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Working together to arm the
globe
By Jonathan Schell
The review conference of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a five-yearly
event, opened in New York on May 2 without benefit
of an agenda. The conference had no agenda because
the world has no agenda with respect to nuclear
arms. Broadly speaking, two groups of nations are
setting the pace of events. One - the possessors
of nuclear arms under the terms of the treaty,
comprising the United States, Russia, Britain,
France and China - want to hold on to their nuclear
arsenals indefinitely. The other group - call them
the proliferators - has only recently acquired the
weapons or would like to do so. Notable among them
are North Korea, which by its own account has
built a small arsenal, and Iran, which appears to
be using its domestic nuclear-power program to
create a nuclear-weapons capacity.
As the
conference began, Iran announced that it would
soon end a moratorium on the production of fissile
materials and Pyongyang declared that it had
become a full-fledged nuclear power - a
declaration buttressed by testimony in the US
Senate from the director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby,
that North Korea now has rockets capable of
landing nuclear warheads on the US. If the two
countries establish themselves as nuclear powers,
a long list of other countries in the Middle East
and North Asia may seek to follow suit. In that
case, the NPT will be a dead letter, and the gates
of unlimited proliferation will swing open.
The two groups of nations are in
collision. The possessors want to stop the
proliferators, and the proliferators want to defy
them as well as ask them to get rid of their own
mountainous nuclear arsenals. One of the liveliest
debates at the conference concerns the nuclear
fuel cycle, whereby fuel for both nuclear power
and nuclear bomb materials is made. In the
possessor countries, proposals abound to restrict
this capacity to themselves, thus digging a moat
around not only their arsenals but their nuclear
productive capacities as well. The proliferators
respond that the world's nuclear double-standard
should not be fortified but eliminated: in the
long run, either everyone should have the right to
the fuel cycle - and for that matter to the bombs
- or no one should. (This was the view of Pakistan
and India until, in May 1998, they remedied the
inequity in their own cases by testing nuclear
weapons and declaring themselves nuclear powers.)
Far more contentious is the new American
military doctrine of pre-emptive war, aimed at
stopping proliferation by force, as the United
States said it sought to do by overthrowing the
government of Iraq. Inasmuch as the Bush
administration has suggested that even nuclear
force might be used, the new policy represents the
ultimate extreme of the double standard: the US
will use nuclear weapons to stop other countries
from getting those same weapons. The proliferators
accordingly fear a world whose commanding heights
will be guarded by the nuclear cannons of a few
nations, while the rest of the world cowers in the
planet's lowlands and back alleys. Nuclear
disarmament, once the domain of the peace-loving,
would become a prime engine of war in an imposed,
militarized global order.
The debate
between the nuclear haves and have-nots is
probably unresolvable anytime soon. Certainly it
will not be settled at the review conference. And
yet, as is true of so many adversaries, the two
groups of nations have more in common with each
other than with other nations: they both want
nuclear weapons. And if one looks at what is
happening on the ground, a remarkable uniformity
appears. All the parties in this quarrel are
expanding their nuclear capacities and missions.
In a sense the two groups, even as they threaten
each other with annihilation, are cooperating in
nuclearizing the globe.
The end of the
Cold War was supposed to be the beginning of a
farewell to nuclear danger, but now, 15 years
later, it's clear that a nuclear renaissance is
under way. China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and
Britain are all increasing their arsenals and/or
their delivery systems. (In an amazingly
undernoticed development, the shadow of danger
from Chinese nuclear weapons is falling over
larger and larger areas of the United States.) The
US, even as it reduces the number of its alert
nuclear weapons - though not the total number of
nuclear weapons, alert or otherwise - is rotating
its nuclear guns away from their traditional Cold
War targets and toward Third World sites. (The US
and Russia built up such an excess of nuclear
bombs during the Cold War that they can string out
their dismantlement almost indefinitely without
carving into their joint capacity to finish off
most of human civilization.) Britain likewise is
redirecting its targeting. Its defense secretary
has stated that even the modest step of declaring
no-first-use of nuclear weapons "would be
incompatible with our and NATO's doctrine of
deterrence, nor would it further nuclear
disarmament objectives". In other words, Britain
may find it necessary to initiate a nuclear war to
achieve nuclear disarmament. Finally, individuals
and terrorist groups are reaching for the bomb and
other weapons of mass destruction. Osama bin
Laden, for instance, has declared that obtaining
such is the "religious duty" of Muslims, and
September 11 gave us an example of how he might
use them.
All but unheard in the snarling
din are the true voices of peace - voices calling
on the one group of nations to resist the demonic
allure of nuclear arms and on the other group to
rid themselves of the ones they have, leaving the
world with a single standard: no nuclear weapons.
Of the countries represented at the conference,
183 have found it entirely possible to live
without atomic arsenals, and few - barring a
breakdown of the treaty - show any sign of
changing their minds. In the UN General Assembly
the vast majority of them have voted regularly for
nuclear abolition. Behind those votes stand the
people of the world, who, when asked, agree. Even
the people of the United States are in the
consensus. Presented by AP pollsters in March with
the statement, "No country should be allowed to
have nuclear weapons," 66% agreed. In other
countries, the percentage of supporters is higher.
On the day their voices are heard and their will
made active, the end of the nuclear age will be in
sight.
Jonathan Schell, author
of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation
Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The
Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published
by Nation Books.
(Copyright 2005
Jonathan Schell)
This article appeared on
Tomdispatch.com and is
published with permission. |
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