Current Events April 08
Last January Seema Guha informed us in Daily News and Analysis India that Britain’s Prime Minister Brown thinks it is time to get rid of nuclear weapons:
NEW DELHI: In a radical departure from the existing British position, Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke for a nuclear weapon-free world and called on the US and Russia to reduce their stockpiles.
However Brown did not spell out the way forward or whether Britain would be willing to take the initiative and eliminate its own nuclear arsenal. Addressing leaders of Indian and British industry here on Monday, Brown highlighted the threats to world peace posed by nuclear weapons.
“Facing serious challenges from Iran and North Korea, we must send a powerful signal to all members of the international community that the race for more and bigger stockpiles of nuclear destruction is over.’’
He said the time had also come for the US and Russia to further reduce their stockpiles of nuclear warheads. He called for the stalled fissile material cut-off treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to be taken up urgently.
“And let me say today, Britain is prepared to use our expertise to help determine the requirements for the verifiable elimination of nuclear warheads.”
Admittedly, this is a weak call for the elimination of nuclear weapons, but he is edging closer. Meanwhile, much stronger calls have been issued by the likes of Henry Kissinger and even Barack Obama, a leading candidate and possible president of the United States. Why is nuclear abolition suddenly getting support from such unexpected quarters? I wonder if it might have something to do with this article by Hamid Mir in Pakistan’s The Daily Star:
A former American CIA agent and nuclear expert David Dastych has claimed that main nuclear arsenals of Pakistan, India, Britain, France, the USA, Russia and China are safe but nuclear proliferation could not be controlled now because it has completely slipped out of control.
He said some corrupt officials of the US defence and state departments were involved in the theft of US nuclear secrets which were sold to many countries including Israel and Pakistan.
In an exclusive interview with Hamid Mir, he said questioning Pakistani scientist Dr A Q Khan is not of any high value now. He said Russian-made small neutron bombs are a real threat to world peace. David Dastych (65) was recruited to Polish intelligence in 1961. He joined CIA in 1973 and became a double agent. He served in the USA, Europe, Vietnam, and China and in other countries.
Could it be that the US is waking up to the proliferation threat? If so, it is a slow and drowsy awakening. Instead of nuclear weapons abolition or even non-proliferation, the US appears to be committed to “counterproliferation.” “Non-proliferation” means preventing proliferation based on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “Counterproliferation” means preventing proliferation through economic or military coercion. The Times of India provided a good example on April 15:
US goes for the jugular in Pakistan
WASHINGTON: Finally acknowledging that Pakistan represents a clear and present danger to American and world security, the Bush administration is trying to get a stranglehold on the country’s nuclear weapons.
In the latest move, Washington has sought direct access to Pakistan’s Nuclear Command Authority by posting an officer at the US embassy in Islamabad to liaise with the body that controls the country’s nuclear weapons.
The demand, first reported in Pakistani newspapers Jang and News , comes even as US president George Bush said in a TV interview on the weekend that a future 9/11 kind of attack would most likely emanate from Pakistan, not Afghanistan.
Bush and high-ranking US officials had previously glossed over Pakistan’s role as the hub of world terror while targeting Iraq.
Most major terror attacks in the world have emanated from Pakistan, and not from the usual US suspects like Iran, Iraq and Syria.
The US administration’s attempts to get a stranglehold on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons show that Washington now appears to have come out in the open about a country that has long been described by many analysts as the most dangerous place on earth and the ground zero of world terror.
One of the problems with this approach is revealed later in the article:
Pakistan’s security mavens have gone ballistic over the US security bear hug.
"The first step in dealing rationally with our indigenous terrorist problem holistically and credibly is to create space between ourselves and the US. As the US adage goes: ‘There is no free lunch.’ For Pakistan, lunching with the US has become unacceptably costly," wrote Shireen Mazari, who heads the Pakistan Institute of Strategic Studies.
While Mazari wants Islamabad to punish the US by denying it access to Afghanistan, other analysts point out that Pakistan will be toast within weeks without US financial and institutional support.
It turns out counterproliferation is not very popular among those being coerced. Another problem is that counterproliferation is impossible. In 1946 Robert Oppenheimer, scientific leader of the Manhattan Project, met with President Harry Truman, who asked him, “How long do you think it will be until the Russians have the bomb?” Oppenheimer said he had no idea, to which Truman replied, “Well I do. They’ll never get it. We’ll see to that.”
US proponents of counterproliferation are seriously deluded if they think they can keep nuclear weapons under control while maintaining an arsenal of their own. The world is no longer in the mood to accept the two-tiered structure of nuclear haves and have-nots. As evidence, I offer a comment that appeared in the Washington Post on January 25, 2008:
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN, JANUARY 25--At a press conference in Islamabad today, Pakistani Brig. Gen. Atta M. Iqhman expressed concern about U.S. procedures for handling nuclear weapons. Iqhman, who oversees the safety and security of the Pakistani nuclear force, said that U.S. protocols for storing and handling nuclear weapons are inadequate. "In Pakistan, we store nuclear warheads separately from their delivery systems, and a nuclear warhead can only be activated if three separate officers agree," Iqhman said. "In the United States, almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons still sit atop missiles, on hair-trigger alert, and it only takes two launch-control officers to activate a nuclear weapon. The U.S. government has persistently ignored arms control experts around the world who have said they should at least de-alert their weapons."
This article was presented as a joke by the American press. It is not a joke. What the Pakistanis are saying is, “Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” It becomes even less of a joke when we learn from ISN (International Relations and Security News) Zurich that:
On 8 March, Arab League foreign ministers released a statement sharply at odds with the established Arab position on Israeli nuclear development, warning that Arab states would immediately withdraw from the NPT if Israel ended its long-term policy of ambiguity through admitting it had atomic weapons.
While unsure of the statement's provenance, Landau said it appeared to be made "in the context of the whole dynamic with regard to Iran."
“To say that if Israel admits it has nuclear weapons they would withdraw from the NPT is saying to Israel, 'Don't say anything on your nuclear policy. Keep that whole issue quiet and then Arab states will not be forced to react.”
Everyone knows Israel has nuclear weapons, but if they admit it, the Arab states will have to have them, too. If the Arab states decide to withdraw from the NPT and build nuclear weapons, who is going to stop them? Israel? The US? At what cost?
This prospect is enough to give even confirmed neocon militarists pause. On March 26 in Los Angeles, John McCain said:
"We should work to reduce nuclear arsenals all around the world, starting with our own. Forty years ago, the five declared nuclear powers came together in support of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and pledged to end the arms race and move toward nuclear disarmament. The time has come to renew that commitment. We do not need all the weapons currently in our arsenal. The United States should lead a global effort at nuclear disarmament consistent with our vital interests and the cause of peace."
This comment shows that, though he is trying to appear reasonable, McCain must not be elected president. He obviously does not understand the situation. He is not talking abolition, only reduction; he is still aiming at a world in which the US maintains nuclear weapons and nuclear dominance. This means he, like all militarists in this day and age, is out of touch with reality.
A far more realistic appraisal came from Ted Turner the previous day at Yale University:
I want to start by making the statement: I have given a great deal of thought over a number of years to the nuclear situation and been very concerned and worried and thankful at the same time that nothing has seriously gone wrong - that we haven't had a nuclear exchange or nuclear annihilation. But my conclusion - and I will talk about how I got there little later - my conclusion, because I want to be certain to make it very clear, my conclusion is that the only solution to proliferation, the only way that we are going to get out of this box that we have built for ourselves is a complete abolition of all nuclear weapons all over the world and agreement by all countries not to make, use, deploy or do anything with any weapons of mass destruction, but certainly not nuclear.
On March 31, Jocka Fischer writing for the Guardian had this to say about the situation:
Humans love to suppress abstract dangers. They react only after they get their fingers burned. In handling nuclear risks, however, we can hardly get away with such childlike behavior. To begin with, the old system of nuclear deterrence, which has survived particularly in the US and Russia since the cold war's end, still involves lots of risks and dangers. While the international public largely ignores this fact, the risks remain.
To be sure, in the 1990's the US and Russia reduced their nuclear arsenals from 65,000 to approximately 26,000 weapons. But this number is still almost unimaginable and beyond any rational level needed for deterrence. Moreover, there are another 1,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of other nuclear states.
A second cause for worry is that the world is poised to enter a new nuclear age that threatens to be even more dangerous and expensive than the cold war era of mutually assured destruction. Indeed, the outlines of this new nuclear age are already visible: the connection between terrorism and nuclear weapons; a nuclear-armed North Korea; the risk of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East triggered by Iran's nuclear program; a new definition of state sovereignty as "nuclear sovereignty", accompanied by a massive increase in the number of small and medium-sized nuclear states; possible collapse of public order in nuclear Pakistan; the illegal proliferation of military nuclear technology; the legal proliferation of civilian nuclear technology and an increase in the number of "civilian" nuclear states; the nuclearisation of space, triggering an arms race among large nuclear powers.
Important political leaders, especially in the two biggest nuclear powers, the US and Russia, know today's existing risks and tomorrow's emerging ones all too well. Yet nothing is being done to control, contain, or eliminate them. On the contrary, the situation is worsening.
In case you have forgotten about that worsening situation, let me remind you what General Lee Butler, formerly responsible for the strategic nuclear forces of the US Air Force and the Navy, had to say about nuclear weapons:
"Nuclear weapons give no quarter. Their effects transcend time and place, poisoning the Earth and deforming its inhabitants for generation upon generation. They leave us wholly without defence, expunge all hope for meaningful survival. They hold in their sway not just the fate of nations, but the very meaning of civilisation."
I have said it before and I will say it again. The human family is deciding right now whether to eliminate nuclear weapons or use them. At the moment, we are hurtling down the road to catastrophe.