We would need help from other Mexican states, and from other countries, such as equipment, and operational and expert personnel,” he said.

Ecological devastation and damage to infrastructure would cause losses equivalent to 20 percent of the country’s economy.

Places on the planet that have become atomic laboratories, like the Marshall Islands in the Pacific ocean, have suffered damage of various kinds.

The Marshall Islands, made up of chains of islands and coral atolls, were the site of 67 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958.

“There have been environmental and health problems, although they have not been quantified. Many of our survivors have become human guineapigs in the research laboratories, and 60 years on we are still suffering the consequences,” complained Jeban Riklon, a senator in the Islands’ government.

Riklon was two years old and living with his grandmother on Rongelap Atoll when the United States carried out its Castle Bravo test on Bikini Atoll on Mar. 1, 1954, detonating a bomb 1,000 times as powerful as that dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

The United States immediately performed a secret medical study to investigate the effects of radiation on humans.

A Human Rights’ Council Special Rapporteur’s report after a field trip to the Marshall Islands found violations to the right to health, to effective remedies and to environmental rehabilitation, in addition to forced displacement and other serious omissions by the United States.

The promoters of the Mexico conference want the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons n Latin America and the Caribbean, known as the Tlatelolco Treaty, which was signed in 1967, to be the model for a future global convention against the bomb, even though they must overcome decades of diplomatic deadlock.

The treaty led to the region becoming the first of the Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zones (NWFZ) which now include 114 nations.

The other four NWFZ are the South Pacific, Africa, Southeast Asia and Central Asia.

The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation seeks to establish a clear road map to an atomic-weapons-free world by 2020.

There are already 161 states party to this treaty, but its entry into force depends on its signature and ratification by China, North Korea, Egypt, the United States, India, Iran, Israel and Pakistan.

At the Nuevo Vallarta conference there are no representatives from the big five nuclear powers: the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom and Russia.

“I don’t know how many generations it will take for this to end. Why should so many innocent people be made to suffer, when there is no need? This is why we have to make the utmost efforts to abolish nuclear weapons,” Yamashita concluded.

Saudi Arabia’s public anger against the United States masks the kingdom’s growing concern about its diminishing influence in the Persian Gulf and the wider Arab world.

It has nothing to do with U.S. policy toward the Palestinians, Washington’s seeming oscillation toward Syria, or President Barack Obama’s support for democratic transitions in “Arab Spring” countries and his hesitancy to support Mohamed Morsi’s removal from Egypt’s presidency through a military coup.Several fundamental contradictions underpin Riyadh’s public spat with Washington. They include Iran, the Palestinians, oil, and Syria.

The Saudis are lashing out because they fear a possible U.S.-Iranian rapprochement would elevate Iran’s rightful position as the key power in the Persian Gulf and correspondingly reduce Saudi Arabia to a secondary role. The Saudi Kingdom would resist playing a second fiddle to Iran.

If the P5+1 and Iran conclude a deal on the nuclear issue linking enrichment and sanctions, Iran would no longer remain a pariah state. Once the new agreement takes root, Western countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Community, would embark on more robust relations with Iran. This prospect terrifies the Saudi regime.

According to the BBC, Saudi Arabia’s nuclear agreement with Pakistan goes back years. Under the agreement, Saudi Arabia has financed the production of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, which Pakistan has kept ready to transfer to the kingdom at the request of the Saudi leadership.

This agreement, if accurately reported, would help the Saudis hide a serious possible violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which they have signed. If Pakistan has these weapons ready at Saudi Arabia’s beck and call, it’s rather disingenuous for the Saudi leadership to cry foul over Iran’s enrichment programme.

Several fundamental contradictions underpin Riyadh’s public spat with Washington. They include Iran, the Palestinians, oil, and Syria.

Iran under the shah in the 1950s-1970s period was the key protector of the so-called security belt in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia, with the acquiescence of the United States and the United Kingdom, played the role of a junior partner in that arrangement.

During most of that period, Britain controlled the foreign policy and in many cases the domestic politics of Gulf Arab Emirates. While Kuwait became independent in 1961, the other Emirates did not follow suit until a decade later.

Saudi Arabia under King Saud solicited Iran’s help in thwarting the rising tides of Arab nationalism under Egypt’s President Nasser, of Ba’thism and socialism under Michel Aflaq in Syria, and of Communism under the Soviet Union and China.

The establishment of the Islamic Republic under the Ayatollahs in 1979 and the ensuing isolation of Iran in the international community offered Saudi Arabia a rare opportunity to emerge as a pivotal player in the Gulf, especially among the newly independent sheikhdoms, and in the wider Islamic world. This posture, which lasted for over 30 years, is now being challenged by an ascendant Iran.

Saudi anger over Palestine hides another contradiction in the Saudi position on Israel. While they chide the U.S. for seeming callousness toward the Palestinians, the Saudis have been working very closely with the Israelis, according to media reports, against the Assad regime, Hezbollah, and Iran’s military involvement in Syria. Over the years, media outlets have reported on active collaboration between the Saudi and Israeli intelligence services against Al-Qaeda and regional terrorist organisations.

One more thing: While Saudi officials have often talked about Palestinian rights and touted Jerusalem as the “Third Qibla” right after Mecca and Medina, the Saudi government has rarely granted Palestinians visas to visit or work in Saudi Arabia. Saudi royals might defend the “Palestinianism” of Palestine, but they balk at dealing with the “Palestinians” of the conflict.

Saudi Arabia has certainly not matched either Qatar’s funding of development and housing projects in the West Bank and Gaza or the United States financial aid to the Palestinians.

As a hydrocarbon giant, Saudi Arabia is beginning to lose influence in the oil world. Economic reports in the past two years have postulated that by 2028 Saudi Arabia would become a minor oil exporter. The kingdom would need between six and eight million barrels a day for local consumption, mainly power generation and desalination, which would leave it with much smaller oil exports.

This means that in a decade and a half the Saudi leadership will not have at its disposal huge oil revenues either to spend on purchasing advanced weapons systems or to buy off potential opposition activists as they did in 2011 in response to “Arab Spring” upheavals.

Within the same period, the United States because of growing domestic energy production will no longer rely on Saudi and Gulf oil. The days when the United States would threaten to go to war to protect its access to Saudi and Gulf oil, as some U.S. leaders hinted at in the mid-1970s, are gone.

The contradiction in the current anti-U.S. Saudi posture is more glaring in the case of Syria. The Saudi royal family encouraged and financed Salafi jihadists to go to Syria and join the uprising against the Assad regime not because of deep-seated commitment to democracy, civil rights, equality, or inclusion. They wanted to topple Assad because of his connection to Iran and Hezbollah.

The Saudi regime saw Syria as a golden opportunity to wage a war by proxy against Iran and Hezbollah using anti-Shia sectarianism as a rallying cry in the Arab Sunni world. Their military support of the Al-Khalifa regime against the uprising on the Shia majority in Bahrain belies their exhortations against the Assad regime, vicious as it may be.

The Saudis urged Washington to strike Assad militarily and bemoaned President Obama’s decision to forego military action in favour of an international agreement to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons. They joined forces with Israel to denounce Washington’s refusal to strike Assad and more recently its talks with Iran in Geneva.

What is most appalling about the Saudi support of Salafi jihadists in Syria is the unintended encouragement of terrorism. These Sunni extremists advocate the same radical ideology of Al-Qaeda, which was confirmed in a statement by the Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri broadcast on Al-Jazeera Nov. 8. Zawahiri recognised Jabhat al-Nusra as the true jihadist group in Syria and declared Abu Muhammad al-Julani as its head for one year.

In the name of fighting Iran and Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia is inadvertently proselytising the same radical Sunni Salafi ideology it has preached for decades. Once they finish their job in Syria, these jihadists would fan out in the region committing acts of terror against neighbouring countries, including Saudi Arabia.

The Obama administration should make it clear to the Saudi regime that a possible rapprochement with Iran does not mean an alliance against Saudi Arabia. A curtailment of Iran’s nuclear programme in the long run serves the national interest of Saudi Arabia and the region as a whole.

In the meantime, Saudi Arabia should revisit its policy of undermining democratic transitions and genuine political and social reform in the Arab world, including in Bahrain and Egypt.

The author is a former Senior Intelligence Service Officer, a Research Professor at the University of New Mexico, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of “A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World”.

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 U.N. General Assembly Hall. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

The upcoming event at the United Nations is being billed as something politically unique.

For the first time in its 68-year history, the 193-member General Assembly is holding a high-level meeting of world leaders on one of the most controversial issues of our time: nuclear disarmament."While the mirage of a nuclear weapon-free world is held aloft, the CTBT has not entered into force." -- Jayantha Dhanapala, former U.N. under-secretary-general for disarmament affairs

But expectations for the meeting are low, says Jayantha Dhanapala, a former U.N. under-secretary-general for disarmament affairs.

Unless disarmament becomes a priority for possessor states, he told IPS, speeches and meetings alone are not going to change the stark dangers posed by this most destructive weapon of mass destruction (WMD).

“A decision to outlaw nuclear weapons in the same way as biological and chemical weapons is essential,” said Dhanapala, who is president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which jointly won the 1995 Nobel Peace prize for their efforts at nuclear disarmament.

“The time to start negotiations on a Nuclear Weapon Convention (NWC) is not tomorrow but now,” he said.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has consistently maintained that nuclear disarmament is one of his top priorities, is expected to call for “a world free of nuclear weapons” at the meeting scheduled to take place at the United Nations on Sep. 26.

Asked if the high-level meeting will be another exercise in futility, Alyn Ware, a member of the World Future Council and consultant to the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, told IPS, “It could be an exercise in futility if governments, including the non-nuclear governments, do not treat it seriously.”

He said non-nuclear governments should participate at the highest level, and make strong statements that they are more secure without nuclear weapons and that the security of all in the 21st Century requires the abolition of nuclear weapons, meaning that it is a “global good of the highest order”.

Ware said they should also pledge to dedicate greater resources and political traction to developing the building blocks for a nuclear weapons-free world through the Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) to which the nuclear weapons states (NWS) have an obligation to join.

Currently, there are five declared nuclear weapon states, namely the United States, Britain, Russia, France, China, all five permanent members of the Security Council (P5), along with three undeclared nuclear weapon states, India, Pakistan, Israel.

Despite its three nuclear tests, North Korea still remains in limbo.

The three undeclared nuclear powers have all refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as against the five declared nuclear powers who are states parties to the treaty.

Dhanapala said nine countries – five within the NPT and four outside – possess a total inventory of 17,270 nuclear warheads today, 4,400 of them placed on missiles or located on bases ready to be launched in minutes.

The U.S. and Russia alone own 16,200 of these warheads, he pointed out.

And despite the lingering horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the risks of nuclear weapons being used again – by design or accident, by states or non-state actors – are huge, he added.

“The results would be catastrophic for all humankind,” Dhanapala warned.

Ware told IPS the role of nuclear weapons could be reduced in Northeast Asia through negotiations for a North East Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zone.

The U.S., he said, could exercise more effective diplomacy in the Middle East to move the Arab states and Israel to participate in good faith in the proposed U.N. Conference on a Middle East Zone Free from Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction. Arab States are demanding preconditions that are unacceptable to Israel, so both need to exercise some flexibility, he noted.

Non-nuclear countries could use the OEWG, as long as the mandate is renewed, to commence preparatory work on the building blocks for a nuclear weapons-free world (based on the Model Nuclear Weapons Convention circulated by the secretary-general) regardless of whether or not the nuclear weapons states join the OEWG in the near future.

Dhanapala told IPS the first Special Session of the General Assembly Devoted to Disarmament (SSODI) was held in 1978 as a direct outcome of the summit of world leaders of the 1976 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) held in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

It was a period of detente in the Cold War and a far-reaching Final Declaration was adopted.

No multilateral gathering has matched that remarkable consensus on fundamental concepts achieved 35 years ago, especially on the priority of nuclear disarmament, he added.

“Yet today, the multilateral disarmament machinery established by SSOD I is in grave disarray,” he said.

The sole multilateral negotiating body, the Conference on Disarmament, has neither negotiated treaties nor even adopted a programme of work since 1996, according to Dhanapala.

The Disarmament Commission has met ritualistically every year without any agreed texts in the last 14 years.

And the U.N.’s First Committee, dealing with disarmament, is still churning out resolutions with little impact, he added.

“While the mirage of a nuclear weapon-free world is held aloft, the CTBT has not entered into force, the promised conference on the Middle East as a WMD-free zone has not been held and bilateral U.S.-Russian nuclear disarmament talks have not even started,” Dhanapala said.
The need for a radical change has been recognised by the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and their supporters have resisted NAM demands for a SSOD IV.

A one-day high-level meeting of the General Assembly is a compromise, he said.

The 2010 NPT Review Conference with its 64-point action programme and the increasing recognition of humanitarian disarmament are an inadequate basis for the non-nuclear weapon states, most of which are in legally recognised nuclear weapon-free zones, to trust the nuclear armed states to disarm.

The Sep. 26 meeting must be the beginning of a nuclear disarmament process, Dhanapala said.

By Jasmin Ramsey
WASHINGTON, Jul 15 2013 (IPS)

The Jun. 14 election of Hassan Rouhani, nicknamed the “diplomatic sheik” during his service as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2003-2005, to Iran’s presidency was met with hopeful celebrations within the country but much cooler reactions from key world leaders.

Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former spokesperson for Iran’s nuclear negotiators. Photo courtesy of Mr. Mousavian.

While a Jul. 13 Wall Street Journal report claimed that the Obama administration would seek direct talks with its long-time adversary, it remains to be seen how far the United States will go to bring about a mutually acceptable agreement and whether or not Iran would accept it.

Israel’s prime minister, who has been warning for more than two decades that Iran is getting dangerously close to building a nuclear weapon, wants the United States to increase pressure on Iran while ramping up the military threat.

“What is important is to convey to them, especially after the election, that that policy will not change. And that it’ll it be backed up by increasingly forceful sanctions and military action,” Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation”.

But Washington has reportedly already assured the Netanyahu government that it will not decrease pressure on Iran following Rouhani’s win.

“We have told the Israelis we intend to judge the Iranians according to their actions and not according to their words,” an American official told the Israeli daily, Haaretz, on Jul. 14.

According to Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former spokesperson for Iran’s nuclear negotiators who worked closely with Rouhani, without substantial modifications in Washington’s negotiating posture, little will change on the Iranian side. "The first and most favourable option for Iran is to continue seeking a peaceful resolution to the standoff."
-- Hossein Mousavian

IPS spoke with Mousavian, currently a research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, about prospects for change in the Iranian nuclear issue.

Excerpts from the interview follow. Read the complete interview on IPS’s foreign policy blog.

Q: Your article for the “Cairo Review”, which was written more than a month before Rouhani’s election, has generated a lot of discussion over the suggestion that one of Iran’s options is to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Is Iran seriously considering doing so?

A: As I reiterated in the article published by the Cairo Review, the first and most favourable option for Iran is to continue seeking a peaceful resolution to the standoff. I explained the five major demands the P5+1 (United States, Britain, France, China and Russia plus Germany) made in recent nuclear talks to prevent Iran’s breakout capability and to ensure a maximum level of transparency.

Iran, in return, had two major demands: lifting sanctions and recognising Iran’s rights under the NPT. I have also proposed that the world powers and Iran place their demands within a package, to be implemented in a step-by-step manner with proportionate reciprocation. 

Withdrawing from the NPT has never been Iran’s intention. The United States and Israel have initiated “all options on the table”, leaving open the possibility of a military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. This policy goes against the United Nations (U.N.) charter, the NPT, and non-proliferation, where nuclear-armed states – the United States and Israel – are threatening to attack Iran, a non-nuclear weapons state.

Therefore as long as the U.S. policy of “all options on the table” remains valid, Iran as a sovereign state is forced to also have “all options on the table”.

Q: The Obama administration claims that Iran has not responded formally to the confidence-building offer made in Almaty, Kazakhstan in February. In your opinion, why hasn’t Iran responded, and do you expect a formal reply after Rouhani’s inauguration?

A: The P5+1 proposal in Almaty sought maximum demands and provided the minimum in return. Rouhani’s administration would be ready for a fair and balanced deal, comprising all the major demands of both parties based on the NPT, placed within a package and implemented in a step-by-step plan with proportionate reciprocation.

Q: Is recognising Iran’s right to enrich uranium a precondition to a negotiated solution?

A: It would be part of the package deal explained above.

Q: Some in Congress would like to impose more sanctions on Iran before Rouhani is inaugurated. What effect could such a move have on prospects for negotiations?

A: Iran would never take calls for direct talks and engagement seriously as long as the United States continues its sanction and pressure policy. If Washington is genuinely seeking rapprochement, it needs to demonstrate that – through an act of goodwill instead of through increased hostilities and animosity. Iranians place importance in U.S. actions, not just words.

Q: What is the balance of forces in Iran with respect to those who want to take a hard line on the nuclear issue and those who favour more flexibility, and what is the effect of sanctions on this internal debate?

A: There are two schools of thought in Iran with respect to the nuclear approach, but there is no dispute on Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology, including enrichment. The P5+1 and Western approach toward Iran’s nuclear dossier does, however, play an important role in the balance of these two schools of thought.

During the nuclear talks from 2003 to 2005 with the three European powers (the United Kingdom, France and Germany), when I was a member of the negotiating team, Iran demonstrated far-reaching overtures to resolve the nuclear dispute.

Iran implemented the maximum level of transparency a member state of the NPT can commit to by accepting the Additional Protocol and Subsidiary Arrangement. We also demonstrated Iran’s readiness to commit to all confidence building measures, assuring the peaceful nature of the nuclear programme – forever.

Regrettably, Iran and its European counterparts failed to reach a final agreement because the United States continued to deny Iran its legitimate rights under the NPT. The United States’ inflexibility and position altered the balance of forces in Iran toward those in favour of radicalism. Therefore, if the West seeks cooperation and flexibility from Iran, it has to respond proportionally and appropriately.

The sanctions policy is only good for a lose-lose game. The Iranian nation has suffered from the sanctions, while the West has suffered from the dramatic increase of Iran’s enrichment capacity and level. Once sanctions were implemented, Iran increased the number of centrifuges from 3,000 to 12,000 and the level of enrichment from 3.5 percent to 20 percent. The stockpile of enriched uranium increased approximately 800 percent.

Q: In his first press conference as president-elect, Rouhani referred to Israel as Israel, rather than by any other name. Do you think this portends a new approach by Rouhani? What could it look like?

A: Rouhani is not a man of radical rhetoric. He is courteous and logical and respects international norms and regulations. The key to resolving the dispute with Iran depends on whether the traditional Western policies of pressure, sanctions, threats and humiliating Iran will change to those based on respect, mutual interests and cooperation with Rouhani’s administration.

Excerpt:

When the 193-member U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) holds is first-ever high-level meeting on nuclear disarmament next September, there is little or no hope that any of the nuclear powers will make a firm commitment to gradually phase out or abandon their lethal arsenals.

At the beginning of 2013, eight states – UK, the United States, Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel – possessed approximately 4,400 operational nuclear weapons, according to the latest Yearbook released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)."Our job is to help push the issue of the abolition of nuclear weapons up the political ladder so that they will cooperate on disarmament." -- Jonathan Granoff of the Global Security Institute

Nearly 2,000 of these are kept in a state of high operational alert, SIPRI said.

Jonathan Granoff, president of the Global Security Institute and adjunct professor of International Law at the Widener University School of Law, told IPS, “What is needed to counteract the slow pace in arms control and disarmament is higher political profile.”

For example, he said, if certain leaders were to say at the General Assembly, “My country is one of 114 countries in a nuclear weapons-free zone. We want to help countries relying on nuclear weapons for security to obtain the benefits of helping to make the entire world a nuclear weapons-free zone.”

The SIPRI report highlights the need to bring commitments made solemnly at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in 2012 to advance nuclear disarmament into action.

Promises must mean something, said Granoff.

If all nuclear warheads are counted, says SIPRI, these eight states together possess a total of approximately 17,265 nuclear weapons, as compared with 19,000 at the beginning of 2012.

The decrease is due mainly to Russia and the United States further reducing their inventories of strategic nuclear weapons under the terms of the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START), as well as retiring ageing and obsolescent weapons.

At the same time, says SIPRI, all five legally recognised nuclear weapons states – China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States – are either deploying new nuclear weapon delivery systems or have announced programmes to do so, and appear determined to retain their nuclear arsenals indefinitely.

Of the five, only China seems to be expanding its nuclear arsenal.

And of the others, India and Pakistan are both expanding their nuclear weapon stockpiles and missile delivery capabilities.

“Once again there was little to inspire hope that the nuclear weapon-possessing states are genuinely willing to give up their nuclear arsenals,” according to SIPRI.

“The long-term modernisation programmes under way in these states suggest that nuclear weapons are still a marker of international status and power,” says Shannon Kile, senior researcher at SIPRI’s Project on Nuclear Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-proliferation.

Asked if the upcoming UNGA disarmament conference will produce anything tangible towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, Kile told IPS that in light of current trends in global nuclear arsenals, the General Assembly cannot be reasonably expected to be able to adopt concrete measures that will require the nuclear weapon-possessing states to begin eliminating these weapons or to change their nuclear force postures and operational practices.

However, the positive role the UNGA can play in terms of strengthening existing norms and political commitments to pursue nuclear disarmament should not be underestimated, Kile said.

This involves, first and foremost, maintaining political pressure on the nuclear weapon-possessing states to reduce the role and salience of nuclear weapons in their national security strategies and defence postures.

This could be done, for example, by persuading these states to adopt explicit declaratory policies ruling out the first-use of nuclear weapons, and to provide legally-binding negative security assurances – that is, guarantees not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states.

In the longer term, he said, the UNGA can contribute to and strengthen efforts to devalue nuclear weapons as a currency of international geopolitics and to delegitimise their possession.

“This will admittedly be a part of a long-term process that will require considerable patience and diplomatic persistence but its normative significance should not be overlooked,” Kile added.

Granoff told IPS the deals the administration of President Barack Obama believed it had to make to get the START Treaty ratified in the U.S. Senate included modernisation of aspects of the nuclear arsenal. Some modernisation simply keeps the weapons in a stable situation while others actually improve accuracy and reliability and could be construed as a form of vertical proliferation, he said.

“Such activities should not be funded, but even if they are, they are not being brought into practice because of military geo strategic planning,” Granoff said.

However, he said, it is not the case that such actions affirm the status of nuclear weapons or a commitment to abrogate pledges under the NPT to move toward a nuclear weapons-free world.

“They only represent short term political deals necessary in an extremely difficult domestic partisan environment to achieve modest arms control measures,” Kile said.

But to say that the policy is not to move in the correct direction is incorrect, he added.

Granoff said there is a new open-ended working group in Geneva that will come up with recommendations.

Norway recently hosted a large conference with many countries highlighting the horrific humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons. These activities bode well for our future, he said.

“It is odd that the P5 (UK, United States, Russia, France and China) did not participate in these activities,” Granoff added. “It shows, however, that they can cooperate and come up with the same strategy and positions when they want.

“Our job is to help push the issue of the abolition of nuclear weapons up the political ladder so that they will cooperate on disarmament,” he said.

Asked about the absence of North Korea from the list of nuclear weapon states, Kile told IPS, “The section of the Yearbook’s nuclear forces chapter dealing with North Korea’s nuclear weapon capabilities notes that it is not known whether North Korea has produced operational (militarily usable) nuclear weapons.”

An operational weapon is not the same as a simple nuclear explosive device and would require more advanced design and engineering skills to build, he said.

“We have published in SIPRI Yearbook 2013 the estimate of six to eight nuclear weapons to indicate the maximum number that North Korea may possess, based on publicly-available information about its plutonium production activities.

“But again, it is unclear whether North Korea has actually produced operational nuclear weapons, so we did not include it in the table in the press release,” he added.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is one of the most vociferous advocates of a world free of nuclear weapons.

The lack of publicity stands in contrast to the strong public stand taken by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has consistently called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Credit: Bomoon Lee/IPS

“Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation are not utopian ideals,” he says. “They are critical to global peace and security.”

Still, the Group of 77, the largest single coalition of 132 developing countries, implicitly accuses the United Nations of falling short in its efforts to publicise a meeting on nuclear disarmament scheduled to take place Sep. 26.

Ambassador Peter Thomson of Fiji, the G77 chair, last week described the upcoming talks as “the first-ever high level meeting of the General Assembly on nuclear disarmament.”

He said the meeting is of importance to developing nations, and therefore, all efforts should be made to give it timely and wide publicity.

A G77 delegate told IPS the conference is not getting the advance publicity it should, probably because three of the big powers, the United States, UK and France, are not supportive of the meeting.

“We have not seen anything on the high level meeting so far,” he added.

The lack of coverage stands in contrast to the strong public stand taken by the secretary-general, who has consistently called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons.

Asked about the significance of the upcoming meeting, Dr. John Burroughs, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, told IPS the meeting is a chance for world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama and others, to give direction to the nuclear disarmament enterprise, “which is now drifting aimlessly despite much rhetoric over the past five years.”

“Of course they should reassert that the global elimination of nuclear weapons is a shared aim of the international community,” he said.

But they can and should do more, he said, specifically to set in motion concrete, multilateral processes to achieve that objective.

“If there can be a Nuclear Security Summit process, focused on securing nuclear materials, why can there not be a Nuclear Disarmament Summit Process?” he asked.

Or definitive action could be taken to overcome the 16-year deadlock in the Conference on Disarmament, if necessary by establishing a separate process, Dr Burroughs said.

The resolution calling for the high-level meeting, which was sponsored by Indonesia and the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement, was adopted last December in the General Assembly by a vote of 179 to none against, with four abstentions (Israel, and three of the five permanent members of the Security Council, namely France, UK and the United States).

The other two permanent members, China and Russia, voted for the resolution.

All five permanent members are the world’s five declared nuclear powers, with India, Pakistan, Israel, and more recently North Korea, outside the P-5 nuclear club.

In an explanation of his country’s decision to abstain on the vote, Guy Pollard, deputy permanent representative of the UK, told delegates last December, “We question the value of holding a high-level meeting (HLM) of the General Assembly on nuclear disarmament when there are already sufficient venues for such discussion.”

He cited the General Assembly’s First Committee (on Disarmament), the U.N. Disarmament Commission, and the Conference on Disarmament.

“We are puzzled about how such a HLM will further the goals of the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) Action Plan that was agreed by consensus in 2010,” Pollard said.

“In our view,” he said, “this roadmap of actions offers the best way of taking forward the multilateral nuclear disarmament agenda, along with related issues.”

“We continue to believe that nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament are mutually reinforcing and therefore regret that this high level meeting doesn’t treat both of these aspects in a balanced manner,” Pollard said.

Meanwhile, in a new study released last month, George Perkovich, director of the Nuclear Policy Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, points out one of the few ways that President Obama could restore confidence in U.S. intentions would be to update the declaration of the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security policy, including in defence of its allies.

“In his searching Nobel Peace Prize speech (in December 2009), Obama recognised the occasional inescapability of war and the imperative of waging it justly,” Perkovich said.

So, too, Obama now could examine how the ongoing existence of nuclear arsenals, even if temporary, can be reconciled with the moral-strategic imperative to prevent their use, says the study titled “Do Unto Others: Toward a Defensible Nuclear Doctrine.”

“The president could articulate a limited framework for the legitimate use of nuclear weapons that the United States believes would be defensible for others to follow as long as nuclear weapons remain,” it says.

Such a nuclear policy, says Perkovich, could then be conveyed in the U.S. Defence Department’s Quadrennial Posture Review, which is due later this year.

Dr. Burroughs told IPS that non-nuclear weapon states have been doing their best to create opportunities to set a clear course on disarmament.

At the initiative of Austria, Mexico and Norway, the General Assembly in 2012 established an open-ended working group on taking forward proposals on multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations, scheduled to meet for three weeks this summer in Geneva.

Norway hosted a conference in Oslo in March on the humanitarian impact of nuclear explosions.

And Indonesia and the Non-Aligned Movement proposed the resolution last year that scheduled the September high-level meeting on nuclear disarmament.

“However, the P-5 in the Security Council have been recalcitrant. So far they have said they will not participate in the open-ended working group,” said Dr. Burroughs.

They also declined the invitation to participate in the Oslo meeting. And last year the UK, the United States, and France, along with Israel, abstained on the resolution scheduling the high-level meeting, expressing doubt as to its value, he added.

“So the personal engagement of heads of state/government and foreign ministers is clearly necessary,” Burroughs said.

At lower levels, the Permanent Five officials have been floundering, he added.

“Unless there is a change of tune coming from the very top, the September meeting will turn out to be a fruitless exercise,” he said.

The crisis on the Korean peninsula should be a wake-up call.

The nuclear threats exchanged by North Korea and the United States have once again laid bare an often underappreciated fact, the unacceptable risks arising from reliance on nuclear weapons.

In September, P-5 leaders and other governments possessing nuclear arsenals should seize the moment to signal clearly, to their own governments as well as to the world, that they will now engage constructively with non-nuclear weapon states on a process for the global elimination of nuclear weapons, he said.

Parliamentarians, mayors, and civil society groups working for a nuclear weapons-free world should also take advantage of this global platform, which surprisingly is the first time a General Assembly high-level meeting will be held on nuclear disarmament, Dr Burroughs said.

As parties to the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) begin their second preparatory conference in Geneva on Monday, representatives of civil society and several countries have decided to bring the festering nuclear issue and its potential humanitarian consequences to the centre stage.

“The NPT has its own process and business as usual,” said Rebecca Johnson, co-chair for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a Geneva-based global coalition of pressure groups working on disarmament and a ban on nuclear weapons.

The Geneva preparatory committee meeting will focus on a range of issues for the next two weeks to prepare the agenda for the 2015 Review Conference which will take place in Geneva.

More importantly, it is taking place against the backdrop of rising nuclear tensions in the Korean peninsula and Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme.  Also, several countries held an international conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear weapons in Oslo last month.

“My hope is that a large number of countries talk (at the Geneva meeting) about the importance of bringing the nuclear issue back to human level and understanding the humanitarian consequences because of nuclear weapons,” Johnson told IPS.

She expects that a large number of parties to the NPT will sign up to the South African statement on the human dimension of nuclear weapons which will be delivered at the meeting.

“We want a sustained dialogue on the humanitarian impact so that it changes the balance of power in the NPT,” Johnson argued.

The NPT came into force in 1970 with the avowed goal of stopping countries from building a nuclear bomb. So far, 189 countries have ratified the treaty while India, Israel, and Pakistan refused to become parties to it. All three countries possess a nuclear arsenal, with total estimates varying from 50 to 200 nuclear weapons.

The official nuclear weapon states – the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China who are known as P5 – are required to implement measures under the treaty to “cessation” of the nuclear arms race, and complete nuclear “disarmament”.

The five nuclear weapon states held a meeting last week during which they discussed promoting dialogue and mutual confidence on nuclear issues. The P5 members exchanged views on various issues concerning “non-proliferation”, “the peaceful uses of nuclear energy”, and “disarmament” – known as the three pillars of the NPT.  The five nations, who are the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, reaffirmed their commitment to the goal of nuclear disarmament.

However, progress on nuclear disarmament is almost limited or negligible over the last 45 years.  “There is not much progress on nuclear disarmament and we need a new dynamic to break the paralysis, otherwise there will be new cold war,” said Martin Hinrichs, an ICAN activist. Representatives of ICAN from some 16 countries held a brainstorming session on how to go about their advocacy campaign during the NPT meeting this week.

“They (the P5) have got a vested interest and they constructed their industry, defence industries, and military to deploy, to possess, and to modernise nuclear weapons,” said Johnson.

The P5 members, says Johnson, “have a vested interest in keeping the status quo and stopping new countries entering the nuclear club.” Besides, they enjoy numerous privileges because of their status and it would be a mistake to think that they would implement substantive measures towards complete nuclear disarmament, she said.

So, the “game” for the elimination of nuclear weapons will not start from the P5 side who wield powerful nuclear weapons, Johnson said.

“What has to change is that the non-nuclear states have to start things to bring about nuclear disarmament,” the ICAN co-chair argued. “They (the non-nuclear weapon states) have the power and tools to change by becoming aware that nuclear weapons are a humanitarian problem even if they are set in the international legal and political rules.”

Therefore, it is important not to give exalted status to the nuclear arms states every time on the hope that they would carry out disarmament. “The non-nuclear weapon states are not supplicants, and they have to engage in politics and change international relations by joining forces with civil society,” Johnson asserted.

The international ban movement intends to delegitimise nuclear weapons for everybody so that countries are dissuaded from spending billions of dollars on nuclear weapons.

The world’s nuclear environment has increasingly turned politically toxic, replete with threats, accusations and open defiance of Security Council resolutions.

A long outstanding international conference on a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, to be hosted by Finland, is still far from reality. So is a proposed Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) aimed at eliminating weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

And last week, a renegade North Korea defied the United Nations by conducting its third nuclear test, while Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reserved his country’s right to nuclear weapons in a region where Israel’s nuclear arsenal has the implicit blessings of the Western world.

“We believe nuclear weapons must be eliminated,” said Khamenei, “We don’t want to build atomic weapons.” But if Iran was forced to do so, he warned, “No power could stop us.”So long as these weapons exist, there is a very real possibility that they will be used, either by accident or design.

As the ultimate goal of a nuclear-weapons free world keeps receding, the leader of a Tokyo-based lay Buddhist non-governmental organisation (NGO) launched a global campaign last week for a nuclear summit of world leaders in 2015.

Daisaku Ikeda, president of Soka Gakkai International (SGI), says the annual G8 Summit in 2015 could be an “expanded summit” focusing on a nuclear weapons-free world and marking the 70th anniversary of the devastating atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“This would be an appropriate opportunity for such a nuclear summit,” he adds.

Tim Wright of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) told IPS his organisation supports the call by Ikeda and others to begin a process in 2013 aimed at achieving a treaty banning nuclear weapons.

“We urge all nations, including those which are part of a nuclear alliance, to participate constructively in such a process,” he said.

The involvement of NGOs will also be essential, Wright pointed out. “And a global ban on nuclear weapons is feasible, necessary and urgent.

“So long as these weapons exist,” he argued, “there is a very real possibility that they will be used, either by accident or design. Any such use would have catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences.”

In his 2013 Peace Proposal ‘Compassion, Wisdom and Courage: Building a Global Society of Peace and Creative’ released last week, Ikeda offers three concrete proposals.

First, to make disarmament a key theme of the U.N.’s post-2015 economic agenda, including Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Specifically, he proposes halving world military expenditures relative to 2010 levels and abolishing nuclear weapons and all other weapons judged inhumane under international law.

These should be included as targets for achievement by the year 2030.

Second, initiate the negotiation process for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, with the goal of agreement on an initial draft by 2015. Japan, as a country that has experienced nuclear attack, should play a leading role in the realisation of a NWC, he asserts.

Further, it should undertake the kind of confidence-building measures that are a necessary predicate to the establishment of a Northeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone and to creating the conditions for the global abolition of nuclear weapons.

“To this end, we must engage in active and multifaceted debate cantered on the inhumane nature of nuclear weapons to broadly shape international public opinion,” says Ikeda.

“If possible, Germany and Japan, which are the scheduled G8 host countries for 2015 and 2016, respectively, should agree to reverse that order, enabling the convening of this meeting in Hiroshima or Nagasaki,” Ikeda notes.

Third, an expanded G8 summit in 2015 which could double as a nuclear summit of world leaders.

In past peace proposals, he has urged that the 2015 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) be held in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a vehicle for realising a nuclear abolition summit.

Nevertheless, he says, the logistical issues involved in bringing together the representatives of almost 190 countries may dictate the meeting be held at the U.N. headquarters in New York, as is customary.

“In that event, the G8 Summit scheduled to be held several months after the NPT Review Conference would provide an excellent opportunity for an expanded group of world leaders to grapple with this critical issue,” according to Ikeda.

Ikeda says SGI’s efforts to grapple with the nuclear weapons issue are based on the recognition that the very existence of these weapons represents the ultimate negation of the dignity of life.

“At the same time, nuclear weapons serve as a prism through which to perceive new perspectives on ecological integrity, economic development and human rights,” he says.

This in turn, he says, “helps us identify the elements that will shape the contours of a new, sustainable society, one in which all people can live in dignity.”

The atomic bomb detonated by the United States in August 1945 above Hiroshima killed 145,000. Several hundreds of thousands of other inhabitants of the city have suffered severe injuries and chronic disease in the past six decades. Credit: ICAN.

By Jacques N. Couvas
ISTANBUL, Feb 1 2013 (IPS)

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has adopted a new strategy to involve citizens and politicians more actively to push for a global ban on nuclear weapons.

The strategy was emphasised at an ICAN conference in Istanbul last week.

The new strategy by ICAN, a coalition of 286 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in 68 countries which jointly campaign against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and aim to ultimately have them banned, aims to do more to sensitise both public opinion and state authorities to the consequences of a nuclear detonation.

ICAN intends to go beyond rhetoric and propose, with the involvement of states sensitive to the issue, concrete measures to cope with a nuclear disaster event. It will be hosting an international civil society forum in Oslo on March 2-3 this year, which will be followed by an experts conference on military nuclear threats organised by the government of Norway with the support of 16 other nations.

“We are constantly told by nuclear weapons states officials that putting into effect the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is not possible, not conceivable in practical terms,” Arielle Denis, ICAN Europe, Middle East and Africa coordinator told IPS. “Our position is that there is record of international treaties which have led to the prohibition of other lethal weapons. If the international community succeeded in banning land mines and cluster bombs, it can certainly ban the ownership of nuclear arms.”

The coalition of NGOs argues that any country, even a nuclear weapons state, could be the target of a nuclear attack in the new geopolitical environment, which it says encourages the proliferation of rogue states and terrorist organisations. “Although no nuclear weapons have been used since 1945, cyber-terrorism makes today the explosion of an atomic warhead realistic,” said Denis.

Core to this strategy is the humanitarian aspect of a nuclear detonation, even of a single device. ICAN published a report in 2012 which identifies immediate and long-term damage to local populations. Blast shockwaves travelling at hundreds of kilometres an hour, are lethal to all those in the proximity of ground zero of the detonation, who often just vaporise due to the intense pressure and heat. Further away, victims suffer from oxygen shortage and carbon monoxide excess, lung and ear damage, and internal bleeding.

But the consequences due to radiation are felt even at greater distances. This affects most organs of the body with effects lasting decades and with genetic alterations suffered by the victims and their descendants.

Such claims are corroborated by studies by the U.S. government and by research institutions between the 1970s and last decade. In a scenario of a nuclear attack involving three medium power warheads against an intercontinental ballistic missiles base in the “farm belt” of the U.S., which covers primarily the northern mid-west, it was calculated that the number of dead could reach 7.5 to 15 million, with 10 to 20 million being severely injured.

The humanitarian aspect of the surviving population would be practically impossible to manage, as the presence of radioactivity would force 40 million people to relocate as far away as possible. Relocation would take from several weeks to years, it was estimated.

The “farm belt” in the U.S. is a rural area. Europe is three times more densely populated than the U.S., and a nuclear detonation would have a more catastrophic humanitarian impact on European locations.

ICAN, formed in 2007, operates through an international steering group of personalities and experts on nuclear armaments and a small staff in Geneva, which coordinates international campaigns and events. Member NGOs provide support to regional activities.

ICAN’s main argument for its activism is based on the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), signed on July 1, 1968 in New York and gradually ratified by 189 states, excluding India, Pakistan and Israel. Its validity was extended indefinitely in May 1995.

Signatories to the NPT are distinguished between the nuclear weapon states and the non-nuclear weapon states. The former group is composed of Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States (U.S.), the same nations which form the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

Article VI of the NPT requires signatory states to pursue “negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament,” and towards a “treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

“Disarmament must be general and complete,” said Denis. “There was in the 1990s some ambiguity about the Treaty text in this respect, but this has been clarified in international law and all nuclear weapon states must begin negotiations for dismantling all their nuclear weapons.”

The U.S. has traditionally interpreted Article VI as having no mandatory effect on the parties. But the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in an advisory opinion, dated Jul. 8, 1996 stated that “there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

The lack of visible willingness by nuclear weapon states to get around the negotiations table has fuelled the determination of the NGOs which form ICAN to systematically make citizens and politicians around the globe aware of the threats of maintaining an arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Although the number of nuclear warheads was drastically reduced after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s from 60,000 to 19,000, ICAN is concerned about the continuing technology updates of such weapons by the nuclear weapon states.

Nuclear weapon spending in the U.S. reached 61.3 billion dollars in 2011, a ten percent increase over the previous year. The nine countries that are known, or suspected, to have nuclear military power increased in the same period their spending by 15 percent to 105 billion dollars. Israel has since 1958 adopted a non-confirmation, non-denial policy in respect to having a nuclear arsenal.

“This level of expenditure is a strong indication that nations which hold nuclear weapons have no intention to get rid of them any time soon,” said Denis. “The governments of such states say that they will dismantle their stocks as soon as the other nuclear weapon states do the same. It is a vicious, endless circle.”

Twenty-five years ago, on Dec. 8, presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This historic agreement eliminated a modern class of land-based “theatre” weapons – the SS20s, cruise and Pershing missiles – that had been brought into Europe in the early 1980s.

Credit: Empty cruise missile silo at Greenham Common. RJohnson2012

The breakthrough surprised most mainstream military and political analysts, but was hailed by European peace activists whose efforts to achieve this outcome had been derided by experts right up to the Reykjavik Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev in October 1986.

Gorbachev, however, has paid tribute to the role of civil society. Asked a few years ago what made him “trust” Reagan, the former Soviet leader said that he didn’t trust Reagan at all; he took the risk to go to Reykjavik and propose nuclear disarmament because he trusted the European peace movement and Greenham Common women to make sure that the U.S. would not take unfair advantage if he took the first step.

Gorbachev also spoke about being moved to act after reading about studies by Russian and American scientists that showed how life on Earth could be obliterated by the “nuclear winter” aftermath of a nuclear war.

Such a thorough understanding of the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons has been missing from mainstream debates since then. Groupthink among government officials, arms controllers, funders and security experts have served to perpetuate the realpolitik notion that nuclear disarmament is an extraordinarily difficult military-technical process that only the nuclear-armed states can take forward.

Such an attitude has given increased power to the nuclear states, forcing nuclear-free countries into the supplicant role of calling for disarmament while simultaneously being marginalised as cheerleaders on the sidelines of the real game.

The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ­ the jewel in the crown of cold war arms control ­ has long been in trouble, but its adherents keep hoping that enough band-aids can be applied to keep the NPT regime and review process going. Squandering the opportunities created by the end of the cold war, diplomatic gesture politics have failed to address the major nuclear threats in the real world, while the NPT paradoxically reinforces a prominent role for nuclear weapons in the security policies of a handful of governments.

It came as little surprise, therefore, to hear from the U.S. Department of State on Nov. 23 that the much heralded conference on a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) “cannot be convened because of present conditions in the Middle East and the fact that states in the region have not reached agreement on acceptable conditions for a conference”.

Iran, which only agreed to participate in the conference a few weeks earlier, predictably seized the high ground and castigated the U.S. for holding the conference – that had been mandated by the 2010 NPT Review Conference – hostage “for the sake of Israel”.

Nabil Elaraby, the Arab League’s secretary-general, warned that failure to convene the conference “would negatively impact on the regional security system and the international system to prevent nuclear proliferation”.

As Israel bombs Palestinians in Gaza, Israelis are being frightened and hurt by missiles on buses that are being fired in retaliation. Nuclear weapons bring no security, but their deployment in volatile regions like the Middle East, South Asia, North-East Asia and also Europe distract from genuine security requirements and add a massive additional threat to peace.

The nuclear possessors make the situation worse by talking about preventing nuclear terrorism while hiding behind the voodoo of nuclear deterrence ­ as if by wearing the weapons they can avoid having to worry about anyone using them.

Recent initiatives by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the Red Cross and a growing number of governments have begun to arouse global interest in the humanitarian effects of nuclear weapons.

On Nov. 22, Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide invited all United Nations governments to send senior officials and experts to participate in an international conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons on March 4-5, 2013, in Oslo.

The aim of the conference is “to provide an arena for a fact-based discussion of the humanitarian and developmental consequences associated with a nuclear weapon detonation. All interested states, as well as U.N. organisations, representatives of civil society and other relevant stakeholders are invited to the conference.”

This conference aims to bring together not only scientists and doctors to talk about the immediate blast, flash-burns, fires and radiation that would incinerate and contaminate millions, but also agencies that deal with refugees, food insecurity and the medical needs of millions of homeless, starving people, all of which will be compounded by predicted longer term effects such as nuclear winter and global famine that the detonation of less than one percent of today’s nuclear arsenals would cause.

Leaders have to think in humanitarian and environmental terms, as Gorbachev did.

The nuclear free countries have to stop behaving like passive supplicants, giving veto powers to their nuclear-armed neighbours. Unlike traditional arms control, humanitarian disarmament approaches recognise that everyone has the right and responsibility to take steps to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.

The best way to do this is to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons. Once the nuclear-free countries acknowledge their own power and responsibility, they will find that a nuclear ban treaty can be far quicker and simpler to achieve than they thought. By changing the legal context, such a treaty would be a game changer, draining power and status from the nuclear-armed governments and hastening their understanding of their own security interests, increasing the imperative for concerted nuclear disarmament rather than perpetual proliferation.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Rebecca Johnson is executive director and co-founder of the Acronym Institute and vice chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

Ruins of the Abu Khadra complex for civil adminstration following an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City. Credit: Mohammed Omer/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 28 2012 (IPS)

A long outstanding international conference on a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, scheduled to take place in Finland next month, has been postponed, giving rise to speculation on whether it will ever get off the ground.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a vigorous opponent of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), remains hopeful the conference will take place sometime next year.

“I have also personally engaged with the states of the region at the highest level to underline the importance of the conference in promoting long-term regional stability, peace and security on the basis of equality,” he said.

But Dr. Rebecca Johnson, director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, told IPS it is appalling for the people of the Middle East that militarism is still destroying the lives of civilians.

“If the recent tragic developments have also derailed the important Conference on freeing the Middle East of weapons of mass destruction, it will be important to convene early in 2013,” she said.

Dr. Johnson said the date need not be a deal-breaker – but this delay makes it even more important now to start a determined and constructive process to eliminate nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from the region.

“If the meeting cannot launch an effective process early in 2013, there will be serious consequences not only for the region but for the credibility of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), demonstrating yet another failure to deliver on its essential agreements,” she warned.

The proposal for the meeting was endorsed by 189 member states at the Review Conference on the NPT held at the United Nations in May 2010.

The Israeli government, while criticising the outcome document of that Review Conference, left the door open for participation in the proposed conference.

But the political uprisings in the Arab world, including the ouster of the Israeli-friendly Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, have triggered expressions of Israeli concern – specifically its own security in an increasingly hostile environment.

In a statement released Monday, the secretary-general said he reaffirms his “firm resolve and commitment, together with the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States, in consultation with the states of the region, to convene a conference to be attended by all states of the Middle East.”

The focus, he said, will be on the establishment of a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction, on the basis of arrangements freely arrived at by the states of the region.

Hillel Schenker, co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal, told IPS that while it’s unfortunate the Helsinki conference will not be convened in 2012, the fact that Ban Ki-moon and the co-conveners, the U.S., UK and Russia, remain committed to the process is very encouraging.

It’s understandable, given the circumstances, he said, that it was difficult to convene the conference in December 2012.

However, the recent statement by the secretary-general expressing hope that the Finnish facilitator will be able “to conduct multilateral consultations in the shortest possible time which will allow the conference to be convened in the earliest possible time in 2013”, means that this valuable process will continue.

“For the conference to succeed, it is crucial that both Iran and Israel be at the table,” Schenker noted. “Hopefully the facilitator, perhaps with the aid of the Americans, will be able to convince the Israeli government of the importance of engaging in this process.”

Still, he said, the Helsinki Conference remains an historic opportunity to move forward on a parallel track, towards the creation of a regional security regime which will contain a Nuclear and WMD-Free Zone and towards Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab comprehensive peace.

Meanwhile, the United States which traditionally throws a protective arm around Israel, has already laid down a condition in advance of the pre-conference preparations.

In July 2010, when Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu met with U.S. President Barack Obama, he was assured the Middle East conference would not single out Israel.

A White House statement also insisted the conference would only take place “if all countries feel confident they can attend, and that any efforts to single out Israel will make the prospects of convening such a conference unlikely.”

Speaking at a symposium on “Faith, Dialogue and Integration” at the United Nations Monday, Jonathan Granoff, president of the Global Security Institute, said nuclear weapons represent a form of security apartheid.

Like apartheid, both sides are injured. And those threatened reasonably feel the terror of destruction, he added, pointing out that those threatening have their moral foundations corroded or live in denial of what they are doing.

“The continued reliance on these horrific devices provides the modern world with its most severe and divisive irony,” he said.

The means of pursuing security are serving to breed insecurity. And the inequity inherent in the system pulls at the fabric of human unity, he added.

As Vartan Gregorian of the Carnegie Corporation recently pointed out, “All declared nuclear powers – the U.S., Russia, Great Britain, France, and China and now India and Pakistan (Israel as an undeclared nuclear power) – insist they possess nuclear weapons only to deter others from using them.”

Yet there have been many times in the past, and there will surely be times in the future, when major powers have used their nuclear capability to gain some political end by intimidation, he said.

Intimidation through the threat of annihilation of millions of innocent people is unjustified legally, morally, and remains the greatest threat to the stimulation of the proliferation of weapons, said Granoff. Thus, continued threat to use these weapons is impractical.

“One must therefore wonder if the irrational pride of power informs the policies of those who seek to perpetuate and ‘improve’ their arsenals of devastation,” he said.