By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Sep 9 2015 (IPS)

Iran has had a nuclear programme since 1959 when the United States gave a small reactor to Tehran University as part of the “Atoms for Peace” programme during Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s reign.  When the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was introduced in 1968 and entered into force in 1970, Iran was one of the first signatories of that Treaty.

Farhang Jahanpour

The Shah had made extensive plans for using nuclear energy in order to free Iran’s oil deposits for export and also in order for use in petrochemical industries to receive more revenue. The Shah had planned to build 22 nuclear reactors to generate 23 million megawatts of electric power.  By 1977, the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) had more than 1,500 highly paid employees, with a budget of 1.3 billion dollars, making it the second biggest public economic institution in the country.

In 1975, the Gerald Ford administration in the United States expressed support for the Shah’s plan to develop a full-fledged nuclear power programme, including the construction of 23 nuclear power reactors.

President Gerald Ford has been reported as having “signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete ‘nuclear fuel cycle’.”“Iran has had a nuclear programme since 1959 when the United States gave a small reactor to Tehran University as part of the “Atoms for Peace” programme during Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s reign”

The Shah donated 20 million dollars to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to train Iranian nuclear experts, many of whom are still working for Iran’s Nuclear Energy Organisation, including the current head of the organisation and one of the chief negotiators, Dr. Ali Akbar Salehi.  In 1975, Iran also paid 1.18 billion dollars to buy 10 percent of Eurodif, a French company that produces enriched uranium. In return, Iran was supposed to receive enriched uranium for its reactors, a pledge that the French government reneged on after the Iranian revolution.

In 1975, Germany’s Kraftwerk Union AG started the construction of two reactors in Bushehr at an estimated cost of 3-6 billion dollars. Kraftwerk Union stopped work on the Bushehr reactors after the start of the Iranian revolution, with one reactor 50 percent complete, and the other 85 percent complete. The United States also cut off the supply of highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel for the Tehran nuclear reactor.

After the revolution, the Islamic Republic initially stopped all work on the nuclear programme. However, in 1981, Iranian officials concluded that after having spent billions of dollars on their programme it would be foolish to dismantle it. So, they turned to the companies that had
signed agreements with Iran to complete their work. Nevertheless, as the result of political pressure by the U.S. government, all of them declined. Iran also turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for help to no avail.

In the late 1980s, a consortium of companies from Argentina, Germany and Spain submitted a proposal to Iran to complete the Bushehr-1 reactor, but pressure by the United States stopped the deal. In 1990, U.S. pressure also stopped Spain’s National Institute of Industry and Nuclear Equipment from completing the Bushehr project.  Later on, Iran set up a bilateral cooperation on fuel cycle-related issues with China but, under pressure from the West, China also discontinued its assistance.

Therefore, it was no secret to the West that Iran was trying to revive its nuclear programme.

Having failed to achieve results through formal and open channels, Iranian officials turned to clandestine sources, and using their own domestic capabilities.  A major mistake was to receive assistance from A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme.  In 1992, Iran invited IAEA inspectors to visit all the sites and facilities they asked. Director General Hans Blix reported that all activities observed were consistent with the peaceful use of atomic energy.

On Feb. 9, 2003, Iran’s programme and efforts to build sophisticated facilities at Natanz were revealed allegedly by Iranian dissident group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the political wing of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation (MKO), for years regarded as a terrorist organisation by the West. It has been strongly suggested that MKO had received its information from Israeli intelligence sources.

President Mohammad Khatami announced the existence of the Natanz (and other) facilities on Iranian television and invited the IAEA to visit them. Then, in late February 2003, Dr. Mohammad El-Baradei, the head of IAEA, accompanied by a team of inspectors, visited Iran.  In November 2003, the IAEA reported that Iran had systematically failed to meet its obligations under its NPT safeguards agreement to report its activities to the IAEA, although it also reported no evidence of links to a nuclear weapons programme.

It should be noted that at that time Iran was only bound by the provisions of the NPT, which required the country to inform the IAEA of its nuclear activities only 180 days before introducing any nuclear material into the facility.  So, according to Iranian officials, building the Natanz facility and not declaring it was not illegal, but the West regarded it as an act of concealment and violation of the NPT’s Additional Protocol, which Iran had not signed. In any event, the scale of Iran’s nuclear activities surprised the West, and it was taken for granted that Iran was developing nuclear weapons.

In May 2003, in a bold move, the Khatami government in Iran sent a proposal to the U.S. government through Swiss diplomatic channels for a “Grand Bargain”, offering full transparency, as well as withdrawal of support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and resumption of diplomatic relations, but the offer went unanswered.

In October 2003, the United Kingdom, France and Germany undertook a diplomatic initiative to resolve the problem. The foreign ministers of the three countries and Iran issued a statement known as the Tehran Declaration, according to which Iran agreed to cooperate with the IAEA and to implement the Additional Protocol as a voluntary confidence-building measure. Iran even suspended enrichment for two years during the course of the negotiations.  On Mar. 23, 2005, Iran submitted to the EU Troika” a plan of “objective guarantees” with the following elements:

(1) Spent reactor fuels would not be reprocessed by Iran.

(2) Iran would forego plutonium production through a heavy water reactor.

(3) Only low-enriched uranium would be produced.

(4) A limit would be imposed on the enrichment level.

(5) A limit would be imposed on the amount of enrichment, restricting it to what was needed for Iran’s reactors.

(6) All the low-enriched uranium would be converted immediately to fuel rods for use in reactors (fuel rods cannot be further enriched).

(7) The number of centrifuges in Natanz would be limited, at least at the beginning.

(8) The IAEA would have permanent on-site presence at all the facilities for uranium conversion and enrichment.

In early August 2005, the EU Troika” submitted the “Framework for a Long-Term Agreement” to Iran, recognising Iran’s right to develop infrastructure for peaceful use of nuclear energy, and promised collaboration with Iran. However, as the result of extreme U.S. pressure, the EU Troika was unable to respond to Iran’s call for nuclear collaboration, and subsequently Iran withdrew its offer and resumed enrichment.

The rebuff by the West to President Khatami’s outstretched hand resulted in the weakening of the Reformist Movement and the election of hardline candidate Mahmud Ahmadinezhad as the next president of Iran in June 2005. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

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:

By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Sep 5 2015 (IPS)

Article Six of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) makes it obligatory for nuclear states to get rid of their nuclear weapons as part of a bargain that requires the non-nuclear states not to acquire nuclear weapons. Apart from the NPT provisions, there have been a number of other rulings that have reinforced those requirements.

However, while nuclear states have vigorously pursued a campaign of non-proliferation, they have violated many NPT and other international regulations.

Farhang Jahanpour

An advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice in 1996 stated: “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.” Nuclear powers have ignored that opinion.

The nuclear states, especially the United States and Russia, have further violated the Treaty by their efforts to upgrade and diversity their nuclear weapons. The United States has developed the “Reliable Replacement Warhead”, a new type of nuclear warhead to extend the viability of its nuclear arsenal.

The United States and possibly Russia are also developing tactical nuclear warheads with lower yields, which can be used on the battlefield without producing a great deal of radiation. Despite U.S. President Barack Obama’s pledge to reduce and ultimately abolish nuclear weapons, it has emerged that the United States is in the process of developing new categories of nuclear weapons, including B61-12 at a projected cost of 348 billion dollars over the next decade

India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea cannot be regarded as nuclear states. Since Article 9 of the NPT defines Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) as those that had manufactured and tested a nuclear device prior to 1 January 1967, it is not possible for India, Pakistan, Israel or North Korea to be regarded as nuclear weapon states.“All nuclear powers have continued to strengthen and modernise their nuclear arsenals. While they have been vigorous in punishing, on a selective basis, the countries that were suspected of developing nuclear weapons, they have not lived up to their side of the bargain to get rid of their nuclear weapons”

All those countries are in violation of the NPT, and providing them with nuclear assistance, such as the U.S. agreement with India to supply it with nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear technology, constitutes violations of the Treaty. The same applies to U.S. military cooperation with Israel and Pakistan.

Nuclear states are guilty of proliferation 

Paragraph 14 of the binding U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 that called for the disarmament of Iraq also specified the establishment of a zone free of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in the Middle East.

It was clearly understood by all the countries that joined the U.S.-led coalition to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait that after the elimination of Iraqi WMDs, Israel would be required to get rid of its nuclear arsenal. Israel – and by extension the countries that have not implemented that paragraph – have violated that binding resolution. Indeed, both the United States and Israel are believed to maintain nuclear weapons in the region.

During the apartheid era, Israel and South Africa collaborated in manufacturing nuclear weapons, with Israel leading the way. In 2010 it was reported that “the ‘top secret’ minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa’s Defence Minister P.W. Botha asked for nuclear warheads and the then Israeli Defence Minister Shimon Peres responded by offering them ‘in three sizes’.”

The documents were uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries. Israeli officials tried hard to prevent the publication of those documents. In 1977, South Africa signed a pact with Israel that included the manufacturing of at least six nuclear bombs.

The 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review and Extension Conference also called for “the early establishment by regional parties of a Middle East zone free of nuclear and all other WMDs and their delivery systems”. The international community has ignored these resolutions by not pressing Israel to give up its nuclear weapons. Indeed, any call for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East has been opposed by Israel and the United States.

The 2000 NPT Review Conference called on “India, Israel and Pakistan to accede to the Treaty as Non-Nuclear Weapons States (NNWS) promptly and without condition”. States Parties also agreed to “make determined efforts” to achieve universality. Since 2000, little effort has been made to encourage India, Pakistan or Israel to accede as NNWS.

The declaration agreed by the Iranian government and visiting European Union foreign ministers (from Britain, France and Germany) that reached an agreement on Iran’s accession to the Additional Protocol and suspension of its enrichment for more than two years also called for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction throughout the Middle East.

The three foreign ministers made the following commitment: “They will cooperate with Iran to promote security and stability in the region including the establishment of a zone free from weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East in accordance with the objectives of the United Nations.” Twelve years after signing that declaration, the three European countries and the international community have failed to bring about a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

While, during the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) refused to rule out first use of nuclear weapons due to the proximity of Soviet forces to European capitals, this policy has not been revised since the end of the Cold War. There have been repeated credible reports that the Pentagon has been considering the use of nuclear bunker-buster weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites.

For the past 2,000 years and more, mankind has tried to define the requirements of a just war. During the past few decades, some of these principles have been enshrined in legally-binding international agreements and conventions. They include the Covenant of the League of Nations after the First World War, the 1928 Pact of Paris, and the Charter of the United Nations.

A few ideas are common to all these definitions, namely that any military action should be based on self-defence, be in compliance with international law, be proportionate, be a matter of last resort, and not target civilians and non-combatants.

Other ideas flow from these: the emphasis on arbitration and the renunciation of first resort to force in the settlement of disputes, and the principle of collective self- defence. It is difficult to see how the use of nuclear weapons could be compatible with any of these requirements. Yet, despite many international calls for nuclear disarmament, nuclear states have refused to abide by the NPT regulations and get rid of their nuclear weapons.

In his first major foreign policy speech in Prague on 5 April 2009, President Barack Obama spoke about his vision of getting rid of nuclear weapons. He said: “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War… Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”

He went on to say: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons…”

Sadly, those noble sentiments have not been put into action. On the contrary, all nuclear powers have continued to strengthen and modernise their nuclear arsenals. While they have been vigorous in punishing, on a selective basis, the countries that were suspected of developing nuclear weapons, they have not lived up to their side of the bargain to get rid of their nuclear weapons. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

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:

By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Sep 4 2015 (IPS)

Iran’s nuclear programme has been the target of a great deal of misinformation, downright lies and above all myths. As a result, it is often difficult to unpick truth from falsehood. 

Farhang Jahanpour

As President John F. Kennedy said in his Yale University Commencement Address on 11 June 1962: “For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliché of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of the opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

In order to understand the pros and cons of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreed by Iran and the P5+1 (United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, France and Germany) on 14 July 2015, and the subsequent U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 passed unanimously on 20 July 2015 setting the agreement in U.N. law and rescinding the sanctions that had been imposed on Iran, it is important to study the background to the whole deal.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regulates the activities of the countries that wish to make use of peaceful nuclear energy. The NPT was enacted in 1968 and it entered into force in 1970. Its objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, while promoting the peaceful use of nuclear technology. Iran was one of the first signatories to that Treaty, and so far 191 states have joined the Treaty.“Iran’s nuclear programme has been the target of a great deal of misinformation, downright lies and above all myths. As a result, it is often difficult to unpick truth from falsehood”

It has been one of the most successful disarmament treaties in history. Only three U.N. member states – Israel, India and Pakistan – did not join the NPT and all of them proceeded to manufacture nuclear weapons. North Korea, which acceded to the NPT in 1985, withdrew in 2003 and has allegedly manufactured nuclear weapons.

This treaty was a part of the move known as “atoms for peace”, which allowed different nations to have access to nuclear power for peaceful purposes, but prevented them from manufacturing nuclear weapons.

The treaty was a kind of bargain between the five original countries that possessed nuclear weapons (all the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council) and the non-nuclear countries that agreed never to acquire nuclear weapons in return for sharing the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology.

The Treaty is based on four pillars:

Pillar One – Non-Proliferation:  Article 1 of the NPT states that nuclear weapon state countries (N5) should not transfer any weapon-related technology to others.

Pillar Two – Ban on possession of nuclear weapons by non-nuclear states: Article 2 states the other side of the coin, namely that non-nuclear states should not acquire any form of nuclear weapons technology from the countries that possess it or acquire it independently.

Pillar Three – Peaceful use of nuclear energy: Article 4 not only allows the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, but even stresses that it is “the inalienable right” of every country to do research, development and production, and to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, without discrimination, as long as Articles 1 and 2 are satisfied.

It further states that all parties can exchange equipment, material, and science and technology for peaceful purposes. It calls on the nuclear states to assist the non-nuclear states in the use of peaceful nuclear technology.

Pillar Four – Nuclear disarmament: Article 6 makes it obligatory for nuclear states to get rid of their nuclear weapons. The Treaty states that all countries should pursue negotiations on measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race and “achieving nuclear disarmament”.

While nuclear powers have worked hard to prevent other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons, they have not abided by their side of the bargain and have been reluctant to give up their nuclear weapons. On the contrary, they have further developed and upgraded those weapons, and have made them more capable of use on battlefields.

Sadly, 37 years after its final ratification, the number of nuclear-armed countries has increased, and at least four other countries have joined the club.

After it was realised that unfettered access to enrichment could lead some countries, such as Iraq and North Korea, to gain knowledge of nuclear technology and subsequently develop nuclear weapons, the NPT was amended in 1977 with the Additional Protocol, which tightened the regulations in order to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

According to the Additional Protocol, which Iran has agreed to implement as part of the JCPOA, “Special inspections may be carried out in circumstances according to defined procedures. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) may carry out such inspections if it considers that information made available by the State concerned, including explanations from the State and information obtained from routine inspections, is not adequate for the Agency to fulfil its responsibilities under the safeguards agreement.” 

However, as the above paragraph makes clear, these inspections will be carried out only in exceptional circumstances when there is valid cause for suspicion that a country has been violating the terms of the agreement, and only if the IAEA decides that the explanations provided by the State concerned are not adequate. Also, such inspections will be carried out on the basis of “defined procedures”

The countries that have ratified the Additional Protocol have agreed to “managed inspections”, and the Iranian authorities have also said that such managed and supervised inspections can be carried out. This of course does not mean “anytime, anywhere” inspections, but inspections that are in keeping with the provisions of the Additional Protocol as set out above.

Meanwhile, in addition to the nuclear states, there are 19 other non-weapons states which are signatories to the NPT and which actively enrich uranium. They have vastly more centrifuges than Iran ever had. Iran’s array of 19,000 centrifuges (only 10,000 of them were operational) prior to the agreement was paltry compared with the capabilities of other countries that enrich uranium.

During the talks between Iran and the P5+1, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali  Khamenei said that Iran wanted to have at least 190,000 centrifuges in order to get engaged in industrial scale enrichment.

It should be remembered that the sale of nuclear fuel is a lucrative business and the countries that do not have enrichment facilities but which have nuclear reactors, are forced to purchase fuel from the few countries that have a monopoly of enriched uranium. Iran had openly stated that it wished to join that club, or at least to be self-sufficient in nuclear fuel.

However, under the JCPOA, Iran has given up the quest for industrial scale enrichment and is even reducing the number of its operational centrifuges from 19,000 to just over 5,000. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

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:

By Gunnar Westberg
GÖTEBORG, Sweden, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons had as members former leading politicians or military officers, among others a British Field Marshal, an American General, an American Secretary of Defence and a French Prime Minister.

The commission unanimously agreed in its report in 1996 that “the proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never be used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility. The only complete defence is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.”

Gunnar Westberg

So that’s it: Nuclear weapons will be used if they are allowed to remain with us. And even a “small” nuclear war, using one percent or less of the world’s nuclear weapons, might cause a worldwide famine leading to the death of a billion humans or more.

Lt Colonel Bruce Blair was for several years in the 1970s commander of U.S. crews with the duty to launch intercontinental nuclear missiles. “I knew how to fire the missiles, I needed no permission,” he states. In the 1990s he was charged with making a review for the U.S. Senate on the question: “Is unauthorised firing of U.S. nuclear weapons a real possibility?”

Blair’s answer was “Yes”, and the risk is not insignificant.

On Hiroshima Day, Aug. 6, this year, a major newspaper in Sweden, Aftonbladet, carried an interview with Colonel Blair, now head of the Global Zero movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons. The reporter asked: “Mr Blair, do you think that nuclear weapons will be used again?” Mr Blair was silent for a while and then responded: “I am afraid it cannot be avoided. A data code shorter than a Twitter message could be enough.”

Blair reminds us of the story of the ‘Permissive Action Link’, a security device for nuclear weapons, the purpose of which is to prevent their unauthorised arming or detonation.

When Robert McNamara was U.S. Secretary of Defence in the mid-1960s, he issued an order that to be able to fire missiles from submarines, the commanding officer must have received a code which permitted the launch.

However, the navy did not want to be prevented from firing on its own initiative, such as in the case that contact with headquarters was interrupted. The initial code of 00000000 was for this reason retained for many years and was generally known. McNamara, however, did not know this until many years after he left the government.

A Soviet admiral once told me that as late as around 1980 he could fire the missiles from a submarine without a code.

When systems of control of the launch systems are discussed, we often learn – as a kind of post scriptum – that there is a Plan B: If all communication with HQ is dead and the commanders believe the war is on, missiles can be fired. We are never told how this works. But there is a plan B.

What is the situation today? Can an unauthorised launch of nuclear weapons occur? Colonel Blair says “Yes”. Mistakes, misunderstandings, hacker encroachments, human mistakes – there are always risks.

After the end of the Cold War, we have learnt about several “close calls”. There was the Cuban missile crisis and especially the “Soviet submarine left behind”. There was the Petrov Incident in September 1983. There was the possibly worst crisis – worst but little known – of the NATO exercise ‘Able Archer’ in November 1983 when the Soviet leaders expected a NATO attack any moment – and NATO had no insight into the Soviet paranoia.

There are numerous other dangerous incidents about which we have less information.

Martin Hellman, a mathematician and expert in risk analysis, guesses that the risk of a major nuclear war may have been as high as one percent per year during the 40 Cold War years. That sums up to 40 percent. Mankind thus had a slightly better than even chance of not being exterminated. We were lucky.

Maybe the risk is smaller today. But with the risk of proliferation, with new funds allocated to nuclear weapons research and with the increasing tension in international relations, the risk may be increasing again.

As long as nuclear weapons exist the risk exists. The risk of global omnicide, of Assured Destruction.

It is nuclear weapons or us. We cannot co-exist. One of us will have to go.

A prohibition against nuclear weapons is necessary. And it is possible.

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. 

* This article was originally published by the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF)

Excerpt:

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   

A group of eminent persons (GEM) launched a concerted campaign on Aug. 25, 2015, for entry into force of a global ban on nuclear weapon tests such as this one at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Credit: United States Department of Defense via Wikimedia Commons

By Katsuhiro Asagiri and Ramesh Jaura
HIROSHIMA, Aug 27 2015 (IPS)

As the international community gears up to commemorate the 20^th anniversary next year of the opening up of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) for signature, a group of eminent persons (GEM) has launched a concerted campaign for entry into force of a global ban on nuclear weapon testing.

GEM, which was set up by Lassina Zerbo, the Executive Secretary of the September 2013 Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) at the United Nations headquarters in New York, met on Aug. 24-25 in Hiroshima, a modern city on Japan’s Honshu Island, which was largely destroyed by an atomic bomb during the Second World War in 1945.

“Multilateralism in arms control and international security is not only possible, but the most effective way of addressing the complex and multi-layered challenges of the 21st century” – CTBTO Executive Secretary Lassina Zerbo
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only two cities in the world which have suffered the devastating and brutal atomic bombs that brought profound suffering to innocent children, women and men, the tales of which continue to be told by the ‘hibakusha’ (survivors of atomic bombings).

“There is nowhere other than this region where the urgency of achieving the Treaty’s entry into force is more evident, and there is no group better equipped with the experience and expertise to help further this cause than the Group of Eminent Persons,” CTBTO Executive Secretary Zerbo told participants.

The GEM is a high-level group comprising eminent personalities and internationally recognised experts whose aim is to promote the global ban on nuclear weapons testing, support and complement efforts to promote the entry into force of the Treaty, as well as reinvigorate international endeavours to achieve this goal.

The two-day meeting was hosted by the government of Japan and the city of Hiroshima, where CTBTO Executive Secretary Zerbo participated in the commemoration of the 70^th anniversary of the atomic bombing early August.

On the eve of the meeting, Zerbo joined former United States Secretary of Defence and GEM Member William Perry and Hiroshima Governor Hidehiko Yuzaki as a panellist in a public lecture on nuclear disarmament which was attended by around 100 persons, including many students.

In an opening statement, Zerbo urged global leaders to use the momentum created by the recently reached agreement between the E3+3 (China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, United Kingdom and the United States) and Iran to inject a much needed dose of hope and positivity in the current discussions on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

“What the Iran deal teaches us is that multilateralism in arms control and international security is not only possible, but the most effective way of addressing the complex and multi-layered challenges of the 21st century. [It] also teaches us that the measure of worth in any security agreement or arms control treaty is in the credibility of its verification provisions. As with the Iran deal, the utility of the CTBT must be judged on the effectiveness of its verification and enforcement mechanisms. In this area, there can be no question,” Zerbo said.

Also speaking at the opening session, Perry expressed his firm belief that ratification of the CTBT served U.S. national interests, not only at the international level but also at the strictly domestic level for national security measures. He considered that the current geopolitical climate constituted a risk for the prospects of entry into force and reiterated the importance of maintaining the moratoria on nuclear testing.

Participating GEM members included Nobuyasu Abe, former U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, Japan; Des Browne, former Secretary of State for Defence, United Kingdom; Jayantha Dhanapala, former U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs; Sérgio Duarte, former U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Brazil; Michel Duclos, Senior Counsellor to the Policy Planning Department at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Wolfgang Hoffmann, former Executive Secretary of the CTBTO, Germany; Ho-Jin Lee, Ambassador, Republic of Korea; and William Perry, former Secretary of Defence, United States.

István Mikola, Minister of State, Hungary; Yusron Ihza Mahendra, Ambassador of Indonesia to Japan; Mitsuru Kitano, Permanent Representative, Ambassador of Japan to the International Organisations in Vienna; and Yerzhan N. Ashikbayev, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Kazakhstan, participated as ex-officio members.

The GEM took stock of the Plan of Action agreed in its meetings in New York (Sep. 2013), Stockholm (Apr. 2014) and Seoul (Jun. 2015). The Group considered the current international climate and determined that, with the upcoming 20^th anniversary of the opening for signature of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, there was an urgency to unite the international community in support of preventing the proliferation and further development of nuclear weapons with the aim of their total elimination.

Participants in the meeting discussed a wide range of relevant issues and debated practical measures that could be undertaken to further advance the entry into force of the Treaty, especially in the run-up to the Article XIV Conference on Facilitating Entry into Force of the CTBT, which will take place at the end of September in New York, with Japan and Kazakhstan as co-chairs.

One hundred and eighty-three countries have signed the Treaty, of which 163 have also ratified it, including three of the nuclear weapon states: France, Russia and the United Kingdom. But 44 specific nuclear technology holder countries must sign and ratify before the CTBT can enter into force. Of these, eight are still missing: China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and the United States. India, North Korea and Pakistan have yet to sign the CTBT.

The GEM adopted the Hiroshima Declaration, which reaffirmed the group’s commitment to achieving the global elimination of nuclear weapons and, in particular, to the entry into force of the CTBT as “one of the most essential practical measures for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation”, and, among others, called for “a multilateral approach to engage the leadership of the remaining . . . eight States with the aim of facilitating their respective ratification processes.”

The GEM called on “political leaders, governments, civil society and the international scientific community to raise awareness of the essential role of the CTBT in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation and in the prevention of the catastrophic consequences of the use of nuclear weapons for humankind.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

The mayor of Nagasaki, Tomihisa Taue, presents the Nagasaki Peace Declaration, saying that “rather than envisioning a nuclear-free world as a faraway dream, we must quickly decide to solve this issue by working towards the abolition of these weapons, fulfilling the promise made to global society”. Credit: YouTube

By Ramesh Jaura
BERLIN/TOKYO, Aug 10 2015 (IPS)

Seventy years after the brutal and militarily unwarranted atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, a nuclear weapons free world is far from within reach.

Commemorating the two events, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made impassioned pleas for heeding the experiences of the survivors of the atomic bombings and the growing worldwide awareness of the compelling need for complete abolition of such weapons.

The atomic bombings in 1945 destroyed the two cities, and more than 200,000 people died of nuclear radiation, shockwaves from the blasts and thermal radiation. Over 400,000 have died since the end of the war, from the after-effects of the bombs.

As of Mar. 31, 2015, the Japanese government had recognised 183,519 as ‘hibakusha’ (explosion-affected people), most of them living in Japan. Japan’s Atomic Bomb Survivors Relief Law defines hibakusha as people who were: within a few kilometres of the hypocentres of the bombs; within 2 km of the hypocentres within two weeks of the bombings; exposed to radiation from fallout; or not yet born but carried by pregnant women in any of these categories.“Our world still bristles with more than 15,000 nuclear weapons, and policy-makers in the nuclear-armed states remain trapped in provincial thinking, repeating by word and deed their nuclear intimidation” – Kazumi Matsui, mayor of Hiroshima

During the commemorative events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reports in several newspapers confirmed that those bombings were militarily unwarranted.

Gar Alperovitz, formerly Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, wrote in The Nation that that “the war was won before Hiroshima – and the generals who dropped the bomb knew it.”

He quoted Adm. William Leahy, President Harry S. Truman’s Chief of Staff, who wrote in his 1950 memoir ‘I Was There’ [that] “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender …”

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the U.S. president from 1953 until 1961, shared this view. He was a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe.

Eisenhower stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he “voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

Even the famous “hawk” Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command, went public the month after the bombing, telling the press that “the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all,” wrote Alperovitz.

“The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish,” warned Robert Oppenheimer, widely considered the father of the bomb, as he called on politicians to place the terrifying power of the atom under strict international control.

Oppenheimer’s call has yet to be followed.

In his fervent address on Aug. 6, Kazumi Matsui, mayor of the City of Hiroshima, said: “Our world still bristles with more than 15,000 nuclear weapons, and policy-makers in the nuclear-armed states remain trapped in provincial thinking, repeating by word and deed their nuclear intimidation.”

He added: “We now know about the many incidents and accidents that have taken us to the brink of nuclear war or nuclear explosions. Today, we worry as well about nuclear terrorism.”

As long as nuclear weapons exist, he warned, anyone could become a hibakusha at any time. If that happens, the damage would reach indiscriminately beyond national borders. “People of the world, please listen carefully to the words of the hibakusha and, profoundly accepting the spirit of Hiroshima, contemplate the nuclear problem as your own,” he exhorted.

As president of Mayors for Peace, comprising mayors from more than 6,700 member cities, Kazumi Matsui vowed: “Hiroshima will act with determination, doing everything in our power to accelerate the international trend toward negotiations for a nuclear weapons convention and abolition of nuclear weapons by 2020.”

This, he said, was the first step toward nuclear weapons abolition. The next step would be to create, through the trust thus won, broadly versatile security systems that do not depend on military might.

“Working with patience and perseverance to achieve those systems will be vital, and will require that we promote throughout the world the path to true peace revealed by the pacifism of the Japanese Constitution,” he added.

“We call on the Japanese government, in its role as bridge between the nuclear- and non-nuclear-weapon states, to guide all states toward these discussions, and we offer Hiroshima as the venue for dialogue and outreach,” the mayor of Hiroshima said.

In the Nagasaki Peace Declaration issued on Aug. 9, Nagasaki mayor Tomihisa Taue asked the Japanese government and Parliament to “fix your sights on the future, and please consider a conversion from a ‘nuclear umbrella’ to a ‘non-nuclear umbrella’.”

Japan does not possess any atomic weapons and is protected, like South Korea and Germany, as well as most of the NATO member states, by the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

He appealed to the Japanese government to explore national security measures, which do not rely on nuclear deterrence. “The establishment of a ‘Northeast Asia Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (NEA-NWFZ),’ as advocated by researchers in America, Japan, Korea, China, and many other countries, would make this possible,” he said.

Referring to the Japanese Parliament “currently deliberating a bill, which will determine how our country guarantees its security”, he said: “There is widespread unease and concern that the oath which was engraved onto our hearts 70 years ago and the peaceful ideology of the Constitution of Japan are now wavering. I urge the Government and the Diet to listen to these voices of unease and concern, concentrate their wisdom, and conduct careful and sincere deliberations.”

The Nagasaki Peace Declaration noted that the peaceful ideology of the Constitution of Japan was born from painful and harsh experiences, and from reflection on the war. “Since the war, our country has walked the path of a peaceful nation. For the sake of Nagasaki, and for the sake of all of Japan, we must never change the peaceful principle that we renounce war,” the declaration said.

The Nagasaki mayor regretted that the Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) held at the United Nations earlier this year had struggled with reaching agreement on a Final Document.

However, said Taue, the efforts of those countries which were attempting to ban nuclear weapons had made possible a draft Final Document “which incorporated steps towards nuclear disarmament.”

He urged the heads of NPT member states not to allow the NPT Review Conference “to have been a waste”. Instead, they should continue their efforts to debate a legal framework, such as a ‘Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC),’ at every opportunity, including at the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Many countries at the Review Conference were in agreement that it was important to visit the atomic-bombed cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Against this backdrop, the Nagasaki mayor appealed to “President [Barack] Obama, heads of state, including the heads of the nuclear weapon states, and all the people of the world … (to) please come to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and see for yourself exactly what happened under those mushroom clouds 70 years ago.”

No U.S. president has ever attended the any event to commemorate the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller was the highest-ranking U.S. official at the Aug. 6 ceremony. She was reported as saying that nuclear weapons should never be used again.

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:

Arnot coal-fired power station in Middelburg, South Africa. Climate activists are pushing for a much greater rollout of renewable energy as the key to shifting the carbon-intensive energy sector towards a sustainable low carbon future. Photo credit: Gerhard Roux/CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0

By Munyaradzi Makoni
CAPE TOWN, Jul 28 2015 (IPS)

Anti-nuclear energy activists are up in arms, and have taken to vigils outside South Africa’s parliament in Cape Town to protest against President Jacob Zuma’s push for nuclear development.

The protest has been building since September 2014 when Zuma struck a deal with Russia’s Rossatom to build up to eight nuclear power stations in South Africa. The stations would cost the country around 1 trillion South African rands (84 billion dollars).

As the protests mount, the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI), an interdenominational faith-based environment initiative led by Bishop Geoff Davies, has said the government’s nuclear policy is not only foolish but immoral.“SAFCEI does not believe that nuclear energy is an answer to climate change but is a distraction likely to bankrupt the country [South Africa] and lead to further energy impoverishment” – Liziwe McDaid, energy advisor for the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute

SAFCEI is demanding that the government take a fresh look at its drive for nuclear energy, and the call has found resonance among clean energy civil society organisations (CSOs) in South Africa.

Although CSOs and government agree in the need to tackle climate change urgently, they differ on core issues as South Africa prepares for the U.N. Climate Conference (COP21) in Paris in December.

“We believe that adaptation needs to be given greater emphasis,” says Liziwe McDaid, SAFCEI’s energy advisor. “Building the capacity of affected and vulnerable communities to respond to climate change must be a priority,” she adds.

For mitigation, argues McDaid, a much greater rollout of renewable energy is the key to shifting the carbon-intensive energy sector towards a sustainable low carbon future.

As a participant in the country’s National Climate Change dialogues, she says that SAFCEI shares the aspiration for responsible climate change and “we are in agreement with government on many of the priorities as outlined in the White Paper.”

South Africa’s White Paper seeks to prioritise climate change responses that have huge adaptation benefits, imply significant economic growth and job creation, and are responsive to public health and risk management.

However, stresses McDaid, when it comes to nuclear energy, “SAFCEI does not believe that nuclear energy is an answer to climate change but is a distraction likely to bankrupt the country and lead to further energy impoverishment.”

Dissenting voices

Meanwhile, David Hallowes researcher and editor of Slow Poison for groundWork, another climate change pressure group, feels there is no consensus between the government and the CSOs ahead of the crucial Paris meeting.

South Africa is not doing enough on adaptation, said Hallowes. “Government is still allowing mining and industry to poison water and land in key catchments and agricultural areas,” he told IPS, adding that the result is that climate impacts will be amplified.

The same plants and developments that are driving climate change are poisoning and killing people, animals and plants that are in the path of pollution, “so the people’s struggles for an environment not harmful to their health and wellbeing are also climate struggles.”

According to Hallowes, “there are different views on what can be achieved with renewable energy. We (groundWork) do not think it can power infinite economic growth and hence we do not believe it can sustain a capitalist economy. In the short term, we think we should be looking for a reduction in energy consumption. The question is who gets it for what.”

Referring to South Africa’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement (REIPPP) programme, which some say proves the benefits of privatisation, he also pointed to differences over nationalisation or privatisation.

“We think we should have a programme that creates democratic ownership and control of renewable energy at different levels from community or settlement, to municipality to national. We call it energy sovereignty.  The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa calls it social ownership. It’s the same thing.”

The groundWork researcher said that CSOs want to see an end to new coal developments, such as new mines or power stations. “I think everyone agrees but don’t necessarily mean the same thing. For some, it’s just a matter of jobs. We think it means the transformation of the economy towards equality and freedom that is democratic control rather than plutocratic control.”

Muna Lakhani, founder and national coordinator of the Institute for Zero Waste in Africa (IZWA), is equally concerned that government is not doing enough to fight climate change.

“Our government sees too much of ‘business as usual’ and is very lax in implementing even the minimal legislation, such as air quality permits, carbon taxes and the like,” he says.

According to Lakhani, CSOs are mostly united on key issues, such as the call for no more fossil fuel, a bigger push for renewables, and promoting local resilience especially of poorer communities and the generally disadvantaged.

Government role

Leluma Matooane, director of Earth Systems Science at Department of Science and Technology (DST) says the Department of Environmental Affairs has the responsibility to implement the country’s National Climate Change Response Policy but that the DST has taken a leadership and coordinating role in climate change research and in ensuring that the country’s responses to climate change are informed by robust science.

Under DST’s 10-Year Innovation Plan, argues Matooane, more focus is being placed on improving the scientific understanding of the drivers, impacts and risks of climate change, as well as on technological innovations the country may need to allow vulnerable sectors of the economy and society at large to adapt.

While views may differ on how to deal with climate change, notes the DST official, government has allowed the setting up of a multi-stakeholder grouping in which government has been joined by the private sector and civil society to discuss solutions.

Discussions in this grouping, he adds, influence and shape the country’s position in international debates and there is a deliberate attempt to have South Africa’s representatives deliver the similar position and messages at different platforms.

Edited by Phil Harris   

CTBTO Executive Secretary Lassina Zerbo introducing the panel discussion on 'Citizen Networks: The Promise of Technological Innovation' at SnT2015 in Vienna, June 2015. Photo credit: CTBTO

By Ramesh Jaura
VIENNA, Jun 30 2015 (IPS)

An international conference has highlighted advances made in detecting nuclear explosions,tracking storms or clouds of volcanic ash, locating epicentres of earthquakes, monitoring the drift of huge icebergs, observing the movements of marine mammals, and detecting plane crashes.

The five-day ‘Science and Technology 2015 Conference’ (SnT2015), which ended Jun. 26, was the fifth in a series of multi-disciplinary conferences organised by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), which has been based in the Austrian capital since 1997.

The conference was attended by more than 1100 scientists and other experts, policy makers and representatives of national agencies, independent academic research institutions and civil society organisations from around the world.“With a strong verification regime and its cutting edge technology, there is no excuse for further delaying the [Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty] CTBT’s entry into force” – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

SnT2015 drew attention to an important finding of CTBTO sensors: the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 was the largest to hit Earth in at least a century.

Participants also heard that the Air Algérie flight between Burkina Faso and Algeria which crashed in Mali in July 2014 was detected by the CTBTO’s monitoring station in Cote d’Ivoire, 960 kilometres from the impact of the aircraft.

The importance of SnT2015 lies in the fact that CTBTO is tasked with campaigning for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which outlaws nuclear explosions by everyone, everywhere: on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, underwater and underground. It also aims to develop reliable tools to make sure that no nuclear explosion goes undetected.

These include seismic, hydro-acoustic, infrasound (frequencies too low to be heard by the human ear), and radionuclide sensors. Scientists and other experts demonstrated and explained in presentations and posters how the four state-of-the-art technologies work in practice.

170 seismic stations monitor shockwaves in the Earth, the vast majority of which are caused by earthquakes. But man-made explosions such as mine explosions or the announced North Korean nuclear tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013 have also been detected.

CTBTO’s 11 hydro-acoustic stations “listen” for sound waves in the oceans. Sound waves from explosions can travel extremely far underwater. Sixty infrasound stations on the Earth’s surface can detect ultra-low frequency sound waves that are emitted by large explosions.

CTBTO’s 80 radionuclide stations measure the atmosphere for radioactive particles; 40 of them also pick up noble gas, the “smoking gun” from an underground nuclear test. Only these measurements can give a clear indication as to whether an explosion detected by the other methods was actually nuclear or not. Sixteen laboratories support radionuclide stations.

When complete, CTBTO’s International Monitoring System (IMS) will consist of 337 facilities spanning the globe to monitor the planet for signs of nuclear explosions. Nearly 90 percent of the facilities are already up and running.

An important theme of the conference was performance optimisation which, according to W. Randy Bell, Director of CTBTO’s International Data Centre (IDC), “will have growing relevance as we sustain and recapitalise the IMS and IDC in the year ahead.”

In the past 20 years, the international community has invested more than one billion dollars in the global monitoring system whose data can be used by CTBTO member states – and not only for test ban verification purposes. All stations are connected through satellite links to the IDC in Vienna.

“Our stations do not necessarily have to be in the same country as the event, but in fact can detect events from far outside from where they are located. For example, the last DPRK (North Korean) nuclear test was picked up as far as Peru,” CTBTO’s Public Information Officer Thomas Mützelburg told IPS.

“Our 183 member states have access to both the raw data and the analysis results. Through their national data centres, they study both and arrive at their own conclusion as to the possible nature of events detected,” he said. Scientists from Papua New Guinea and Argentina said they found the data “extremely useful”.

Stressing the importance of data sharing, CTBTO Executive Secretary, Lassina Zerbo, said in an interview with Nature: “If you make your data available, you connect with the outside scientific community and you keep abreast of developments in science and technology. Not only does it make the CTBTO more visible, it also pushes us to think outside the box. If you see that data can serve another purpose, that helps you to step back a little bit, look at the broader picture and see how you can improve your detection.”

Photo credit: CTBTO

In opening remarks to the conference, Zerbo said: “You will have heard me say again and again that I am passionate about this organisation. Today I am not only passionate but very happy to see all of you who share this passion: a passion for science in the service of peace. It gives me hope for the future of our children that the best and brightest scientists of our time congregate to perfect the detection of the bomb instead of working to perfect the bomb itself.”

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon set the tone in a message to the conference when he said: “With a strong verification regime and its cutting edge technology, there is no excuse for further delaying the CTBT’s entry into force.”

South African Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor, pointed out that her country “is a committed and consistent supporter” of CTBTO. She added: “South Africa has been at the forefront of nuclear non-proliferation in Africa for over twenty years. We gave up our nuclear arsenal and signed the Pelindaba Treaty in 1996, which establishes Africa as a nuclear weapons-free zone, a zone that only came into force in July 2009.

Beside the presentations by scientists, discussion panels addressed topics of current special interest in the CTBT monitoring community. One alluded to the role of science in on-site inspections (OSIs), which are provided for under the Treaty after it enters into force.

This discussion benefited from the experience of the 2014 Integrated Field Exercise (IFE14) in Jordan. “IFE14 was the largest and most comprehensive such exercise so far conducted in the build-up of CTBTO’s OSI capabilities,” said IDC director Bell.

Participants also had an opportunity to listen to a discussion on the opportunities that new and emerging technologies can play in overcoming the challenges of nuclear security. Members of the Technology for Global Security (Tech4GS) group joined former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry in a panel discussion on ‘Citizen Networks: the Promise of Technological Innovation’.

“We are verging on another nuclear arms race,” said Perry. “I do not think that it is irreversible. This is the time to stop and reflect, debate the issue and see if there’s some third choice, some alternative, between doing nothing and having a new arms race.”

A feature of the conference was the CTBT Academic Forum focused on ‘Strengthening the CTBT through Academic Engagement’, at which Bob Frye, prestigious Emmy award-winning producer and director of documentaries and network news programme, pleaded for the need to inspire “the next generation of critical thinkers” to help usher in a world free of nuclear tests and atomic weapons of mass destruction.

The forum also provided an overview of impressive CTBT online educational resources and experiences with teaching the CTBT from the perspective of teachers and professors in Austria, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Pakistan and Russia.

With a view to bridging science and policy, the forum discussed ‘technical education for policymakers and policy education for scientists’ with the participation of eminent experts, including Rebecca Johnson, executive director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy; Nikolai Sokov of the James Martin Center for Non-proliferation Studies; Ference Dalnoki-Veress of the Middlebury Institute for International Studies; Edward Ifft of the Center for Security Studies, Georgetown; and Matt Yedlin of the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia.

There was general agreement on the need to integrate technical issues of CTBT into training for diplomats and other policymakers, and increasing awareness of CTBT and broader nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament policy issues within the scientific community.

Yet another panel – comprising Jean du Preez, chief of CTBTO’s external relations, protocol and international cooperation, Piece Corden of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Thomas Blake of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, and Jenifer Mackby of the Federation of American Scientists – looked ahead with a view to forging new and better links with and beyond academia, effectively engaging with the civil society, the youth and the media.

“Progress comes in increments,” said one panellist, “but not by itself.”

[With inputs from Valentina Gasbarri]

Edited by Phil Harris    

The writer can be contacted at headquarters@ips.org

Is the G7 commitment to an energy transition that aims to gradually phase out fossil fuel emissions this century to avoid the worst of climate change just hot air? Credit: CC BY-SA 2.5

By Lucy Cadena
LONDON, Jun 11 2015 (IPS)

One of the promises made by the leaders of the world’s seven richest nations when they met at Schloss Elmau in Germany earlier this week was an energy transition over the next decades, aiming to gradually phase out fossil fuel emissions this century to avoid the worst of climate change.

Let us be clear: a target of zero fossil fuels by 2100 puts us on track for warming on an unmanageable scale. The only commitment made by the G7 this week was a commitment to climate chaos.

Putting our faith in as-yet-underdeveloped technology fixes such as ‘carbon capture and storage’ and ‘geo-engineering’ to save us in the next 85 years, while the solutions to the climate crisis – renewable technology and community energy systems – exist here and now, is senseless.“The only way to avoid the worst of climate change is to act now, with urgency and ambition. Not by 2100, nor 2050. We need real commitment to real solutions – and the best place the G7 can start is by taking its money – public money – out of dirty energy”

The only way to avoid the worst of climate change is to act now, with urgency and ambition. Not by 2100, nor 2050. We need real commitment to real solutions – and the best place the G7 can start is by taking its money – public money – out of dirty energy.

While the G7 gathered on Jun. 7 and 8, this was the message from people from around the world, who are calling for a ban on all new dirty energy projects and an end to the financing of dirty energy.

The G7’s role in upholding the current dirty energy system is not limited to the subsidies they pour into fossil fuels daily.

G7 countries also directly finance – and profit from – dirty energy projects, particularly in the global South, and in regions where poverty and limited energy access devastate families.

These include projects affecting communities deeply reliant on clean air, water, and land that is polluted and stolen from them, projects among populations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and projects where people face harassment and human rights violations for speaking out.

France

Last week, France, host of the 30 November-11 December 2015 Paris climate summit – the U.N. gathering to set the agenda for global climate commitments in the next decades – announced that two of the summit’s key sponsors will be EDF and ENGIE (formerly GDF-Suez).

The French state holds 84 percent and 33.3 percent of shares in these companies respectively. Both are involved in the construction of several very controversial, polluting projects across the world.

EDF is currently planning the destructive Mphanda Nkuwa mega-dam on the Zambezi River in Mozambique, in the face of fierce opposition from local communities and environmental organisations.

A letter from civil society reminds French President François Hollande that these and other projects place EDF and ENGIE among the top 50 companies that contribute the most to global climate change.

With 46 coal-fired power plants between them, EDF and ENGIE are responsible for emitting 151 million tonnes of CO₂ a year – which amounts to about half the total of France’s overall emissions.

Italy

The Italian state owns a considerable number of shares – almost one-third – in oil and gas company ENI. According to a recent report by Amnesty International, last year alone ENI reported 349 oil spills in the Niger Delta from its own operations.

The figure is remarkable – almost unbelievable. Each spill triggers a human and ecological crisis. The scale of the devastation and ENI’s failure to safeguard communities and ecosystems begs the question: is this sheer incompetence, recklessness, or simply utter indifference to the welfare of local communities?

Japan

Japan, the next offender on the G7 list, is the number one public financier of coal plants globally among the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

Japan has 24 coal-powered projects either under construction or planned, many of them in Indonesia, Vietnam and India, where the more vulnerable local populations live under the cloud of plants’ toxic emissions.

Emissions of deadly sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from coal plants are currently highest in Indonesia, where the planned Batang coal power plant is set to become the largest ever Japanese-financed plant in Southeast Asia.

United States

A report by Oil Change International indicates that the United States government alone provides 5.1 billion dollars in national subsidies to fossil fuel exploration each year – that’s 5.1 billion dollars into seeking out new sources of civilisation-destroying energy sources.

Canada

Likewise, Canada’s expanding oil sector (caused by the growth in dirty tar sands production, known as ‘the biggest industrial project on Earth’) continues to reap the benefits of massive national subsidies.

United Kingdom

The U.K. government spent 300 times more supporting dirty energy overseas than it contributed towards renewable energy projects during its last term.

The 2012-2013 annual report of UK Export Finance, the country’s export credit agency, announced spending on projects such as a 147 million pounds (228 million dollars) guarantee to support oil and gas exploration by Petrobras in Brazil and 15 million pounds (23 million dollars) in guarantees to a loan for a gas power project in the Philippines.

Domestically, the government is prioritising drilling for new oil and gas, which will require huge subsidies. Hailing carbon-emitting gas as a ‘bridge fuel’ towards a cleaner energy system, the government is delaying investment in renewables to push fracking onto a population that vehemently opposes the dash for gas.

Germany

Meanwhile, Germany – the host of the G7 meeting – has been much lauded for its ‘Energiewende’ (‘Energy Revolution’), with a rapidly increasing use of renewable energy compensating for its nuclear phase-out in recent years.

However, German euros still make their way into the dirty energy machine – through sizeable tax exemptions afforded to fossil fuel producers’ exploration activities – allowing such companies to go further and dig deeper to uncover more carbon that needs to stay in the ground.

G7 Must Catch Up

The G7 countries have done the most to cause climate change. According to the Climate Equity Reference Calculator, they are responsible for 70 percent of historical carbon emissions, while hosting only 10 percent of the global population.

A commitment to a phase-out of fossil fuels in eight decades’ time is not a commitment. It is an easy promise for a politician, who probably will not even be in power in the next decade, to make. It is an easy promise for a rich nation, whose citizens are not the most vulnerable, to make.

G7 societies have grown rich by exploiting the human and natural world. They owe an enormous ‘climate debt’ to developing nations – yet they can barely scrape together the money they promised to the developing world via the Green Climate Fund.

Whether it’s an oil spill in Nigeria, a mega-dam in Mozambique or a coal plant in Java, the sources of our publicly-owned dirty energy are always sites of ecological and social devastation.

Access to energy is a right, but it should not come at the cost of other people’s rights – to clean air and drinking water, to land and food sovereignty, and to sustainable societies.

The international movement for climate justice is building, and will keep up pressure on governments to take money out of dirty energy and reinvest it in democratic renewable solutions that benefit everyone.

The global shift towards a just energy transformation has long been under way. Now, it’s snowballing. People from around the world are showing the way and implementing community-owned renewable energy solutions.

There is a hunger for change, despite continued inaction from governments. G7 leaders, take note: you are trailing far behind and have a lot of catching up to do!

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:

By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, Jun 2 2015 (IPS)

The euphoria that spread though the world after the Iran nuclear agreement reached in Lausanne in April this year with the United States, Russia, China, France, United Kingdom and Germany, plus the European Union, is  proving short-lived.

Republicans in the U.S. Congress have made it clear that they will spare no effort to block it.  Hilary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presidential hopeful, is keeping her options open. Whispers are escaping from European chancelleries that the sanctions on Iran will only be lifted in stages. Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani have responded by insisting that they must be lifted “at once”.

Prem Shankar Jha

But the agreement’s most inveterate enemy is Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel. In the week that followed the Lausanne agreement, he warned the American public in three successive speeches that the agreement would “threaten the survival of Israel” and increase the risk of a “horrific war”. This is a brazen attempt to whip up fear and war hysteria on the basis of a spider’s web of misinformation.

Netanyahu is not new to this game. At the U.N. General Assembly in 2012, he unveiled a large cartoon of a bomb and drew a red line across it, just below the neck. This was how close Iran was to making a nuclear bomb, he said. It could get there in a year. Only much later did the world learn that Mossad, Netanyahu’s own intelligence service, had told him that Iran was very far from being able to build a bomb.

Mossad probably knew what a U.S. Congress Research Service (CRS) report revealed two months later:  that although Iran already had enough five percent, or low-enriched,  uranium in August 2012 to build  five to seven bombs, it had not enriched enough of it to the intermediate level of  20 percent to meet the requirement for even one  bomb. The CRS had concluded from this and other evidence that this was because  Iran had made no effort to revive its nuclear weapons programme after stopping it ‘abruptly’ in 2003.“[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is following a two-pronged strategy: first to get the U.S. Congress to insert clauses in the nuclear treaty draft that Iran will be forced to reject, and second to take advantage of the spike in paranoia that will follow to push the West into an attack on Iran”

Another of Netanyahu’s deceptions is that he only wants to punish Iran with sanctions until it gives up trying to acquire not only nuclear weapons but any nuclear technology that could even remotely facilitate this in the future. However, he knows that no government in Iran can agree to this, so what he is really trying to steer the world towards is the alternative – a military attack on Iran.

What is more, because he also knows that destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities will not destroy its capacity to rebuild these in the future, he does not want the attack to end until it has destroyed Iran’s infrastructure (as Israel destroyed southern Lebanon’s in 2006), its industry, its research facilities and its science universities.

He knows that Israel cannot undertake such a vast operation without the United States. But there is one stumbling block – President Barack Obama – who has learned from his recent experience that, to put it mildly, U.S. interests do not always tally with those of its allies in the Middle East.

So Netanyahu is following a two-pronged strategy: first to get the U.S. Congress to insert clauses in the nuclear treaty draft that Iran will be forced to reject, and second to take advantage of  the spike in paranoia that will follow to push the West into an attack on Iran.

He has been joined in this endeavour by another steadfast friend of the United States – Saudi Arabia. At the end of February, Saudi Arabia quietly signed an agreement with Israel that will allow its warplanes to overfly Saudi Arabia on their way to bombing Iran. This has halved the distance they will need to fly. Then, four weeks later, on Mar. 26,  it declared war on the Houthis in Yemen, whom it has been relentlessly portraying as a tiny minority bent upon taking Yemen over through sheer terror, with the backing of  Iran.

This is a substantial oversimplification, and therefore distortion, of a complicated relationship.

Iran may well be helping the Houthis, but not because they are Shias.  The Houthis, who make up 30 percent of Yemen’s population, are Zaidis, a very different branch of Shi’a-ism than the one practised in Iran, Pakistan and India. They inhabit a region that stretches across Saada, the northernmost district of Yemen, and three adjoining principalities, Jizan, Najran and Asir, that Saudi Arabia annexed in 1934.

The internecine wars that Yemeni Houthis have fought since the 1960s have not been sectarian, or even against the Saudis specifically, but in quest of independence and, more recently, a federal state. This is a goal that several other tribes share.  

The timing of Saudi Arabia’s attack, four weeks after its overflight agreement with Israel, and its incessant portrayal of the Houthis as proxies of Iran, hints at a deeper understanding between it and Israel. The Houthis’ attacked Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, in September last year. So why did Saudi Arabia wait until March this year before sending its bombers in?

Iran has kept out of the conflict in Yemen so far, but the manifestly one-sided resolution passed by the U.N. Security Council and the immediate resignation of the U.N. special envoy for Yemen, Jamal Benomar, who had been struggling to bring about a non-sectarian resolution of the conflict in Yemen and been boycotted by the country’s president Abed Rabo Mansour Hadi for his pains, cannot have failed to raise misgivings in Tehran.

Iraqi President Haydar Abadi’s sharp criticism of the Saudi attack in Washington on the same day reflects his awareness of how these developments are darkening the prospect for Iran’s rehabilitation, and therefore Iraq’s future.

To stop this drift Obama needs to tell his people precisely how far, under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel’s interests have diverged from those of the United States, and how single-mindedly Israel has used its special relationship with the United States to push it into actions that have imperilled its own security in the Middle East.

Instead of dwelling on how the nuclear treaty will make it practically impossible for Iran to clandestinely enrich uranium or produce plutonium, he needs to remind Americans of what Netanyahu has been carefully neglecting to mention: that a nuclear device is not a bomb, and that to convert it into one Iran will need not only to master the physics of bomb-making and reduce its weight to what a missile can carry, but conduct at least one test explosion to make sure the bomb works. That will make escaping detection pretty well impossible.

Finally, the White House needs to remind Americans that Iranians also know the price they will pay if they are caught trying to build a bomb after signing the agreement. Not only will this bring back all and more of the sanctions they are under,  but it will vindicate Netanyahu’s apocalyptic predictions and make a pre-emptive military strike virtually unavoidable.

Should a  military strike, whether deserved or undeserved,  destroy Iran’s economy, it will add tens of thousands of Shi’a Jihadis to the Sunni Jihadis already spawned in Libya, Somalia, Chechnya and  the other failed states and regions of the world. The security that Netanyahu claims it will bring will turn out to be a chimera.

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:

By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, May 10 2015 (IPS)

President Barack Obama’s Nowroz greeting to the Iranian people earlier this year was the first clear indication to the world that the United States and Iran were very close to agreement on the contents of the nuclear agreement they had been working towards for the previous 16 months.

In contrast to two earlier messages which were barely veiled exhortations to Iranians to stand up to their obscurantist leaders, Obama urged “the peoples and the leaders of Iran” to avail themselves of “the best opportunity in decades to pursue a different relationship between our countries.”

Prem Shankar Jha

This moment, he warned, “may not come again soon (for) there are people in both our countries and beyond, who oppose a diplomatic solution.”

Barely a fortnight later that deal was done. Iran had agreed to a more than two-thirds reduction in the number of centrifuges it would keep, although a question mark still hung over the timing of the lifting of sanctions against it. The agreement came in the teeth of opposition from hardliners in both Iran and the United States.

Looking back at Obama’s unprecedented overtures to Iran, his direct phone call to President Hassan Rouhani – the first of its kind in 30 years – and his letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in November last year, it is clear in retrospect that they were products of  a rare meeting of minds between him and  Rouhani and their foreign ministers John Kerry and Muhammad Jawad Zarif that may have occurred as early as  their first meetings in September 2013.

The opposition to the deal within the United States proved a far harder obstacle for Obama to surmount. The reason is the dogged and increasingly naked opposition of Israel and the immense influence of the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) on U.S. policymakers and public opinion.

Both of these were laid bare came when the Republican party created constitutional history by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address  a joint session of Congress  without informing the White House, listened raptly to his diatribe against Obama, and sent a deliberately insulting letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in a bid to scuttle the talks.

Obama has ploughed on in the teeth of this formidable, highly personalised, attack on him  because he has learnt from the bitter experience of the past four years what Harvard professors John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt had exposed in their path-breaking  book, ‘The Israel lobby and American Foreign Policy’ in 2006.“Quietly, and utterly alone, Obama decided to reverse the drift, return to diplomacy as the first weapon for increasing national security and returning force to where it had belonged in the previous three centuries, as a weapon of last resort”

This was the utter disregard for America’s national interest and security with which Israel had been manipulating American public opinion, the U.S. Congress and successive U.S. administrations, in pursuit of its own security, since the end of the Cold War.

By the end of 2012, two years into the so-called “Arab Spring”, Obama had also discovered how cynically Turkey and the Wahhabi-Sunni sheikhdoms had manipulated the United States into joining a sectarian vendetta against Syria, and created and armed a Jihadi army whose ultimate target was the West itself.

Nine months later, he found out how Israel had abused the trust the United States reposed in it, and come within a hairsbreadth of pushing it into an attack on Syria that was even less justifiable than then U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.  And then the murderous eruption of the Islamic State (ISIS) showed him that the Jihadis were out of control.

Somewhere along this trail of betrayal and disillusionment, Obama experienced the political equivalent of an epiphany.

Twelve years of a U.S. national security strategy that relied on the pre-emptive use of force had  yielded war without end, a string of strategic defeats, a  mauled and traumatised army, mounting international debt and a collapsing hegemony reflected in the impunity with which the so-called friends of the United States were using it to serve their ends.

Quietly, and utterly alone, Obama decided to reverse the drift, return to diplomacy as the first weapon for increasing national security and returning force to where it had belonged in the previous three centuries, as a weapon of last resort. His meeting and discussions with Rouhani and Iranian foreign minister Zarif gave him the opportunity to begin this epic change of direction.

Obama faced his first moment of truth on Nov. 28, 2012 when a Jabhat al Nusra unit north of Aleppo brought down a Syrian army helicopter with a Russian man-portable surface-to-air missile (SAM).

The White House tried to  pretend that that the missile was from a captured Syrian air base, but by then U.S. intelligence agencies were fed up with its suppression and distortion of their intelligence and  leaked it to the Washington Post that 40 SAM missile batteries with launchers, along with hundreds of tonnes of other heavy weapons had been bought from Libya, paid for by Qatar, and transported to the rebels in Syria  by Turkey through a ‘rat line’ that the CIA had helped it to establish, to funnel arms and mercenaries into Syria.

A day that Obama had been dreading had finally arrived: heavy weapons that the United States and the European Union had expressly proscribed, because they could bring down civilian aircraft anywhere in the world, had finally reached Al Qaeda’s hands

But when Obama promptly banned the Jabhat Al Nusra, he got his second shock. At the next ‘Friends of Syria’ meeting in Marrakesh three weeks later, not only the   ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels that the United States had grouped under a newly-formed Syrian Military Council three months earlier, but all of its Sunni Muslim allies condemned the ban, while Britain and France remained silent.

Obama’s third, and worst, moment of truth came nine months later when a relentless campaign by  his closest ‘allies‘, Turkey and Israel, brought him to the verge of launching an all-out aerial attack  on Syria in September 2013 to punish it for “using gas on rebels and civilians in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus.”

Obama learned that Syria had done no such thing only two days before the attack was to commence, when the British informed him that soil samples collected from the site of the Ghouta attack and analysed at their CBW research laboratories at Porton Down, had shown that the sarin gas used in the attack could not possibly have been prepared by the Syrian army.

This was because the British had the complete list of suppliers from which Syria had received its precursor chemicals and these did not match the chemicals used in the sarin gas found in the Ghouta.

Had he gone through with the attack, it would have made Obama ten times worse than George Bush in history’s eyes.

Hindsight allows us to reconstruct how the conviction that Syria was using chemical weapons was implanted into policy-makers in the United States and the European Union.

On Sep. 17, 2012, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the highly-reputed German magazine Der Speigel, had learned, “quoting several eyewitnesses”, that Syria had tested delivery systems for chemical warheads   at a chemical weapons research centre near Aleppo in August, and that the tests had been overseen by Iranian experts.

Tanks and aircraft, Der Speigel reported, had fired “five or six empty shells capable of delivering poison gas.”

Since neither Der Speigel nor any other Western newspaper had, or still has, resident correspondents in Syria, it could only have obtained this report second or third-hand through a local stringer. This, and the wealth of detail in the report, suggests that the story of a test firing, while not necessarily untrue, was a plant by an intelligence agency. It therefore had to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

One person who not only chose to believe it instantly, but also to act on it was Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On Dec. 3, 2012, Haaretz reported that he had sent emissaries to Amman twice, in October and November, to request Jordan’s permission to overfly its territory to bomb Syria’s chemical weapons facilities.

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.

* The second part of this two-part analysis can be accessed here.

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Apr 27 2015 (IPS)

The results of a survey of what 3,500 young people between the ages of 18 and 24 – in all Arab countries except Syria – feel about the current situation in the Middle East and North Africa have just been released.

The report of the survey, which was carried out by international polling firm Penn Schoen Berland (PBS), is not a minority report given that 60 percent of the population of the Arab population is under the age of 25, which means 200 million people. Well, the outcome of the survey is that the large majority of them have no trust in democracy.

Roberto Savio

The word democracy does not exist in Arabic, being a concept totally alien to the era in which Muhammad created Islam. However, it is worth noting that the concept of democracy as it is known today is also relatively recent in the West, and we have to wait from its origins in the Greek era for it to make a comeback at the time of the French Revolution.

It became an accepted value just after the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Soviet, Nazi and Japanese regimes.

As a matter of fact, it is still not a reality in large parts of Asia (just think of China and North Korea) and Africa.

Then we have governments, as in Hungary where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is openly preaching a style of governance à la Russian President Vladimir Putin, followed by several of his esteemers, including the National Front party in France, and the Northern League in Italy. But few have such a negative view of democracy as young Arabs.After the Arab Spring revolutions in 2012, a massive 72 percent of young Arabs believed that the Arab world had improved. The figure dropped to 70 percent in 2013, then 54 percent in 2014, and now it stands at just 38 percent

After the Arab Spring revolutions in 2012, a massive 72 percent of young Arabs believed that the Arab world had improved. The figure dropped to 70 percent in 2013, then 54 percent in 2014, and now it stands at just 38 percent.

According to the survey, 39 percent of young Arabs agreed with the statement “democracy will never work in the region”, 36 percent thought it would work, while the remaining 25 percent expressed many doubts.

It is clear that the Arab Spring has been betrayed by the return of the army to power as in Egypt, or by the clinging of the old guard to power regardless of the costs, like Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

If you add to this the fact that 41 percent of young Arabs are unemployed (out of a total unemployment figure of 25 percent), and of those 31 percent have completed higher education and 17 percent have graduated from university, it is not difficult to understand that frustration and pessimism are running high among Arab youth.

It also contributes to explaining why so many young people feel attracted to the Islamic State (ISIS) which wants to topple all Arab governments, defined as corrupt and allied to the decadent West, and create a Caliphate as in Muhammad’s times, where wealth will be distributed among all, the dignity of Islam will be enhanced, and a world of purity and vision will substitute the materialistic one of today.

This is why ISIS is attracting youth from all over. Besides, according to experts, for the terrorist to have a geographical space and run it  as a state, where hospitals and schools function and there is a daily life to prove that the dream is possible, represents a great difference with previous terrorist movements like Al-Qaeda, which could only destroy, not really build.

But the survey also reveals something extremely important. To the question “which is the biggest obstacle for the Arab world?”, 37 percent indicated the expansion of ISIS and 32 percent the threat of terrorism. The problem of unemployment was mentioned by 29 percent and that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 23 percent.

It is worth noting that the threat of a nuclear Iran was mentioned by only 8 percent (contrary to the declarations of Arab governments), while 17 percent consider that the real problem is the lack of political leaders, while only 15 percent denounce the lack of democracy.

It is important to note that no interviews were carried out in Iran, which is not an Arab country but is a Muslim country. However Iranian Muslims are Shiites and not Sunnis, as in all Arab countries, except for Iraq and Bahrein, and perhaps Yemen, where Shiites are a majority. Of the world’s total Islamic population of 1.6 billion people, Shiites make up only 10 percent.

It is within Sunnite Islam that a dramatic conflict is going on, where Wahabism, a Sunni school born in Saudi Arabia and the official religion of the Saudi reigning house, has now split into those who want to return to the purity of the early times and those are considered “petrowahabists” because they have been corrupted by the wealth created by petrol (they are also called sheikh wahabists because they accept government by sheikhs).

Saudi Arabia has been spending an average of 3 billion dollars a year to promote Wahabism. It has built over 1,500 mosques throughout the world, where radical preachers have been asking the faithful to go back to the real and uncorrupted Islam.

It was with Osama Bin Laden that the Wahabist movement escaped from the control of Saudi Arabia, very much like the radical Hamas movement, originally supported by Israel to weaken the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Yasser Arafat, turned against the Israeli state. It is not possible to ride radicalism.

The survey also reveals that young Sunnis see ISIS and terrorism as their main threat, but we are talking here of a poll which should represent 200 million people between the ages of 18 and 25. Even if just one percent of them were to succumb to the call of the jihad, we are talking of a potential two million people … and this is now being felt acutely.

The polarisation inside Sunni society (Shiites are not part of that – there are no Shiite terrorists) is felt as the most important problem for the future.

In Europe and the United States, this should be the clearest of examples that ISIS and terrorism are first and foremost an internal problem of Islam and that to intervene in that problem will only unify the Arab world against the invader. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

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:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 19 2015 (IPS)

For a long time, citizens of the United States have firmly believed that their country has an exceptional destiny, and continue to do so today even though their political system has become totally dysfunctional.

The three pillars of U.S. democracy – legislative, executive and judicial – are no longer on speaking terms,  so dialogue or the possibility of bipartisan policy has virtually disappeared.

In this context, to please his opponents, and with a view to the U.S. presidential elections in 2016, President Barack Obama is increasingly being pushed to act as strong guy.

Roberto Savio

This is the only reasonable explanation on why he has suddenly declared Venezuela a security threat to the United States, just months after starting the process of normalisation of relations with Cuba, a long-time U.S. enemy in Latin America and ally of Venezuela.

The country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, is extremely happy because his denunciations of a U.S. plot with Venezuela’s opposition to have him removed have now been officially justified – by no less than the United States itself. Even the New York Times, in an editorial on Mar. 12, wondered about the wisdom of such move.

The problem is that, behind Obama’s back, U.S. Republican senators are doing unprecedented things, like writing an admonitory letter to the Supreme Guardian of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, indicating that any nuclear agreement made with Obama would last only as long as he remained in office.

That letter must have made Khamenei and Iran’s hardliners very happy, because they have always said that the United States cannot be trusted, and that the ongoing nuclear negotiations make no sense."This escalation [over Ukraine] has already taken a direction that clear heads should exam with a long-term perspective. Are the members of NATO – an institution that needs conflict to justify its new life now that the Soviet Union no longer exists – ready to enter a war, just to keep making the point? "

We are now facing an extension of the concept of the exceptional destiny of the United States, in which its foreign policy can also be exceptional, not subject to logic and rules.

Across the Atlantic, what is certainly exceptional is that while Europe has practically always followed U.S. foreign policy, even when it is against its interests as is the case of the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the United Kingdom – which has a special relationship with the United States – is now indulging in some divergent action.

Through its Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, the United Kingdom has announced that it intends to join the Chinese initiative for the creation of an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), in which Beijing is investing 50 billion dollars. This has raised the ire of the United States because the AIIB is seen as an alternative to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, in which the United States (and Japan) have powerful interests.

Shortly after Cameron’s move, France, Germany and Italy followed, while Australia will also join and South Korea will have to do so. This will leave the United States isolated, opening up a new “exceptional” dimension – economic might (China) is more attractive than military might (United States).

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has responded to U.S. irritation by declaring that the United Kingdom is joining the AIIB because “we think that it’s in the UK’s national interest”.

Of course, Cameron is playing up to his financial constituency, which is very aware of its interest, even when it does not coincide with U.S. interest. After all, China’s share of global manufacturing output, which was three percent in 1990, had risen to nearly 25 percent by 2014.

Even worse is that Cameron has also decided to cut spending on defence and while the U.K. government currently meets the two percent of GDP target that the United States expects all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to pay into the alliance, it has only committed itself to continuing that until the end of the current Parliament in May.

For the U.S. administration, this could be taken as a sign of weakness by Russian President Vladimir Putin who, it argues, should be put under growing pressure and shown that the confrontation over Ukraine will escalate until he backs down.

This escalation has already taken a direction that clear heads should exam with a long-term perspective. Are the members of NATO – an institution that needs conflict to justify its new life now that the Soviet Union no longer exists – ready to enter a war, just to keep making the point?

The signals are those that precede a war.

U.K. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has declared that Russia is “as great a threat to Europe as ‘Islamic States’.” Troops are amassing in the Baltic States to serve as a deterrent for a possible Russian invasion. The U.S. Republican Congress is overtly asking for the supply of massive and heavy weapons to the Ukrainian army.  Hundreds of U.S. troops have been assigned to Ukraine to bolster the Kiev regime against Russian-backed rebels in the east. The United Kingdom is sending 75 military advisers.

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, the Polish government is supporting the creation and training of militias, and plans to provide military training to any of the many Poles who are increasingly concerned that “the great Russian behemoth will not be sated with Ukraine and will reach out once again into the West.” The same is happening in the Baltic States, which all have a sizable Russian presence and think Putin could invade them at any moment.

Media everywhere have engaged in a frenzy of personal vilification of Putin and in the popular pastime of using Putin and Ukraine to justify military expansionism – to advocate tit for tat what Putin is doing.

It is difficult to look to Putin with sympathy, but this confrontation has again pushed the Russian people behind its leader, and at an unprecedented level that now stands at around 80 percent.

The Guardian has reported veteran Russian leftist Boris Kagarlitsky as commenting that most Russians want Putin to take a tougher stand against the West “not because of patriotic propaganda, but their experience of the past 25 years”, and it would be a mistake to underestimate the role that humiliation can play in history.

It is commonly accepted that Hitler emerged from the frustrations of the German people after the heavy penalties that they had to pay the victors after the First World War. The same sense of humiliation made the war of Slobodan Milosevic against NATO popular with the Serbian population.

It is the humiliation of the Arabs divided among the winners of the First World War which is at the roots of the Caliphate, or the Islamic State, which claims that Arabs are finally going to be given back their dignity and identity.

And it is also humiliation over the imposition of austerity which is now creating a strong anti-German sentiment in Greece, to which Germans respond with a sense of righteous indignation (52 percent of Germans now want Greece to leave the Euro).

Has anyone considered who is going to take over Russia if Putin goes away? Certainly not those who are now in the opposition. Has anyone considered what it would mean to take on responsibility for a very weak state like Ukraine?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has now approved a 17.5 billion dollar relief fund for Ukraine but warned that the country’s rescue “is subject to exceptional risks, especially those arising from the conflict in the East.”

In fact Ukraine needs to plug a hole of at least 40 billion dollars in the immediate term, and economists all agree that the country does not have a viable economy. It will require many years of consistent help to reach some economic equilibrium – if there is no war.

Europe is close to recession and apparently unable even to solve the problems of Greece, but goes headlong into supporting Kiev against Russian-backed rebels. NATO can support Ukrainian soldiers up to their last man, but it is impossible that they will beat Russia. Will the West then intervene or back off and lose face, after many deaths and much waste and destruction?

A widespread view now is that sanctions should starve Russia, which will have lost its revenues from oil. What if Putin does not back down, sustained by the Russian people? Are Europeans ready to go to war to please the Republican Congress in the United States? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

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:

Indian coal workers. India announced in November last year that it plans to double coal production to a whopping 1 billion tonnes per annum before the end of this decade, a feat that is going to be highly improbable to pull off. Photo credit: Jaipal Singh/EPA

By Chaitanya Kumar
NEW DELHI, Mar 18 2015 (IPS)

India’s Government under Narendra Modi is in overdrive mode to please businesses and investments in the country. The much aggrandised ‘Make in India’ campaign launched in September 2014 is a clarion call for spurring investments into manufacturing and services in India and all eyes have turned to the power sector which is expected to undergo dramatic shifts.

Piyush Goyal, India’s power minister, announced in November last year that he plans to double coal production in India to a whopping 1 billion tonnes per annum before the end of this decade, a feat that is going to be highly improbable to pull off.

In an effort to enhance production, the Indian government has started a process of auctioning coal blocks, which were de-allocated by the country’s Supreme Court as a result of the coal scam that hit the country in 2012 (and resulted in notional losses of 30 billion dollars to India’s exchequer).

With domestic miners already having shown an aggressive interest in bidding at the first auction last month, a total of 204 coal blocks are set to be auctioned over the next 12 months. The first 32 auctioned blocks have yielded more than 35 billion dollars, exceeding the nominal losses from the coal scam.“[Indian] Prime Minister Modi has made it clear that he does not intend to give into … pressure [to take further action on climate change and rethink its energy options] from any nation but he also cannot afford the ignominy of being singled out as a country that is blocking progressive climate action in Paris”

Coupled with the auctions is the disinvestment of Coal India Limited (CIL), the world’s largest coal mining company. A 10 percent stake sale in early February resulted in a mixed bag response. Another state owned firm, LIC India, lapped up 50 percent of the stocks alongside a couple of international investment funds and a few Indian firms. The move generated 3.6 billion dollars in revenues for the government.

The auctions and the disinvestment of CIL can provide short-term reprieve to India’s energy and fiscal deficit woes, but there are four reasons why investors and the government should be really wary of investing in coal for the long run (10-15 years). The following are the first two.

Unburnable carbon

The reality that a large proportion of coal and other fossil fuels should be left in the ground is rapidly becoming clear to big business and governments around the world. By signing on to a global agreement that pledges to limit the rise in the earth’s surface temperature to 2 degrees Celsius, India along with other major carbon emitters have effectively signalled the imminent decline in the use of fossil fuels in order to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.

To achieve this much needed and agreed upon limit on temperature rise, 82 percent of known global coal reserves should remain unextracted. This roughly translates into 66 percent of known coal reserves in India and China that should be left in the ground, according to a study published in the reputed journal Nature.

These stranded assets, or unburnable carbon, is what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body that informs climate policy around the world, also highlighted in its recent report on climate change mitigation.

This new reality is unravelling quicker than expected and gaining credence from the most unlikely of places. Even the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has faced consistent criticism in underplaying the role of renewable energy in favour of nuclear and fossil fuels, stated recently that “no more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2 degrees C goal”.

IEA’s Chief Economist Fatih Birol warned that “we need to change our way of consuming energy within the next three or four years,” because, otherwise, “in 2017, all of the emissions that allow us to stay under 2°C will be locked in.”

Coal is fast losing the rug under its feet. Nick Nuttall, the spokesman for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said of divestment: “We support divestment as it sends a signal to companies, especially coal companies, that the age of ‘burn what you like, when you like’ cannot continue.

This proposition will be contested fiercely by the Indian government as much as by any fossil fuel company, but as nations – under pressure – prepare to deliver a strong global climate agreement at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris in December, long-term investments in coal in this rapidly growing economy will stand on very thin ice.

Even U.S. President Barack Obama’s statements during his recent visit to India suggest diplomatic pressure on India to take further action on climate change and rethink its energy options for the immediate future.

Prime Minister Modi has made it clear that he does not intend to give into such pressure from any nation but he also cannot afford the ignominy of being singled out as a country that is blocking progressive climate action in Paris.

Thermal coal reaches retirement age – it’s time for renewable energy

A new report from Goldman Sachs starts with this gem of a sentence:  “Just as a worker celebrating their 65th birthday can settle into a more sedate lifestyle while they look back on past achievements, we argue that thermal coal has reached its retirement age.”

The latest data reveal that coal consumption is declining in many parts of the world, including across Europe as a whole, the United States and now, surprisingly, even China registered a small but historic decline in its coal consumption last year. The retirement of dirty coal plants in developed economies is set to cement this trend in the coming few years.

The most recent blow comes from the world’s largest sovereign fund, as Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), worth 850 billion dollars, announced that it had dumped 40 major coal mining companies from its portfolio on environmental and climate grounds.

Besides the climate concern, economics is increasingly in favour of alternative sources of energy, such as wind and solar.

In 2014, we saw a precipitous drop in the cost of solar energy in India. Bidding prices came down as low as 6.5 rupees a unit, a 61 percent drop over the last three years, compared with the average unit price of conventional energy like coal at around 5.5 rupees a unit.

Coupled with dramatic drops in costs of solar equipment such as panels, alongside operational, capital and maintenance costs, the path is clearly open for solar to achieve grid parity by 2017.

Meanwhile, onshore wind has in fact become the cheapest way to generate electricity in the world, laying the claims of cheap coal to rest. A report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental research organisation, has laid bare the facts.

According to the report, the levelised cost of energy or LCOE (that is, all costs considered except externalities like subsidies or environmental impacts) for solar and wind already makes them highly competitive with fossil fuel-based electricity.

The oft cited issues of high capital costs and intermittency notwithstanding, prices of small-scale residential rooftop solar systems also dropped in the range of 40-65 percent between 2008 and 2014 in Europe and the United States.

What does this mean for coal in India? If the above numbers are any measure of the future of the energy sector, heavy investments in coal beyond this decade would be economic suicide.

Coal plants once established have a lifetime of at least 30 years and given the market volatility for coal, owing to rising costs of mining and uncertain fuel supply agreements, greater prices for end consumers is inevitable.

Many pundits in India appreciate this reality and the government has given the right indicators on its pursuit of renewable energy. With a target of 165 GW, India has set an ambitious goal of adding 60 percent to its total current capacity from just solar and wind by 2022.

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:

By Hazel Henderson
ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida, May 23 2014 (IPS)

Japanese Buddhist and president of Soka Gakkai International (SGI) Daisaku Ikeda’s Peace Proposal 2014 elevated my focus from the daily news to my longer term concerns for more peaceful, equitable and sustainable human societies to assure our common future. These broader concerns are now shared by millions of humans who have transcended purely personal, local and nationalistic goals and become prototypical global citizens.

Hazel Henderson

Breakdowns in our current institutions now cause daily crises and are, as always, driving new breakthroughs as humans seek new solutions.  Stress has always been a tool of evolution – as recorded in the 3.8 billion years of life forms on our home planet.

Today’s crises are all consequences of our former myopic technological and social innovations addressing short-term problems without anticipating their system-wide longer-term effects.  This is how I became concerned about how human burning of fossil fuels and digging in the Earth for our energy which led me to join the World Future Society in the 1960s.  I was then leading an effort to clean New York City’s polluted air, living close by a huge coal-burning power plant pumping smoke and soot into the play park where I and other mothers watched our infants.

Fast forward to 2014, and I’m still a card-carrying futurist and on the Planning Committee of the Millennium Project which tracks our human family’s 15 Global Challenges.  Our latest State of the Future Report 2014 tracks where we are progressing and where we are falling short in addressing these challenges: sustainable development and climate change; water; population and resources; democratisation; long-term policy making; globalisation of information technology; rich-poor gap; health; decision-making capacities; conflict resolution; improving the status of women; transnational organised crime; energy; science and technology, and global ethics.  This Millennium Project has participants from academia, government, civic society and businesses in fifty countries.

“Political will in many countries is still hostage to special interests, lobbying and money from these legacy sectors and their perverse subsidies”
At the same time, Daisaku Ikeda, also my esteemed co-author of Planetary Citizenship, leader of SGI’s 12 million members, outlines his annual Peace Proposal for 2014, as he has done since 1983. Ikeda, born in 1928, is one of the world’s most distinguished global citizens.

Ikeda’s Peace Proposal 2014 – Value Creation for Global Change: Building Resilient and Sustainable Societies – engages  United Nation issues: moving beyond the 2000 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Agenda of 191 countries in Rio+20 in Brazil in 2012, as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  These now embrace the transition from fossil and nuclear energy to the more decentralised, cleaner, greener, knowledge-richer, green economies now under way.  I came to similar conclusions in my Mapping the Global Transition to the Solar Age (2014). Retiring human uses of fossil fuels, uranium and nuclear power plants and weapons is now feasible with current technologies as outlined in many reports covered in the 2014 Green Transition Scoreboard®.

Political will in many countries is still hostage to special interests, lobbying and money from these legacy sectors and their perverse subsidies. Civic movements worldwide are pressuring pension funds and university endowments to divest from fossilised sectors and shift to cleaner, greener, more sustainable investments.  Veteran financial experts, including Jeremy Grantham and Robert A. G. Monks, now join these critics, along with asset managers offering “fossil-free” portfolios which often outperform dirtier assets. As nuclear power plants are being decommissioned in the United States and Europe due to cheaper wind, solar and efficiency alternatives, many in Asia are still planned, even in China which now leads the world in solar energy.

Huge conceptual breakthroughs are needed to shift old paradigms and theory-induced blindness. One such is the rapidly developing proposal “Iran Goes Solar” by the Planck Foundation for Iran to end run the entire political debate about its right to develop civilian nuclear power. This could bypass all sanctions, Israel’s concerns about another nuclear weapons state in the Middle East and “electrify” the upcoming United Nation Conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

While Ikeda rightly calls for a “non-use” agreement under NPT, the Planck Foundation’s plan is a paradigm shifter. Iran could accelerate its transition from both nuclear and fossil fuels by immediately acquiring blocks of shares in China’s solar energy companies and then purchasing as many of their solar panels as possible. This is already a much cheaper alternative to building nuclear reactors or fossil fuel power plants.

Iran’s bountiful oil reserves would stay underground as valuable feedstocks for industrial use rather than burning them, a plan I proposed in the NBC-TV Today Show in 1965!  Details of the Planck “Iran Goes Solar” plan also call for expanding rail services on the Silk Road to China, greening desert lands with salt-loving plants as in their DesertCorp plan for expanding seawater-based agriculture in many desert regions.

Today’s breakdowns are indeed producing the new systemic plans and breakthroughs long-proposed by futurists and planetary citizens. All these plans for our common future and green economies are covered by Ethical Markets Media(United States and Brazil), but often overlooked in mainstream media. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Hazel Henderson is the president of Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil) and creator of the Green Transition Scoreboard®.

Excerpt:

By Daisaku Ikeda
TOKYO, Mar 29 2014 (IPS)

This past February, the Second Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons was held in Nayarit, Mexico, as a follow-up to the first such conference held last year in Oslo, Norway. The conclusion reached by this conference, on the basis of scientific research, was that “no State or international organisation has the capacity to address or provide the short and long term humanitarian assistance and protection needed in case of a nuclear weapon explosion.”

As this makes clear, almost 70 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humanity remains defenceless in the face of the catastrophic effects that any use of nuclear weapons would inevitably produce.

Since May 2012, a succession of four joint statements warning of the dire humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons have been issued. These statements have drawn support from a growing number of states; the Nayarit conference was attended by the representatives of 146 countries.

Dr. Daisaku Ikeda. Credit: Seikyo Shimbun.

In summing up the outcome of the conference, the Chair stressed the need for a legal framework outlawing these weapons, whose very existence is contrary to human dignity, stating that the time has come to initiate a diplomatic process to realise this goal. It is highly significant that three-quarters of the member states of the United Nations have expressed their shared desire for a world without nuclear weapons in this way.

Regrettably, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the nuclear-weapon states recognised under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), did not attend this meeting. What is needed most at this juncture is to find a common language shared by the countries signing these joint statements and the nuclear-weapon states.

The movement to focus on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons has emerged against the backdrop of grassroots efforts by global civil society calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Crucially, this has included the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who have long raised their voices in the cry that no one must ever again experience the horror of nuclear war.

On the other hand, the experience of being in possession of the “nuclear button” that would launch a devastating strike has steadily impressed on several generations of political leaders in the nuclear-weapon states the reality that nuclear weapons are unlike other armaments and cannot be considered militarily useful weapons. This has served as a restraint against their use.

In this sense, the two sides share a sentiment that can bridge the gulf between them – the desire never to witness or experience the catastrophic humanitarian effects of nuclear weapons. This can serve as the basis for a common language with which to explore the path towards a world without nuclear weapons.

I have repeatedly called for a nuclear abolition summit to be held in Hiroshima and Nagasaki next year in 2015, the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of those cities. I hope that representatives of the nuclear-weapon states, the countries that have signed the Joint Statement on the Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons, as well as representatives of global civil society and, above all, youthful citizens from throughout the world, will gather in a world youth summit for nuclear abolition to adopt a declaration affirming their commitment to end dependence on nuclear weapons and bring the era of nuclear weapons to a close.

In this connection, I would like to offer some concrete proposals.

The first is for a nuclear weapons non-use agreement. One means of achieving this would be to place the catastrophic humanitarian effects of nuclear weapons use at the centre of the deliberations for the 2015 NPT Review Conference. Such an agreement would advance the implementation of Article VI of the NPT, under which the nuclear-weapon states have committed to pursuing nuclear disarmament in good faith.

Regions such as Northeast Asia and the Middle East, which are not currently covered by nuclear-weapon-free zones, could take advantage of a non-use agreement to declare themselves “nuclear weapon non-use zones,” as a preliminary step to becoming nuclear-weapon-free. It is my strong hope that Japan – which signed the most recent iteration of the joint statement on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons even while remaining under the nuclear umbrella of the United States – will reawaken to its responsibility as a country that has experienced atomic weapons attack. Japan should play a leading role in the establishment of such a non-use agreement and non-use zones.

In parallel with such efforts within the existing NPT regime, I would also call upon the international community to fully utilise the process now developing around the successive joint statements to broadly enlist international public opinion and catalyse negotiations for the complete prohibition of nuclear weapons.

This could take the form of a treaty expressing the commitment, made in light of the humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, to the future relinquishment of reliance on these weapons as a means of achieving security, coupled with separate protocols defining concrete prohibition and verification regimes. Such an approach would mean that even if the entry into force of the separate protocols took time, the treaty would express the clear will of the international community that nuclear weapons have no place in our world.

This coming April 11-12, the Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament Initiative will convene in Hiroshima, attended by the foreign ministers of 12 states. From April 28, the NPT Review Conference preparatory committee will meet in New York. These are opportunities for global civil society to arouse international public opinion and to accelerate progress towards the elimination of nuclear weapons.

The work of building a world without nuclear weapons signifies more than just the elimination of these horrific weapons. Rather, it is a process by which the people themselves, through their own efforts, take on the challenge of realising a new era of peace and creative coexistence. This is the necessary precondition for a sustainable global society, a world in which all people – above all, the members of future generations – can live in the full enjoyment of their inherent dignity as human beings.

Excerpt:

A protest against nuclear energy in Tokyo. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS.

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Feb 7 2014 (IPS)

Tokyo, one of the largest and most energy-guzzling cities in the world, is set to hold elections for a new governor Feb. 9. Analysts say it could prove crucial in stopping the Japanese government from restarting some nuclear reactors this year.

It could also mean a big push for renewable energy.

Professor Yurika Ayukawa, a climate change expert at the Chiba University of Commerce, told IPS, “Only political leadership will bring an end to dangerous nuclear power in Japan. That is why a strong showing by the more popular anti-nuclear candidate in the race is vital this month.”“The painful irony is that Japan is already a world leader in innovative carbon-free technology that can replace nuclear energy.” -- climate change expert Professor Yurika Ayukawa

“The painful irony is that Japan is already a world leader in innovative carbon-free technology that can replace nuclear energy,” she said.

The latest face of Japan’s anti-nuclear movement is 76-year-old gubernatorial election candidate Morihiro Hosokawa, a former prime minister who in 1993 broke the long political hold of the powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

Hosokawa entered the race only in January but his pledge to ban nuclear power and push renewable energy as a replacement taps into public anguish over the Fukushima nuclear accident Mar. 11, 2011 following a massive earthquake and tsunami.

“If I am elected I will adopt a zero nuclear policy. The message to the world is Japan will replace dangerous nuclear power with renewable energy,” Hosokawa told the press.

Up against him is Yoichi Masuzoe, who has the support of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of the LDP. The latter is now pushing nuclear power as a viable energy option for the Japanese economy, which is the third-largest in the world.

The industrial sector accounts for 43 percent of the nearly 860 billion kilowatt national energy consumption recorded in 2011. The transport sector, at 24 percent, is the second-biggest consumer.

Despite continuing radiation contamination in the Fukushima area and the surrounding sea, Abe argues that nuclear power is a must and cites better safety rules for reactors as the way to go.

LDP has long backed this lucrative power source and enacted policy to extend large subsidies to utility companies to construct expensive nuclear plants that supplied almost 30 percent of national energy until the Fukushima accident.

The Fukushima accident has nevertheless prodded breakthrough measures by the government to support renewable energy as it grapples with the bitter reality of public distrust and a hefty rise in expenditure on the import of fossil fuel to cope with the loss of nuclear energy.

A key departure from the traditional energy policy that has been pro-nuclear is the allocation of state funds coupled with much needed deregulation measures to support the expansion of low-carbon technology – mostly solar, wind and biomass – enacted during the past two years.

The 2012 national energy policy, for example, has set new targets for renewables from the current 11 percent to 35 percent by 2030. Over 700 billion dollars has been pledged to achieve the new target.

A notable step in April last year was the newly established feed-in-tariff system that is aimed at prying open the protected and lucrative utility market by accelerating private investment in renewable energy industries.

Under this system, a state-supported tariff system extends premium prices to renewable power sold by private companies to mainstream utility companies.

Taking prompt advantage of the new system is Solar Sharing Association, a private company that provides technology to farmers to install solar panels on their land and to sell the excess power generated through this investment.

“The concept of our company is to increase solar power output in the country and decrease dependence on nuclear energy. We target farmers who want to increase their income,” explained its spokesperson Mayumi Yamada.

The company has over a hundred members. Kenta Hiaasa, a farmer who installed solar panels on his land last July after investing 8,000 dollars, told IPS that his monthly income from the venture is hitting 1,500 dollars.

Other important developments recorded in this sector are an increase in wind power. This move is targeting the now barren tsunami-hit northeastern coasts of the main island and Hokkaido.

Hokkaido Power Company has pledged to buy 390 million kilowatts of wind energy, or the equivalent of energy produced in three nuclear reactors, from private companies during the next 10 years.

The project will cost the utility company 30 million dollars, mostly supported by the new tariff system.

Despite the important gains in Japan, Ayukawa points out that the biggest hurdle for the renewable sector is the lack of a clear government stance on nuclear policy.

“Much of the official estimates and targets to purchase alternative energy are made by companies against a backdrop that nuclear power is still an option. This policy is not a stable foundation for renewables to be expanded,” she said.

This is the crucial reason why election for a new Tokyo governor could signal long awaited change.

Street protest against the planned Indo-Japan nuclear cooperation deal. Credit: Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace.

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Feb 1 2014 (IPS)

Activists opposed to India’s plans to massively increase civilian nuclear power production are aghast that a plan for an Indo-Japanese nuclear cooperation deal is gaining pace even while Japan is struggling to cope with the fallout of the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was guest of honour at India’s 64^th Republic Day celebrations on Jan. 26, announced in a press statement before leaving that talks for a nuclear cooperation agreement were continuing “with the view for an early conclusion.”“It would appear that the two countries were only waiting for the anger over the Fukushima disaster to cool down."

At a press conference given jointly with Abe, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said “negotiations towards an agreement for cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy have gained momentum in the last few months.”

“It would appear that the two countries were only waiting for the anger over the Fukushima disaster to cool down,” Anil Choudhury, leader of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), which ran a poster campaign and a demonstration protesting against the deal during Abe’s three-day visit, tells IPS.

“CNDP will continue to oppose any Indo-Japan nuclear deal as also will our counterparts in Japan,” Choudhury said. “A simultaneous poster campaign was mounted in Tokyo and letters of protest were sent to both prime ministers by Yukiko Kameya, an elderly evacuee from Fukushima.”

In an open letter to Abe, Laxminarayan Ramdas, a prominent leader of the CNDP wrote: “A country like yours, which was the victim of the first two atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the more recent and tragic accident of your nuclear power plant at Fukushima would, one would have thought, helped you to give up this horrible and dangerous source of energy.

“Please do not do us this favour and sell us a potential Fukushima,” Ramdas, former admiral of the Indian navy, told Abe in the letter.

Abe’s visit was marked by marches at sites where mega nuclear parks are functional or in various stages of completion. At the Kudankulam nuclear plant in Tamil Nadu, which became operational in October 2013, protests led by the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) have been continuing since September 2011.

According to PMANE leader S.P. Udayakumar, the Kudankulam project built with Russian technology is unsafe and threatens the delicate marine ecology of the Palk straits. “A Fukushima-type accident at this mega plant, which is due to generate 9,200 MW when complete, would be truly catastrophic,” he tells IPS.

The 2004 December Asian tsunami flooded nuclear installations at Kudankulam and tremors were recorded in the area in March 2006 and August 2011, but the government continues to insist that the plant is safe, Udayakumar says.

Safety is a major concern expressed by organisations of farmers and fishermen who live close to other major nuclear parks sites like Jaitapur in Maharashtra state, Mithi Virdi in Gujarat and Fatehabad in Haryana.

“There is very little to inspire confidence as India does not even have a nuclear radiation safety policy in place,” Choudhury said. “The lack of transparency and accountability that exacerbated the Fukushima disaster is far worse in India.”

A Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill, pending in Parliament since 2011, has been criticised by opposition legislators and activists as failing to give the regulator real autonomy and credibility, although India has gone ahead with plans to boost nuclear power capacity to 20,000 MW by 2020 and 63,000 MW by 2032.

“The scale of peoples’ protests at Kudankulam, Jaitapur and at other nuclear sites has been such that the least the government could do is to ensure that there is an independent regulator to take care of the public interest,” says Anup Kumar Saha, a member of parliament representing the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Much of the criticism revolves around the fact the regulator is funded by the very organisations it is supposed to be regulating, compromising its ability to act independently. Matters relating to atomic energy are also controlled directly by the prime minister and not parliament, protecting the nuclear establishment from public scrutiny.

M.V. Ramana, physicist and lecturer at Princeton University, tells IPS that the Indo-Japan deal is a corollary to the historic Indo-U.S. nuclear cooperation deal signed in October 2006. Ramana was awarded this year’s Leo Szilard Lectureship Award, given for ‘outstanding accomplishments in promoting the use of physics for the benefit of society in such areas as the environment, arms control, and science policy.’

“The primary motivation for a nuclear agreement between Japan and India is the fact that it is part of the bargain during the U.S.-India deal when the Manmohan Singh government promised to import very expensive reactors from companies like Westinghouse, General Electric and Areva which source key components from Japan,” Ramana says.

“The sad irony is that the deal between India and Japan is being negotiated by democratically elected leaders when their populations are opposed in one way or the other to this agreement,” Ramana adds.

By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Jan 30 2014 (IPS)

In a radio broadcast in October 1939, Winston Churchill described communist Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Many people in the West today have the same feeling about Iran under the ayatollahs. One hears many pundits refer to Iranian politics as mysterious, inscrutable, baffling and unpredictable.

Churchill continued his sentence by adding, “But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” I believe that if we apply the same key to Iran it becomes much easier to understand Iranian policies and actions.

Although the Islamic revolution of 1978-79 brought about many political changes, many facts about Iran have remained the same. They include the main elements of Iranian culture, an attachment to Iran’s long history, and a desire for a better life.

The main slogans chanted by the people on the eve of the revolution were freedom, independence and social justice. The first referred to freedom from domestic tyranny, the second to independence from foreign meddling, and the third to a fairer distribution of wealth.

In order to understand the motives that gave rise to the revolution, as well as what has happened since, it is essential to cast a quick glance at Iranian history in the 20th century.

Iran was one of the first countries in the Middle East to stage a democratic revolution. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-06) put an end to millennia-old absolutist monarchy and replaced it with a constitutional monarchy and a parliament (Majlis), and paved the way for modern Iran. However, Iran was not allowed to enjoy the fruits of that revolution for long.

Shortly afterwards, Russia and Britain divided Iran into zones of influence under the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 as part of the The Great Game. The discovery of oil in Iran in 1908 led to the formation in 1909 of the London-based Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which not only dominated the Iranian economy but also meddled in Iranian politics.

During the First World War, despite her declared neutrality, Russian and British forces invaded Iran in order to safeguard British India and keep Iran out of the hands of the Central Powers.

During the Second World War, Soviet, British and American forces invaded Iran, deposed Reza Shah who early in the war had declared Iran’s neutrality, and placed his young son Mohammad Reza Shah on the throne. The Trans-Iranian Railway was used to send millions of tons of desperately needed supplies to the Soviet Union.

In 1951 Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq nationalised the oil industry to end the unfair exploitation of Iran’s most valuable asset, but in 1953 he was toppled in a coup orchestrated by Britain and the United States.

It is important to remember this long history of foreign meddling in Iran’s internal affairs in order to understand the fury of the revolutionaries against Mohammad Reza Shah and the West.

What is remarkable is that despite all those catastrophes, the Iranian parliament that was first convened on November 6, 1906 continued to function, at least in name, right up to the 1979 revolution.

The Islamic revolution inherited a democratic legacy with universal male and female suffrage. The first Women’s Journal was published in 1910, and on January 7, 1936, Iran became the first Muslim country to ban the veil in public. Women were given the right to vote and to stand for public office in 1963. By the time of the revolution there were many Iranian female ministers, judges, doctors, university professors, pilots, etc.

The people who took part in the revolution were demanding more, not less civil and political freedoms. Therefore, the Islamic regime that came into being under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had no option but to continue the traditions of parliamentary democracy, with universal suffrage for both men and women.

Consequently, the constitution that was approved in a referendum was quite progressive on paper, with the big exception of the inclusion of Velayat-e Faqih (the rule of the religious guardian) and clerical boards, such as the Guardians Council that supervises the selection of presidential and parliamentary candidates.

These powers have certainly compromised and restricted Iranian democracy, but they have not diminished the thirst of the Iranians for democracy and freedom. The elections have also been far from rubber stamps for official candidates, but have often produced many surprises.

Up to a week before the 1997 election, a senior conservative cleric Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri who was the establishment candidate was expected to win. However, Mohammad Khatami’s reformist campaign attracted the biggest turnout in the history of Iranian presidential elections and he won with over 20 million to Nateq-Nouri’s seven million votes.

President Khatami initiated a period of major social reforms at home and a policy of rapprochement with the West. He called for a dialogue of civilisations and even proposed a grand bargain to the U.S. in 2003 covering Iran’s nuclear programme, the Arab-Israeli conflict and Persian Gulf security.

However, in return, he was rewarded with President George W. Bush’s inclusion of Iran in the Axis of Evil. The rejection of Iran’s outstretched hand strengthened the hardliners and led to the victory of the right-wing candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2005 election. In 2009 again the majority of people voted for the reformist candidate Mir-Hoseyn Mousavi, but Ahmadinejad was declared the winner in what many people regarded as a rigged election.

Millions of Green Movement supporters demonstrated in the streets, but they were put down by force, and Iran and the world had to endure four more years of Ahmadinejad’s rule.

“When Hassan Rouhani declared his candidacy for the June 2013 presidential election, opinion polls put his popularity at only five percent, but an energetic campaign with promises of greater freedoms at home and a policy of engagement with the West brought more than 72 percent of the electorate to the polling stations, and he won in the first round with about 51 percent of the vote.

The main candidate of the hardliners, Saeed Jalili, only received just over 11 percent of the vote and the other conservative candidate, former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati who has been the Supreme Leader’s foreign policy advisor for many years received just over six percent of the vote.

While the president has to balance his powers with a number of other influential players, including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the conservative clerics and the Revolution Guards, nevertheless, he is the chief executive and his policies can make a huge difference in both domestic and foreign policies.

Within the first 100 days of his tenure, Rouhani reversed 34 years of mutual hostility with the U.S. and reached a landmark agreement in
face-to-face negotiations between Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif and the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

The agreement limits Iranian nuclear activities and virtually makes it impossible for Iran to move towards a breakout without being detected in plenty of time by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors who have been given the power of daily inspection of Iranian sites. A rapprochement with Iran helps calm the situation in a turbulent Middle East, reduces hostility towards Israel, helps America with her withdrawal from Afghanistan and fighting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

A country of 80 million youthful and educated people, with the world’s largest gas and the second largest oil deposits can provide a huge market for the West. If Iran’s outstretched hand is once again rejected, it would send a message to Iranians that the West is not sincere in her dealings with Iran. It will strengthen the hardliners, reversing the gains of the past few months, and will make the situation even more dangerous than before.

It will also harm the cause of reform and greater democracy in Iran, as well as making the Middle East a much more dangerous place, ultimately leading to a devastating war.

It is time for the U.S. to turn over a new leaf in her relations with Iran and start a period of collaboration, which will help both countries.

Excerpt:

Israel keeps urging the group of six major powers to agree nothing less than a full dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear capability. Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have to come to terms with settling for an agreement which, though sustainable, falls short of his longstanding demand.

As the nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 group (Britain, China, France, the U.S., Russia and Germany) were under way last week in Geneva, the Israeli prime minister was visiting an armoured regiment on a training exercise along the Israeli-Syrian frontline in the occupied Golan Heights.

“It would be a historic mistake to relieve the pressure on Iran without dismantling its nuclear capability,” he warned. “Iran is currently down. Setting off the sanctions in full force to bring about the desired results is feasible. I urge the international community to do so.”Gone are the days when Netanyahu could threaten Iran by drawing a red line on the quantity of uranium enrichment of 20 percent purity required to produce weapon-grade nuclear material.

The first round of talks ended on a positive note but didn’t seem to heed the Israeli prime minister’s call to maintain – let alone upgrade – sanctions imposed on Iran by Western nations.

“There’s an agreement in principle to go for a gradual approach,” Shlomo Brom, a strategic expert at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, tells IPS.

“Iran wants a substantial removal of sanctions at the initial stage for only limited concessions; the P5+1 want exactly the opposite. The negotiations will consist in building a wise enough process to play between these two poles.”

Hence the upsurge of insistence from Israeli officials that the P5+1 powers don’t drop their guard, amidst assessments that the negotiators are mulling partial sanctions relief in exchange for Tehran’s willingness to downsize its uranium enrichment programme.

“The greater the pressure on Iran, the greater the chances for diplomacy, so it would be stupid to reduce the sanctions prior to a satisfactory solution,” Israeli Strategic and Intelligence Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz tells IPS.

“Our request, demand, policy and the way we try to convince our allies is, ‘you inflicted effective pressure on Iran; don’t make it collapse’,” Tsahi HaNegbi, a foreign affairs and defence committee legislator close to Netanyahu, tells IPS.

Gone are the days when Netanyahu could threaten Iran by drawing a red line on the quantity of uranium enrichment of 20 percent purity required to produce weapon-grade nuclear material.

Iran limited the quantity of its enriched uranium of 20 percent purity below the 250 kg threshold. “This isn’t the parameter to judge Iran’s nuclear progress,” says Brom.

By installing more than 1,000 advanced centrifuges, Tehran roughly quintupled its ability to enrich uranium from a lower level of purity. The intermediate enrichment level thus became irrelevant.

So did Netanyahu’s red line.

So a year later, at the U.N. General Assembly, Netanyahu went back to basics, demanding a full dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

Balancing the fact that Israel isn’t a negotiating party, Netanyahu enhanced his country’s role by striking a tough stance tinted with gloom and doom, and self-righteousness.

“If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone,” he told the U.N. General Assembly earlier this month. “Yet in standing alone, Israel will know that we’ll be defending many others.”

The nuclear talks resume in a fortnight. A six to 12-month timeframe to conclude a deal is being evoked.

Time is indeed of the essence, stresses HaNegbi: “This timeframe for us is forever. Negotiations with Iran already took over a decade. We already ran out of time. We won’t wait for, say, nine months.”

Heading a delegation of diplomats and defence officials to the U.S., Steinitz isn’t optimistic: “The Iranians can easily reduce enrichment temporarily and then resume it.”

Still, he’s willing to give time a chance. “If in the meantime the Iranian freeze any activity, the timeframe might be reasonable.”

“Cautious Iran won’t provoke the parties during this period,” Brom says. “So whether talks take one or even two years isn’t important – so long as they result in a satisfactory agreement. There’ll be a freeze on additional nuclear progress – but no suspension – and therefore enough time to negotiate.”

Where time is most critical is when Tehran achieves ‘breakout capacity’ – the ability to dash towards a nuclear weapon if it chose, before Israel took pre-emptive action.

Breakout time depends on the number and efficacy of each centrifuge; on the accumulated material’s quantity and quality; and, if Iran expelled the International Atomic Energy Agency monitors, on the length of time from that moment till Iran builds a bomb.

The negotiators must ensure that an agreement includes a set of parameters which allows enough time – the longer the better – to neutralise breakout capacity in such a sustainable way that enables pre-emptive action to stop it, Brom explains.

“Netanyahu won’t get everything he wants. Dismantling Iran’s nuclear programme means a five-year breakout time – precisely the same amount of time it takes for an average state to produce a nuclear weapon from scratch – that won’t happen.

“If there’s an agreement, breakout time will be between a few months and five years,” Brom predicts.

“A compromise resulting in Iran possessing a bomb not in a few months but in two to five years isn’t a great achievement. Meanwhile, the sanctions which took years to establish will have been removed, and renewing them will be impossible,” counters HaNegbi. “There won’t be any leverage left.”

Earlier this month, the Israel Air Force held a long-range drill including air-to-air re-fuelling and dogfights over Greek waters.

It’s an open secret that prominent Israeli military officials and experts cast doubt on the merits of military action on Iran.

A strike would postpone Iran’s progress towards acquiring nuclear capability for only a few years and wouldn’t prevent the process itself, Brom emphasises.

“The purpose is to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. It’s well understood that an agreement is better than a military operation – if you get the same results. Moreover, an agreement is accompanied with assurances of assessment, plus monitoring and verification systems.

“Netanyahu will have no other choice but to accept such agreement,” Brom concludes.

Japanese protesters are determined to defy efforts to reopen Japan’s nuclear energy installations. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS.

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

Two and a half years ago, Ayako Oga, now 30, found herself helpless as an earthquake and the tsunami it triggered hit Japan and crippled four reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. She and her husband were forced to abandon their village Ookuma Machi, barely five kilometres away.

The once-farmer is a leading activist today in Japan’s growing anti-nuclear movement, joining hundreds of Fukushima residents affected by the Mar. 11, 2011 tragedy to protest against a government plan to restart Japan’s nuclear reactors.

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has been aggressively pushing an economic agenda that has come to be called Abenomics, declared at a press conference last month, “We will restart nuclear power plants on the basis of the world’s strictest safety standards.”“Representing important evidence of the dark side of nuclear power is something I have to do.”

With her worst fears come true, and now living with hundreds of evacuees in Aizu Wakamatsu, a town 100 km from the damaged plant, Oga is determined not to let this happen. “Representing important evidence of the dark side of nuclear power is something I have to do,” she told IPS.

Anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan peaked in the wake of the Fukushima incident. An opinion survey conducted by leading daily Tokyo Shimbun in July 2012 showed nearly 80 percent of the 3,000 respondents were opposed to nuclear power. Not surprising, given that the disaster forced 85,000 people to leave their homes, contaminated vast swathes of land and hit incomes of farmers and fisherfolk.

However, Oga and other anti-nuclear activists could well find themselves on the losing side now as the Liberal Democratic Party government and large corporations push for restarting the reactors, citing an energy crisis and economic losses.

Currently, Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors, which met 30 percent of the country’s energy needs, are shut down for various reasons, including routine inspection. The world’s third largest economy (GDP: 5.96 trillion dollars) imports almost 90 percent of its energy, leaving it with a trade deficit of 1.02 trillion yen (10.5 billion dollars).

With winning local approval as one of the conditions to restart the reactors, the government is publicising the stringent safety standards on the basis of which it will resume nuclear energy production.

The country had established an independent Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) in September 2012 comprising top scientists and safety experts. Its head Shunichi Tanaka, a scientist and native of Fukushima city, had officially stated that the official response and that of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which operated the Fukushima plant, was “groping in the dark.”

The NRA’s new safety guidelines, which came into force in July this year, are based on the concept of defence-in-depth. This requires a strengthening of the third and fourth layer of defence as well as the prevention of simultaneous loss of all safety functions due to earthquakes, tsunamis and other external events.

Operators are also required to check for active earthquake faults while building reactors, have higher tsunami protection walls and secondary control rooms.

People do seem to be buying into the government promise of safe nuclear reactors. Another survey by Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun in July this year registered a dip in support for abolishing nuclear power – 40 percent of its 1,000 respondents supported the restart of nuclear reactors with higher safety guidelines compared to 37 percent in February.

Mitsuhiko Tanaka, a scientist who has worked on reactor design for decades, likens the struggle of the anti-nuclear activists to a fight between David and Goliath.

“Activists are up against a powerful government and rich corporations who aim to justify nuclear power,” he told IPS. “They have the necessary clout to sway public opinion in Japan, where economic profit is what matters.”

He thinks the official moves to push safety standards and win public approval are gravely flawed.

“Besides the lack of transparency in the procedure of restarting the plants, a key point is that officials have still not scientifically revealed the real cause for the Fukushima accident,” he said.

Many scientists are critical of the official explanation that the 13-15 metres high tsunami alone damaged the reactors. With the reactors still in a crippled state, hard-core scientific evidence is yet to come, some say.

Professor Hiromitsu Ino, a nuclear safety expert and now head of the newly established Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, is one such critic. “I am not satisfied with the current official safety regulations because they do not include public interest and ethical aspects of nuclear power,” he told IPS. “This can be developed only after close discussions with people, and needs time.”

Ino also thinks that the new guidelines are not strict enough. For instance, he says, they permit energy operators an indefinite grace period to instal filters in boiling water reactors, viewed as critical to lessen the toxic impact of a hydrogen explosion.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster is believed to be the worst after Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986. It remains an ongoing crisis, with the government battling to contain leaks of highly toxic ground water spilling into the sea and surrounding areas.

On Oct. 10, high levels of radioactive caesium were detected in the seawaters close to the defunct reactors, according to TEPCO.

In August, the Fukushima prefectural government released new statistics on thyroid testing on almost 200,000 children. The figures, reported in Asahi Shimbun, showed 44 children and youth diagnosed with or suspected to have the disease. They were aged between six and 18 years when the accident occurred.

Oga says her husband visited their former home in August as part of a visit arranged by the government for displaced nuclear refugees to sort out their documents and belongings.

“I did not join him even though I was keen to see my old home,” she told IPS. “I wanted to avoid radiation because I want to have a child in the future. Young people like us realise that we have only ourselves to rely on and change the world.”

A Kremlin compromise on nuclear disarmament looks as far away as ever as Russian president Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama use their countries’ strained relations to bolster their own domestic political agendas, experts say.

Obama’s call, during a speech in Berlin in June, for a dramatic reduction in the world’s nuclear weapons had led to hopes that there would be cuts in world nuclear arsenals on the agenda of a potential nuclear summit in 2016, and gave extra impetus to what will be the first-ever high level meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on nuclear disarmament this month.

But following Russia’s granting of asylum to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and Washington’s subsequent cancelling of a summit meeting between Obama and Putin, some critics say the U.S. may use the political rift between the two states as a pretext to fail to make progress on disarmament.

And the Kremlin is more than happy to do the same.“What drives nuclear disarmament in both countries is domestic, not foreign policy."

Nikolai Sokov, a fellow at the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, told IPS: “What drives nuclear disarmament in both countries is domestic, not foreign policy. Confrontation serves the Russian domestic political agenda, just as it does for U.S. politicians with the U.S. domestic political agenda. The current impasse satisfies both sides.

“Russia has no need to change its position on nuclear weapons and President Putin is under no pressure whatsoever at home to change the stance. Even with the political administration there is no one in the Russian administration who is against the current stance, not even in private.”

Russia and the U.S. control 90 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal and since the end of the Cold War there have been various agreements on reducing the number of warheads on both sides.

The recent call by Obama would see both Washington and Moscow reduce their arsenals by a third.

But even under the best circumstances the Kremlin has historically been reluctant to agree to drastic cuts due to the differences in weapons delivery capabilities between the two countries, fearing that it would be left at a military disadvantage by dramatic blanket cuts.

It has also been wary of U.S. missile defence plans and without assurances that they would not be used against Russia, the Kremlin is reluctant to agree to concessions on nuclear weapons.

Speaking on Russian television foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that nuclear weapons reductions should only be considered if they involved all countries – a view repeated by Putin.

But the recent strains in the countries’ relationship mean that the Kremlin has a chance to further entrench its position and win political points with the electorate.

“The Russian public is not against the current anti-American stance. The image of the U.S. at the moment is not good in Russia. People see the situation with Syria and think to themselves ‘we can’t deal with the Americans, all they want to do is drop bombs’.

“The Russian public likes the tough tone being taken with the U.S.,” Sokov told IPS.

Recent opinion polls show that the majority of Russians supported what Snowden did and back the decision to grant him asylum.

They also show attitudes towards Obama changing negatively.

Some political commentators in Russia argue that the Kremlin’s stance on disarmament is not even anti-American but simply a normal protection of the country’s interests.

Tatiana Gomozova, political editor at Kommersant FM radio in Moscow, told IPS: “I don’t really think that Russia is actually against the U.S. on the issue – it’s just for itself. The truth is that what Mr. Obama called for [in Berlin] was something over the long term. It’s a goal he himself can’t reach so it was more a political statement than a specific plan. It was also more a speech for his allies than for Russia.

“But while it’s not on today’s Russia-U.S. agenda, I wouldn’t say that Moscow won’t support this idea [of a drastic cut in nuclear weapons] one day.”

But while much of the major media in Russia toes the Kremlin line on many matters, there have been some voices calling for a more conciliatory approach from both sides.

In a long editorial earlier this month the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily newspaper urged both the White House and the Kremlin to work together on the issue of global security, including nuclear disarmament, and lead the way in helping to form a new, safer, international community.

It said: “The issues of nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation and the prevention of nuclear terrorism fall mainly on the shoulders of our two nations…. Common sense dictates that sooner or later Russia and the United States will become partners in the construction of a new system of international politics of the 21st century. It is hoped that this will happen sooner rather than later – the price of delay may be too high.”

But experts remain pessimistic of any progress on disarmament between the two nations in the near future.

Sokov told IPS: “While it would be good for both sides to agree something on disarmament, concessions are unlikely and I’m not hopeful that anything positive will happen soon.”

The surprise victory of Hassan Rouhani in Iran’s Jun. 14 election has provoked a range of reactions here, ranging from cautious optimism about possible détente between Tehran and Washington to outright rejection of the notion that his presidency will produce any substantive change in policy, foreign or domestic.

While most Iran specialists fall into the former category, neo-conservatives and other pro-Israel forces insist that even if the president-elect wanted to be more forthcoming on western demands to curb Tehran’s nuclear programme and other concerns, he would still be overruled by the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and other powerful hard-line interests.

Echoing concerns voiced by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the latter also expressed worry that Rouhani’s more “moderate” image – especially in contrast to the belligerence of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – may lull western governments into making undesirable concessions.

“The search for a ‘moderate’ Iranian leader has beguiled every American president since the revolution of 1979,” according to the Wall Street Journal’s neo-conservative editorial board. “But the hunt for the unicorn seems destined to begin again with the breathless reporting that Iranians have elected 64-year-old cleric Hassan Rohani as their next president.”

President Barack Obama himself no doubt added to those concerns Monday when, after a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-8 Summit in Northern Ireland, he told reporters that the two leaders “expressed cautious optimism that with a new election [in Iran], we may be able to move forward on a dialogue that allows us to resolve the problems with Iran’s nuclear program”.

Rouhani’s first-round victory, with just under 51 percent of the vote in a field of six candidates, came as a surprise to all but a few analysts here. Most expected a candidate, notably Tehran’s current nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, with the hard-line views that are believed to reflect those of Khamenei, to triumph whether by the actual vote tally or by the kind of ballot rigging that many believe occurred in the contested 2009 election.

While Rouhani, who has several degrees including a doctorate from Caledonian University in Glasgow, has held senior foreign-policy positions in the regime – among them, the nuclear file under reformist President Mohammad Khatami – he was openly critical of Tehran’s recent diplomacy, particularly over its nuclear programme, during the election campaign.

“We have to calculate our national interests,” he said shortly before the election. “It’s nice for the centrifuges to run, but people’s livelihoods have to also run, our factories have to also run,” a reference to the impact of U.S. and western sanctions aimed at “crippling” Iran’s economy.

Rouhani, who will assume the presidency in August, gained the strong backing of both Khatami and former President Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, a centrist whose own candidacy had been disqualified by the Guardian Council. Both leaders had also called for major changes in Iran’s foreign policy, including the regime’s handling of negotiations with the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China plus Germany) over the nuclear programme.

Most Iran experts believe Rouhani’s victory offers a major opportunity for progress in those negotiations. They note that he persuaded Khamenei to go along with a voluntary suspension of Iran’s enrichment-related and reprocessing activities while trying to negotiate an accord with the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany).

In 2006, in his capacity as Khamenei’s representative on the regime’s Supreme National Security Council, he published a detailed offer in TIME magazine that included accepting strict limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment and enhanced International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) oversight of Iran’s nuclear-related facilities – only to be rejected by the administration of former President George W. Bush.

A key Rouhani subordinate when he headed the nuclear file, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, has worked continuously on the terms of a nuclear accord ever since he was accused of treason by the Ahmadinejad government and fled the country to accept a post at Princeton University. Most recently, he has emphasised that Iran must accept “the maximum level of transparency in cooperation with the IAEA” – a theme that Rouhani also stressed during a press conference in Tehran Monday.

“It’s not too outrageous to suspect that Mousavian will return to Iran,” according to Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University, who described Rouhani’s tone and style as the “anti-Ahmadinejad”. “There’s a continuity that is very real. Mousavian has argued there’s a deal to be made; it just takes some goodwill on both sides.”

Other Iran experts agree that Rouhani’s election makes a deal substantially more possible than it would have been had Jalili, whose platform stressed “resistance” to western demands, been elected.

But they argue that Washington must also be prepared to make concessions in order to persuade Khamenei to go along, especially in light of the fact that the United States has previously rejected Rouhani’s overtures.

“Rouhani’s election presents the United States and its partners with a test – of our intensions and seriousness about reaching an agreement,” wrote Paul Pillar, a CIA veteran who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East from 2000 to 2005, the period of Rouhani’s greatest influence over Iran’s nuclear policy.

“Failure of the test will confirm suspicions in Tehran that we do not want a deal and instead are stringing along negotiations while waiting for the sanctions to wreak more damage,” he wrote on his nationalinterest.org blog.

“Passage of the test will require placing on the table a proposal that, in return for the desired restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities, incorporates significant relief from economic sanctions and at least tacit acceptance of a continued peaceful Iranian nuclear program, to include low-level enrichment of uranium,” according to Pillar.

Describing Rouhani’s victory as a “game-changer”, Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, argued that Washington must be willing to offer substantial sanctions relief in order to strike a deal.

“For the past eight years, U.S. policy has relied on pressure – threats of war and international economic sanctions – rather than incentives to change Iran’s calculus. Continuing with that approach will be counterproductive. It will not provide Rowhani with the cover for a fresh approach to nuclear talks,” he wrote on foreignpolicy.com.

But such thinking is precisely what worries neo-conservatives and leaders of the Israel lobby.

The White House “no doubt will ramp up its beseeching diplomacy to strike a nuclear deal with the Rohani government”, the Journal’s editorial writers warned Monday. “President Obama is desperate to find some agreement to avoid having to launch a military strike. Expect Mr. Rohani to go along for the talks, but mainly to ease Western sanctions and buy more nuclear time.”

The same forces are similarly worried about the replacement of Ahmadinejad by a less bombastic and far more sophisticated Iranian president.

In a blog entitled “Rooting for Jalili”, Daniel Pipes, the president of the Middle East Forum, wrote that the same logic that led him to support Ahmadinejad’s re-election four years ago applied to this election.

It “is better to have a bellicose, apocalyptic, in-your-face Ahamdinejad who scares the world than a sweet-talking (the 2009 moderate candidate Mir-Hossein) Mousavi who again lulls it to sleep, even as thousands of centrifuges whir away”, he concluded.

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.

With talks over Iran’s nuclear ambitions set to resume Apr. 5 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, there is guarded optimism that negotiators can build on the moderate breakthroughs made in discussions held earlier this year.

“The last rounds of talks in Almaty (in February) and in Turkey (in March) have increased hopes for more progress to be made in April,” Alex Vatanka, an Iranian-born analyst at The Middle East Institute in Washington D.C, told IPS by e-mail.

Both U.S. President Barack Obama and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have been readying their domestic audiences for some forward movement in the protracted negotiations.

“In recent weeks, both President Obama and (Ayatollah) Khamenei have in their own ways started to prepare their home audiences for a compromise. And neither side is at the moment pointing to any fundamental obstacles in the path of a deal,” Vatanka told IPS.

In February, the stalled talks between Iran and the P5+1 – the UN Security Council’s five permanent members (China, France, Russia, Britain and the U.S. plus Germany) – resumed after an eight-month hiatus. These talks saw new life breathed into the process which is attempting to reconcile differences over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The process had reached an impasse last June over what seemed like insurmountable differences between the two sides. Iran called for the immediate and unconditional end of sanctions, which have severely damaged its economy. The P5+1 group demanded Iran immediately stop medium-level enrichment and to close the Fordow underground enrichment facility before offering any easing of sanctions.

At the Almaty talks held on Feb. 26-27, the international group, chaired by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, put some new ideas on the table, believed to be related to Iran suspending 20 percent enrichment for six months and converting its existing enriched uranium into uranium oxide for medical use in exchange for some sanctions-relief, according to the Al-Monitor website.

Iran insists its ambitions are peaceful and in line with its rights as a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, while international negotiators contend Iran’s aims are to obtain nuclear weapons.

“If there is a political will – and I see there is a considerable degree of that on both sides – then the technical details can be resolved,” Vatanka told IPS. “At the same time, a bad political atmosphere can kill an otherwise attainable nuclear agreement.”

The strained political atmosphere is not being helped by the situation in Syria, with Iran a strong ally of the Assad regime in its two-year conflict with armed opposition groups.

IPS reported on Apr. 1 that Javier Solana, a former North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) secretary-general who was Iran’s chief European interlocutor from 2003 to 2009, felt that the opposing positions held by Russia, China, the U.S. and Europe on Syria could weaken the unity of P5+1 and have a knock-on effect on the talks with Iran.

Solana, speaking at a forum at the Brookings Institute in Washington, suggested that Russia and China would most likely oppose any additional sanctions against Tehran if the Almaty talks fail to make much headway, weakening the chances of a diplomatic solution to the problem.

For Vatanka, creating some distance between Syria and the Iranian nuclear issue could be key to reaching an agreement “If the nuclear question can be separated from other issues, then there is a much higher chance for a deal,” he told IPS.

Solving the Iran nuclear question was high on the agenda at the meeting between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Mar. 20. While Netanyahu remained bullish about a military solution, Obama reiterated that time remained for a diplomatic solution, whilst not ruling out other options.

“We prefer to resolve this diplomatically, and there’s still time to do so. Iran’s leaders must understand, however, that they have to meet their international obligations,” Obama told reporters in Jerusalem. But he did not rule out military options, stating that “all options are on the table. We will do what is necessary to prevent Iran from getting the world’s worst weapons.”

Political machinations within Iran as it prepares to go to the polls in June to elect a new president are not necessarily seen as an obstacle to moving forward in the ongoing discussions. Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief negotiator for the P5+1 talks, is expected to be a candidate in the elections, but he is not felt to have too much influence, playing second fiddle to the Supreme Leader.

“Ayatollah Khamenei decides the fundamentals on Iran’s nuclear policy and he will be the Leader before and after the elections,” Vatanka told IPS. “Saeed Jalili is not a political heavy weight in his own right. His boss, Khamenei, will call the shots. Jalili does not have an ability to say or do anything different from the Leader.”

Ahead of the resumption of talks, Jalili sounded a challenging note saying on Apr. 4 that Iran’s right to enrichment should be recognised before any progress can be made with the discussions.

Khamenei’s position remains focussed on Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

“If the Americans wanted to resolve the issue, this would be a very simple solution: they could recognise the Iranian nation’s right to enrichment and in order to address those concerns, they could enforce the regulations of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Khamenei said in a speech in Mashhad on marking Norouz, the Persian New Year on Mar. 21. “We were never opposed to the supervision and regulations of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

Vatanka is not anticipating any major breakthrough in U.S.-Iran relations as a result of the Almaty talks but sees the prospect of a nuclear deal of some sorts as “the catapult that could start a new era of Washington-Tehran relations.”

A 300 million euro loan to improve nuclear safety in the Ukraine has been attacked by environmental groups who say it will instead be used to keep ageing reactors working well beyond their planned lifespans – increasing the risks of a nuclear accident – while doing nothing to address serious issues with the country’s energy intensity.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which approved the loan earlier this month, has said that the money will be used to upgrade safety at nuclear plants to international standards.

But environmentalists say it will instead be used by state energy company Energoatom to keep open or restart ageing reactors and that the EBRD should be helping the Ukraine move away from nuclear power and support renewable energy projects.

Iryna Holovko of the pan-European Bankwatch NGO, which together with other environmental groups has opposed the loan, told IPS: “Energoatom and the Ukrainian government is imposing another 20 years of additional nuclear risk – because of the increased risks associated with ageing of reactors – on the people of Ukraine without developing or offering an alternative option.”

Nuclear power is key to Ukraine’s energy production. Fifteen plants around the country provide almost half of its electricity.

But while many countries in Europe have recently reaffirmed their opposition to nuclear power or abandoned or scaled back their reliance on it in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Ukraine’s energy policy has been amended in the last two years to include new nuclear capacity and the extension of the lifespans of existing plants by, in some cases, 20 years.

Environmental groups in the Ukraine point to an accident at the Rivne nuclear power plant’s Reactor 1. Its original lifespan had expired at the end of 2010 but it was given an extension for 20 years. One month later there was an accident, although no radiation leaked.

The funding provided by the EBRD, together with a further European Commission loan under the Euratom Treaty, will support a programme including more than 80 measures addressing safety issues at plants, such as replacing equipment and improving accident management.

Environmental groups claim that Energoatom has not properly analysed the risks and safety issues related to the safe operation of nuclear units for decades beyond their original lifespans.

In particular, they argue, a reactor at the South Ukrainian nuclear power plant will be restarted again using the financing approved by the EBRD. The reactor’s lifespan has expired and it is no longer generating electricity. But Energoatom has been told its lifespan can be extended and the reactor restarted if it carries out safety upgrades.

Holovko told IPS: “It is one thing to improve the safety of nuclear reactors that still have some years of their original operating time left, but it is not OK to finance measures at facilities whose lifespans have expired and which have already stopped working and at the same time saying the loan has nothing to do with lifespan extension.”

Greenpeace and other groups such as the German NGO Urgewald have said that the EBRD, as one of the largest investors in the Ukraine and other European countries, should be spending money on decommissioning old nuclear reactors and supporting renewable energy instead.

Jutta Matysek of Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe said: “European public money should be used to support renewable energy to help Ukraine overcome its dependence on nuclear energy and imported carbon fuel. A country which is still suffering from the terrible effects of the Chernobyl disaster will not survive another nuclear catastrophe.”

The EBRD has vigorously defended the financing. The bank says its energy policy is geared towards improving energy efficiency, but that it has a clear mandate to financing nuclear safety improvements at an operating facility.

In a statement following approval of the loan, the bank said: “Nuclear safety is a consideration of the utmost priority at any time regardless of whether a unit has just been connected to the grid or has been producing electricity for decades.”

Stressing that the bank has no mandate to force a sovereign state to rule out the use of any source of energy, it added: “Ukraine is currently reviewing its own energy strategy but has made it clear that it will continue to use nuclear power generation. Consequently, addressing the safety issues and raising standards is the EBRD’s primary concern and its due role.”

It also emphasised that Energoatom’s safety upgrade plan had taken into account recommendations from the International Atomic Energy Agency and Ukrainian and international experts.

EBRD representatives in the Ukraine who spoke to IPS stressed that the bank has invested more than 200 million euros in renewable energy projects in Ukraine to date. It has also lent tens of millions of euros to local municipalities for energy efficiency projects.

EBRD Ukraine representative Anton Usov told IPS: “The EBRD should get more recognition for its efforts to make Ukraine more energy efficient and for the renewable energy projects we have implemented in this country – something which no other institution has done.”

Environmental groups say sensitivity to nuclear safety remains particularly high because of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

A nationwide poll carried out in April 2011 showed that 39 percent of respondents believed Ukrainian plants were “quite dangerous” and that 25 percent said they were “extremely dangerous”.  More than 69 percent said they were completely opposed to the construction of new nuclear power plants.
But Usov said that there was no widespread opposition to extending the lifespans of ageing reactors, and that the public accepted that nuclear power was essential to meeting the country’s energy needs.

He told IPS: “People in Ukraine are generally sensitive to nuclear industry-related subjects for obvious reasons….There is a broad understanding in society that the country cannot survive without nuclear power plants, at least in the short-term.”

After almost two decades of non-stop negotiations, and two years of intense U.S. opposition, the much-delayed and controversial 7.5 billion dollar Iran-Pakistan pipeline is well on its track to full operation in the next 15 months.

In a telling sign of Pakistan’s growing energy woes, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari chose to ignore vigorous external opposition and visit Iran (Feb. 27) in order to finalise a fateful energy deal which could potentially elevate Iran-Pakistan relations into a strategic partnership. Zardari and Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated the pipeline on Monday this week.

Once completed, the gigantic 1,881 kilometre pipeline is set to carry 21.5 million cubic metres of natural gas per day (mid-2015) from Iran’s Assalouyeh Energy Zone in the south, stretching over 1,100 km through the country, to the Iran-Pakistan border (Gabd-zero point). Then it will pass through Balochistan and Sindh within Pakistan, from where it would be connected to an existing gas transmission network. Iran has almost completed its side of the pipeline, but Pakistan has been searching for sufficient funds to build its side of the bargain.

After meeting Iran’s top leaders in Tehran, Zardari was able to seal a final agreement to complete the 1.5 billion dollar pipeline project on the Pakistani side. According to the deal, Iran will provide as much as 500 million dollars in soft loans, with an Iran-Pakistan consortium, Iran’s Tadbir Energy and Pakistan’s Interstate Gas Company, to undertake the pipeline construction inside Pakistani soil. The pipeline is due to assume full operation by December 2014, based on an earlier gas sales and purchase agreement.

“The two countries have mutual trust and consolidated relations today despite the will of all those who intend to ruin Tehran-Islamabad relations and impede our path of cooperation,” Pakistan’s president said after signing the final agreement with Tehran. “I believe that building this project is very beneficial for both sides and we support all the work carried out so far.”

“Iran and Pakistan have and will stand beside each other with a strategic outlook,” Ahmadinejad declared, characterising the agreement as a diplomatic coup against growing external pressure to isolate Tehran amid the ongoing nuclear impasse.

Ahead of the Zardari visit, the Pakistani cabinet committee (composed of senior figures in the finance, law, and petroleum ministries headed by the minister of state for finance) approved a 1.5 billion dollar agreement. In this sense, Zardari’s visit was to iron out the details of the deal, particularly the terms of Iranian financing, construction participation, and gas prices, since the Pakistani bureaucracy was already fully on board.

Nonetheless, the trip marked a dramatic turn in Islamabad’s foreign policy, with Zardari braving international pressure and risking irreversible estrangement with Washington, which has tirelessly pushed for an alternative supply from Turkmenistan, via Afghanistan, the so-called TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline.

Ahead of the Zardari trip, outgoing secretary of state Hillary Clinton, in a statement to the U.S. Congress, warned Pakistan against pursuing the pipeline project, saying that “beginning the construction of such a pipeline, either as an Iranian project or as a joint project, would violate our Iran sanctions law.”

Canada’s hawkish leadership condemned the pipeline project, with foreign minister John Baird stating that “Canada is deeply disappointed by Pakistan‘s decision” and that “Pakistan’s decision runs directly contrary” to the objective of isolating Iran over its nuclear programme.

In Pakistan’s view, however, the West is insensitive to the country’s national interests. Pakistan is grappling with an energy crisis, with power shortages hammering domestic industries and further angering the general public. Relations with Washington are frosty and mired in controversy, prompting occasional diplomatic jabs, with growing bilateral tensions over American drone strikes and anti-terror operations inside Pakistani soil.

Given the depth of the security crisis in Afghanistan, as the West swiftly draws down its military presence despite Taliban forces’ relentless push against the fragile Kabul-based government, the Washington-sponsored TAPI pipeline is far from a feasible and timely alternative. Iran represents an affordable and timely energy supplier, with the pipeline set to contribute as much as 20 percent of Pakistan electricity production.

The deal is a subtext of a broader trend where Iran – leveraging its sizeable hydrocarbon reserves – has been gradually warming up to energy-hungry U.S. allies such as Turkey, which has been Iran’s major natural gas customer and a vigorous critic of Western ‘secondary sanctions’ on Tehran’s energy partners.

Pakistan and Iran (together with Turkey) have been founding members of the regional body, the Economic Cooperation Organisation (ECO), and have for decades been exploring multiple ways of enhancing bilateral relations and regional economic integration.

Initially, the pipeline was conceived to extend as far as India, and potentially even China, but a combination of security concerns, external pressure, and pricing disagreements has confined the project to the two immediate neighbours. But Chinese banks are to provide some project financing, while Pakistani officials have indicated a possible extension and re-direction of the Iran-Pakistan pipeline once China is on board. The Iran-Pakistan pipeline, more importantly, will lay down the foundation of a broader trans-regional energy corridor, with Iran at its very core.

Crucially, the two sides have discussed broader strategic cooperation, especially over the insurgency and instability in the Balochistan province (a major threat to the pipelines) as well as the fate of Afghanistan. Given Western sanctions on Iran’s financial and energy sectors, the bilateral talks also provided the basis for substantial barter deals.

The final agreement represents a new chapter in Iran-Pakistan relations, potentially resolving Pakistan’s energy woes, but also signaling the West’s limited capability to fully isolate an energy-rich Iran.

Demanding rights for nuclear workers. Credit: National Union of General Workers.

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Mar 11 2013 (IPS)

Japan has promised to scrap the crippled Fukushima nuclear reactors that faced the world’s worst nuclear accident. But Hiroyuki Watanabe, councillor in Iwaki City located 30 kilometres from the accident site, greets such intentions on the second anniversary of the disaster on Monday with misgiving.

“I see problems in Fukushima increasing, not decreasing. One of the biggest issues facing the country is the lack of qualified workers in Japan who can meet the enormous challenges ahead,” he told IPS.

Iwaki City lies in Fukushima prefecture, and was affected badly by the triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident – that struck on Mar. 11, 2011.

The city is also host to J-Village, a former soccer field now the entry point to the zone around the stricken nuclear plant. Around 3,000 workers commute daily from the new base camp to work on the damaged reactors. They change into radiation protective gear before boarding special buses that take them to their work place almost an hour away.

Watanabe says he must fight for the rights of these workers who spend eight hours daily in dangerous surroundings.

“Workers face the risk of radioactive contamination. They are also employed by companies that do not treat them fairly in terms of work conditions and wages. My work is to protect them and make sure their employers and the government treat them right.”

Watanabe, a member of the Communist Party in the Iwaki local assembly, is not alone. The increasingly difficult looking road ahead as Japan struggles to deal with the damaged reactors has led labour unions to launch separate organisations to take up the issues faced by nuclear workers.

Keiji Watanabe, general secretary of the National Union of General Workers, said there is an urgent need to create a strong protection base for the nuclear workers. Dismantling the plant could take up to four decades.

“The grave situation in Fukushima as well as possible accidents in other nuclear plants in Japan demands the work of tens of thousands of men and women in the decades ahead. This unprecedented situation has awakened us to the dire need to set up units that can deal with the emerging labour issues,” he told IPS.

A major grouse among labour activists is the lack of clear rules for nuclear workers. Currently the workers, divided by skill ratings and age, are employed by hundreds of subcontracting companies that have contracts with Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), which operates the Fukushima plant.

Several workers hired by companies have raised their voices against the system of “commissions” by temporary employment agencies.

About 90 dollars a day are added as special allowance to the salaries of temporary staff hired to clear contaminated debris and carry out repair work. But, said Hiroshi Goto who worked in the Fukushima Dai Ichi reactor, they face up to 50 percent deductions by the employers.

“This cannot be tolerated,” he reported in Sekai, a leading Japanese monthly magazine. He said workers are helpless in demanding better conditions from TEPCO.

Pressure from activists has led Japan to register stricter national contamination standards. Such conditions, labour activists say, would lead to a scarcity because many Japanese workers will have to leave their jobs to protect their health.

Difficult employment conditions have already resulted in a rapid drop of workers willing to work in Fukushima. Watanabe from Iwaki said the majority of the 3,000 working at the reactors are local people from Fukushima who lost their farming jobs because of the contamination of their land.

“The majority of the workers are older people who need jobs to survive,” he said, and this could mean that Japan has to import workers to meet the looming crunch.

Against this backdrop, conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has declared that the nuclear reactors will be restarted for some time once their safety has been confirmed in order to provide the country with stable energy supply – 30 percent of the national energy supply is dependent on nuclear power.

In the meantime, almost 60,000 Fukushima residents remain dislocated from their homes with no prospect of returning due to the decontamination work.

“Two years after the Fukushima meltdown, we are still looking for answers to pave the way forward. The situation continues to be a nightmare lesson for Japan,” said Watanabe.

For the first time, ‘humanitarian diplomacy’ is being deployed to drive home the need for banning nukes – though under the self-imposed exclusion of the P5, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, who own a crushing majority of the 19,000 nuclear weapons capable of destroying the world many times over.

A first step toward humanitarian diplomacy was taken in Oslo at a Mar. 4-5 conference convened by the government of Norway. Mexico will host a follow-up meeting “in due course” and “after necessary preparations,” Juan José Gómez Camacho, the country’s ambassador to the UN announced.

Participants in the conference included representatives of 127 states, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement and civil society, with the International Campaign for Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) in the forefront.

ICAN organised a Civil Society Forum on Mar. 2-3 with the Norwegian government’s support. Some 500 campaigners, scientists, physicians and other experts attended. The forum lent a vigorous dimension to a global campaign for outlawing all nuclear weapons.

ICAN representatives said they will work with governments, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and other partners towards a new treaty banning nuclear weapons. ICAN project manager Magnus Lovold welcomed the 2013 Peace Proposal by Daisaku Ikeda, president of the Tokyo-based Buddhist organisation Soka Gakkai International (SGI).

Ikeda proposed that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and forward-looking governments establish an action group to draft a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) outlawing nuclear weapons – which apart from being inhumane swallow some 105 billion dollars a year at current spending.

SGI executive director for peace affairs Hirotugu Terasaki said that both the ICAN forum and the Oslo government conference had lent significant momentum to ushering in a world without nuclear weapons.

SGI hopes that the G8 Summit in 2015 and the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would serve as milestones towards an expanded summit for a nuclear-weapon-free world.

A broad section of participants at the government conference expressed dismay at the decision of the P5 – the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France – to stay away from the meeting without giving any reasons.

But many nevertheless expressed interest in further exploring the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons “in ways that ensure global participation,” said Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, summarising the outcome of the conference. “States expressed their interest in continuing the discussions, and to broaden the discourse on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons.”

Avoiding any caustic comments on P5’s decision to boycott the conference, Eide asserted: “It is the chair’s view that . . . broad participation (in the conference) reflects the increasing global concern regarding the effects of nuclear weapons detonations, as well as the recognition that this is an issue of fundamental significance to us all.”

These remarks were significant considering that Norway is a founding member of the U.S.-led 28-nation transatlantic military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). NATO announced a “strategic concept” at its Lisbon meeting in November 2010, which “commits NATO to the goal of creating the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons – but reconfirms that, as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world, NATO will remain a nuclear Alliance.”

Answering a question by this correspondent, Eide insisted that Norway was committed to “creating the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons.” In his view, concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation have brought awareness of the continued risks all nukes pose more to the fore than at any time since the vast majority of states signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968.

Since the 2010 review conference of the parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), there has been a growing, if still nascent, movement to outlaw nuclear weapons.

The final document of the review conference notes “deep concern at the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons” and reaffirms “the need for all states at all times to comply with applicable international law, including international humanitarian law.”

This was followed by a resolution by the council of delegates of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in November 2011, strongly appealing to all states “to pursue in good faith and conclude with urgency and determination negotiations to prohibit the use of and completely eliminate nuclear weapons through a legally binding international agreement.”

Subsequently, at the first session of the preparatory committee for the 2015 NPT review conference held in May 2012, 16 countries led by Norway and Switzerland issued a joint statement on the humanitarian dimension of nuclear disarmament, stating that “it is of great concern that, even after the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation remains part of the 21st century international security environment.”

They stressed: “It is of utmost importance that these weapons never be used again, under any circumstances. . . . All States must intensify their efforts to outlaw nuclear weapons and achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.” In October 2012, this statement, with minor revisions, was presented to the first committee of the UN General Assembly by 35 member and observer states.

In line with broad sentiment, ICRC president Peter Maurer welcomed the Norwegian government’s initiative to convene the conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. Although nuclear weapons have been debated in military, technical and geopolitical terms for decades, it is astounding that states have never before come together to address their humanitarian consequences, he said.

*Jamshed Baruah is a disarmament correspondent for IDN-InDepthNews (www.indepthnews.net).

Local activists have begun protests in Slovakia after a government ministry appeared to give its backing to a controversial uranium mining project despite reassurances to people living near the proposed site that no mining would be allowed to take place.

Studies carried out by the Canadian firm European Uranium Resources have shown massive uranium ore deposits in the Kuriskova-Jahodna area, near Kosice, Slovakia’s second largest city.

But fierce local opposition to the plans for a mine had previously led to regional authorities saying they would not let any mining go ahead.

Now, though, it has emerged that just before Christmas, the Slovak Economy Ministry signed a memorandum of understanding with European Uranium Resources – unknown to local authorities in Kosice, the public or the Slovak Environment Ministry.

Environmental groups fear the Economy Ministry is now acting as an unofficial PR agent for the company in a bid to paint the project in the best light possible.

Juraj Rizman, head of Greenpeace Slovakia, told IPS: “The whole memorandum is just part of a process to create positive PR for this exceptionally controversial project and the firm behind it.”

Opposition to the mining project has been strong since it was first announced in 2005 that preliminary surveys of the area were being undertaken.

Local activists and regional authorities across the country organised a petition calling for a ban on all future uranium mining in Slovakia. The petition was signed by more than 100,000 people and became the largest of its kind in Slovak history.

They claim that the mining would destroy the popular Jahodna tourist area just 15km from Kosice, which itself has a population of more than 250,000, as well as posing serious environmental risks to a much larger area.

Among these, they say, is the potential release of radioactive gases and dust, toxic waste and the pollution of important nearby groundwater sources.

The area where the mining would take place straddles three significant sources of water, including one which serves the city of Kosice itself.

The environmental impact of uranium mines, including groundwater pollution, in other parts of the world has been well documented. One of the world’s largest mines, the Ranger mine in Australia’s Kakadu National Park, has had repeated problems with environmental damage and groundwater pollution is reported to be spreading through the UNESCO heritage site.

Uranium mining’s toxic health legacy can also be seen in the neighbouring Czech Republic.

According to studies and official data on work-related illnesses, between 1991 and 2006, just under 76 percent of all malignant cancers recognised as being work-related were from work in the mining and processing of uranium ore.

In the same period, as uranium mines across the country were closed down following the fall of the communist regime, there was an 81 percent drop in the incidence of lung cancer caused by radioactive substances.

Representatives of Ludovika Energy, the Slovak daughter company of European Uranium Resources, refute environmental groups’ claims about the mine.

Maros Havran, spokesman for the company, told IPS that certain environmentalists in Kosice had waged a campaign based on “manipulated facts and open lies” about the mine project to sway public opinion against it.

He said that the company had no plans for industrial activity in the Jahodna area, adding that as it will be underground any changes above ground to the local area would be “minimal”.

He also said the mine would not pose any environmental or health risks, specifically with regard to local water sources. “If the project is prepared and run under Slovak and European legislation and regulations on environmental and health standards for uranium mining and processing, there is no risk. Excellent hydro-geological conditions will also keep water streams and resources in the area safe from any possible harm.”

Ludovika Energy has also been keen to point out the significant benefits of the mine, arguing that the deposits could secure “a safe source of energy for Slovakia for decades” and that the project will create more than 800 jobs and bring in 120 million euros to state coffers via taxes and other payments.

But the former claim is disputed by energy security experts as Slovakia has no facilities to process mined uranium for use in its nuclear power stations and would continue to have to rely on imports of processed uranium from Russia.

The Economy Ministry has defended its signing of the referendum. Ministry spokesman Stanislav Jurikovic told Slovak media that geological surveys had shown that the uranium deposits near Kosice were among some of the most significant in the world and that “it is therefore the responsibility of the ministry to exert the maximum possible effort to gain control over these strategic deposits of uranium ore.”

He added that current legislation did not give the state sufficient power to ensure that it gained the full benefits of any potential mining.

Legal experts have also cast doubt on this claim, saying that under existing legislation the government has more than enough means to check the project at every single stage of its progress.

Environmental groups in Kosice which have formed the “STOP Uranium-Kosice” protest movement say they will continue with protests and have called on local authorities in Kosice to stick to their previously declared intention to reject the project.

Under current legislation, local authorities have the right to veto any mining in the area if and when an application for a licence to mine – which would include a comprehensive and legally binding declaration of its mining methods and what technology it would use – is officially made.

But with this not expected to occur for at least another three years as further feasibility studies and an environmental impact assessment still need to be carried out, Greenpeace says European Uranium Resources has enough time to promote its project among politicians and the public.

Rizman told IPS: “At this stage the firm can say whatever it wants about its plans because they are not legally binding.

“Their statements about their project and their criticism of local environmental activists are part of a long-term, wide-ranging PR campaign designed to improve both the public’s and politicians’ view of their project with the possible aim of influencing, as much as they can, public opinion before the project is subjected to an Environmental Impact Assessment.”

Nuclear energy and defence deals will be high on the agenda when French President François Hollande makes a state visit to India this week, but few analysts expect any solid contracts to result from the two-day trip Thursday and Friday.

“Because the nuclear industry is so much about show, and because so many countries want to be part of the nuclear club, there is a lot of talk and gentleman’s agreements saying they will cooperate and they will work together. But you don’t see too many contracts being signed,” says Sophia Majnoni, nuclear issues spokesperson for Greenpeace France.

Amid state banquets and corporate wining and dining, French officials are hoping to conclude negotiations on the sale of two reactors for India’s controversial Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project, which would be the largest nuclear power generating station in the world if realised.

Some sources close to French nuclear engineering company Areva indicated at last month’s World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi that talks were indeed moving ahead; but several non-governmental organisations and industry insiders have said that this is wishful thinking on the part of the nuclear sector here.

“Every time a French president goes to India, they’re always close to a deal to sell some power plants. It’s been a running joke for some time now,” said Joël Vormus, energy and environment project manager for the Comité de Liaison Energies Renouvelables (CLER), a non-governmental network of more than 200 professionals in the renewable energy sector in France.

“Each time we hear it, we more or less don’t believe it. Even the technology that we’re selling to Finland is way behind schedule,” he told IPS, referring to a European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) being built by French concerns on Olkiluoto Island, Western Finland, that has been beset by delays and cost hikes.

Anti-nuclear activists say that it is paradoxical that Holland’s administration is supporting the sale of nuclear technology abroad even as he has proposed reducing the amount of electricity generated from nuclear power in France to 50 percent from the current 75 percent by 2030.

It all comes down to economic issues, says Greenpeace’s Majnoni. “It’s very clear to us that because Hollande wants to reduce the share of nuclear in the French electricity mix, he has to sell nuclear (technology) abroad to be able to save jobs here and to have something to give to the nuclear industry in exchange,” she told IPS.

“It’s very tactical, and Germany and Japan have done it before,” she added. “They had the same strategy of exporting nuclear because their internal market was no longer there. All the countries that are phasing out nuclear for whatever reason – whether political or because of accidents – have to develop their export industry to balance their political decision.”

According to Greenpeace, the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011 changed the playing field because India, for instance, adopted a “progressive liability regime” to make nuclear suppliers liable in the event of an accident. “This is not acceptable for France,” Majnoni said.

But whether the technology comes from France or elsewhere, India has made it clear that nuclear power is an essential part of its energy mix. On a visit to Paris shortly after the Fukushima catastrophe, Dr. Srikumar Banerjee, a nuclear scientist who was then chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, told IPS that the country was “reassessing safety” but that India has had a “good record” for more than 35 years.

“Our energy demands are very large, with growth of more than 10 percent a year, and these demands need to be met,” he said.

Another possible brake on concluding negotiations, however, could be the financial aspect, analysts told IPS. When Areva and the state-owned Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) began negotiations three years ago, the cost of the two European Pressurised Reactors for Jaitapur was put at 5.4 billion euros. But insiders say Areva now wants to renegotiate the price, which India is not happy about.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Indian analyst told IPS that it would be surprising if French officials came away with any agreement at the end of this week, despite the high-level delegation that will be accompanying Hollande.

The visiting group comprises key government officials such as ecology and energy minister Delphine Batho, and leading corporate executives such as Eric Trappier, the chief executive of French aircraft maker Dassault Aviation. The President’s partner Valerie Trierweiller will also be at his side.

Hollande will meet with Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh as well as with the chairperson of the ruling United Progressive Alliance, Sonia Gandhi. He will see the leader of the opposition Sushma Swaraj and also meet with key business leaders in Mumbai, officials in France told IPS.

After numerous delays, India is still scheduled to purchase 126 French-built Rafale fighter jets from Dassault, in a deal reportedly worth more than 10 billion euros. During the huge five-day Aero India biennial air show that ended in Bangalore on Feb. 10, Trappier told French media that the company hoped to finalise the Rafale deal in 2013. This would be the first foreign sale of the fighter plane, which has seen few international buyers lining up despite multi-billion euro investments in its production.

An industry expert, who asked not to be named, told IPS this week that Indian officials have said that there’s still a “lot of work to be done” on negotiations, and that the time span to accomplish this would probably last until the end of this year. He predicted that an agreement would come before the next Indian general elections, scheduled for 2014.

For its part, New Delhi has stuck to diplomatic language with a statement that “relations between India and France have been laid on strong historical foundations and shared values.” With the upgrade of links to strategic partnership in 1998, the “relationship has become multifaceted and symbiotic in areas such as defence, civil nuclear energy, space and counter-terrorism,” it added. (END)

Crackdown on women protesters against the Kudankulam nuclear plant in India. Credit: K. S. Harikrishnan/IPS.

By K. S. Harikrishnan
KUDANKULAM, India, Feb 3 2013 (IPS)

An indefinite struggle continues against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in the southern Indian state Tamil Nadu despite a government crackdown on protests.

Idinthakarai, a village in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, has become the hub of a mass agitation which started on Aug. 16 in 2011. Hundreds of men, women and children from a group of 12 villages are leading a campaign to stall operation of the nuclear plant. The public agitation intensified after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.

The villagers say they have been facing false propaganda through the media, foreign money, threats from goons, prohibitory orders against meeting in public places, harassment from officials, abuse from policemen, cases of sedition in courts, and arrest warrants.

The movement has become a major headache for the government, S. P. Udayakumar, leader of the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Power (PMANP) told IPS. The sit-in-protest at Idinthakarai has now continued more than 500 days.

“The goons of the establishment threatened my family members and destroyed my school near Nagercoil in Kanyakumari district. The government wants to arrest me to shatter the mental strength of the Kudankulam villagers. The central government has portrayed me as an American agent to isolate me from the rest of the supporters.”

Fearing constant snooping by the national intelligence agencies and arrest by the Tamil Nadu police, the front leaders of the PMANP are staying at undisclosed areas.

Rajalakshmi, a woman living at Kudnakulam, said that senior leaders of the movement did not attend weddings and funeral prayers for fear of arrest. “It is a risk for leaders to be present at functions.”

The backbone of the Kudankulam agitation are the fishers, who believe that the plant is a threat to their livelihood.

“The fishermen have had to borrow millions of dollars from banks to stay alive and feed their families as they have stopped going to sea,” Tamil writer Joe D’cruz from Uvari village told IPS. “The allegation of foreign funds sustaining the agitation is false propaganda meant to malign the people’s movement.”

Women have been particularly active in the protests. “Even though police are continuing their threats, women protesters are going to every house to canvas people,” said Balammal from Chettikulam village.

On Aug. 13 last year, children marched to the district collector’s office and complained that the Nuclear Power Corporation of India has not followed disaster management norms in the construction of the plant.

“We strongly oppose the plant which will destroy our coming generation,” Arun, a ten-year-old boy told IPS.

Teachers say anxiety has crept into schools. “They have strong views against the plant. The stress has affected a few students’ performance in the examination,” said a teacher at the St.Annes Higher Secondary School at Kudankulam.

Gopal, a young protester from Kuttappilli village, said that some who are protesting today were the children who participated in the agitation in 1988 when India signed a pact with erstwhile Soviet Union to construct a nuclear plant at Kudankulam.

Protesters recognise their limits. “We are ordinary people and hold strong peaceful protests, but we cannot do much to oppose the establishment,” said Udayakumar.

International researchers into the health effects of radiation say the protest is justified because of geographical factors. V.T. Padmanabhan, well-known scientist and member of the European Commission on Radiation Risk, points out that the power plant is situated on a volcano site.

“Geological studies show that there are many possibilities of a tsunami in the Gulf of Mannar region which is very close to Kudankulam,” he told IPS. “Another important threat is the using of sea water instead of fresh water as a coolant element in the nuclear reaction processes.”

The agitation has won wide support from environmentalists and independent groups from the neighbouring states Kerala and Karnataka.

The commissioning of the 2000 MW nuclear power plant at Kudankulam has been delayed due to undisclosed technical problems.

Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission R.K. Sinha has said there is no major issue behind the delay. But he declined to give any specific date for commissioning.

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.”