Current Events March

The Hindu newspaper for March 10 printed an article that started out:

India aspires for a non-violent, atomic weapons-free world and believes that the international community should conclude “universal, non-discriminatory and verifiable prohibitions on nuclear weapons” leading to their complete elimination, Vice-President Hamid Ansari said here on Sunday.

Inaugurating the 18th World Congress of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) here, Mr. Ansari said among the actionable and concrete steps towards achieving nuclear disarmament were “negotiation of a nuclear weapons convention prohibiting the development, production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons and on their destruction,” leading to the global, non-discriminatory and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons with a specified time frame.

On March 4 in Geneva, Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki called for the dismantling of nuclear weapons worldwide. So India and Iran want to eliminate nuclear weapons. Good idea. On the other hand, the Associated Press tells us that:

Arab countries will walk away from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty if Israel ever officially acknowledges it has nuclear weapons, the Arab League announced in a statement Wednesday.

As Arab foreign ministers met at the Cairo headquarters of the Arab League to prepare for their annual summit at the end of the month, they also issued a series of statements on regional issues, including the extremely sensitive matter of Israel's refusal to join the NPT.

As soon as Israel announces it has nuclear weapons, the Arabs will announce their withdrawal from the Nonproliferation Treaty, the statement said.

Israel is widely believed to be the only country in the Middle East to have nuclear weapons, though it maintains a policy of ambiguity, insisting it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the region, without confirming or denying their existence.

The emergence of yet another threat to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). Here we anti-nuclear activists have been thinking that the NPT was going to die because of the US-India deal. Now we learn that the Arab states are going to walk out if it ever becomes too obvious that Israel has nuclear weapons. The NPT now depends on the successful maintenance of a lie, or at least the denial of a truth. And if the truth is told, the Middle East will soon be full of nuclear weapons.

This new threat lends even greater urgency to Sam Nunn’s reluctant appeal for nuclear abolition, expressed in an interview in this month’s Arms Control Today:

I believe that the threat has fundamentally changed. We went through the Cold War, where we had a great danger of escalation from conventional [warfare] to tactical nuclear weapons, right up the ladder to strategic nuclear weapons. I was convinced that, at the battlefield front, [NATO's] military people were going to ask for nuclear release at the very beginning of any conventional war. So I spent a great deal of time in the Senate to try and strengthen conventional forces in Europe so we could raise the nuclear threshold and make it where we would have at least several days, maybe even weeks, to make a decision [to go nuclear].

[More recently,] the work we've done with the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI)-particularly on the fuel bank,[2] securing and reducing nuclear material stockpiles, trying to convert reactors around the globe from using highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium,[3] and advocating a fissile material cutoff[4]-has convinced me that we simply are not going to get the cooperation we need around the globe to take the steps that are essential for our security without having a restoration of the vision that was laid down in the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Whether we agree on the interpretation or not, the world perceives that the countries with nuclear weapons made a pledge to step-by-step reduce them, make them less relevant, and eventually get rid of them.[5]

The nuclear fuel bank is aimed at trying to prevent proliferation of uranium-enrichment facilities all over the globe.[6] But when you start talking to people about the fuel bank, you find out pretty quickly that there's no interest even among our best friends, in setting up another have and have-not regime: those who have and can enrich uranium and those who have not and will not be able to enrich. That is why it's hard to get traction in terms of sanctions against Iran. It's hard to get unity on a lot of things and, I think, it will get increasingly difficult.

Therefore, in my view, we're moving toward a nuclear nightmare with more enrichment, more nuclear materials, and more know-how around the globe and terrorist groups who have made it very clear they are doing everything they can to get these weapons. Thus, I believe the vision and the steps go together. The way I like to express it is that we ought to make nuclear weapons less relevant and less important, prevent nuclear weapons or materials from getting in the hands of dangerous people, and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons as a threat to the world.

Sam Nunn is a former chairman of the US Armed Services Committee. The statement above is clearly one of a true cold warrior, and yet, he has come to the conclusion that the time has come to get rid of nuclear weapons. India wants to do it. Iran wants to do it. The Arabs are warning us we need to do it now, before it gets too obvious that Israel has them. So why don’t we just do it?

The problem is, our generals are still fighting the last war, the Cold War. That war was structured by a struggle for dominance between two lions, the US and the USSR. Because they believed themselves threatened, they both felt it was important to make sure their teeth, claws and nuclear weapons were bigger and more threatening than the other lion’s. The only hope for survival was to keep the other lion too afraid to attack.

Today, the situation has changed completely. There is only one lion, and that lion is being threatened not by other lions or bears or tigers but by bacteria and viruses. Teeth, claws and nuclear weapons are completely useless against bacteria. In fact, nuclear weapons are far more useful to the bacteria than the lion. Why? Because the bacteria don’t care if the lion dies. The lion is vulnerable to nuclear weapons. The bacteria are not.

It is far more difficult to sustain the life of a complicated organism like a lion or a country or a civilization than it is to destroy it. All the bacteria have to do is trick the lion into fighting back with nuclear weapons. At that point, the lion dies from a hyper-reaction of its own immune system. A war against internal bacteria is entirely different from a war against an external rival of the same or similar species. And yet, our generals talk and act as if nothing has changed. They retain the delusion that their nuclear weapons are deterring someone.

The CIA has told us it is highly unlikely that anyone will ever attack the US with missiles. If the US suffers a nuclear attack, the weapon will be built in the US or arrive by truck or boat. Against that kind of enemy, even the largest nuclear arsenal is meaningless. Is the US willing to obliterate the whole Middle East because a terrorist takes out most of Chicago? Will Washington bomb Los Angeles if it learns the terrorists might be living in Hacienda Heights?

If the NPT dies, nuclear weapons will spread like wildfire. If Israel admits to having the nuclear weapons everyone knows it has, nuclear weapons will spread through the Middle East. As I keep saying, we are standing at the precipice. Will we get rid of them or let everyone have one? As the A-bomb survivors put it, will we eliminate nuclear weapons or will they eliminate us? The answer lies in our ability to recognize and adapt to our new situation.