COMMENT Changing the disarmament
game By Rebecca Johnson
LONDON - Twenty-five years ago, on
December 8, presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and
Ronald Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This historic
agreement eliminated a modern class of land-based
"theater" weapons - the SS20s, cruise and Pershing
missiles - that had been brought into Europe in
the early 1980s.
The breakthrough
surprised most mainstream military and political
analysts, but was hailed by European peace
activists whose efforts to achieve this outcome
had been derided by experts right up to the
Reykjavik Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev in
October 1986.
Gorbachev, however, has paid
tribute to the role of civil society. Asked a few
years ago what made him "trust" Reagan, the former
Soviet leader said that he
didn't trust Reagan at all; he took the risk to go
to Reykjavik and propose nuclear disarmament
because he trusted the European peace movement and
Greenham Common women to make sure that the US
would not take an unfair advantage if he took the
first step.
Gorbachev also spoke about
being moved to act after reading about studies by
Russian and American scientists that showed how
life on Earth could be obliterated by the "nuclear
winter" aftermath of a nuclear war.
Such a
thorough understanding of the humanitarian
consequences of nuclear weapons has been missing
from mainstream debates since then. Groupthink
among government officials, arms controllers,
funders and security experts have served to
perpetuate the realpolitik notion that nuclear
disarmament is an extraordinarily difficult
military-technical process that only the
nuclear-armed states can take forward.
Such an attitude has given increased power
to the nuclear states, forcing nuclear-free
countries into the supplicant role of calling for
disarmament while simultaneously being
marginalized as cheerleaders on the sidelines of
the real game.
The nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ญ the jewel in the
crown of Cold War arms control ญ has long been in
trouble, but its adherents keep hoping that enough
band-aids can be applied to keep the NPT regime
and review process going. Squandering the
opportunities created by the end of the Cold War,
diplomatic gesture politics have failed to address
the major nuclear threats in the real world, while
the NPT paradoxically reinforces a prominent role
for nuclear weapons in the security policies of a
handful of governments.
It came as little
surprise, therefore, to hear from the US
Department of State on November 23 that the much
heralded conference on a Middle East zone free of
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) "cannot be
convened because of present conditions in the
Middle East and the fact that states in the region
have not reached agreement on acceptable
conditions for a conference".
Iran, which
only agreed to participate in the conference a few
weeks earlier, predictably seized the high ground
and castigated the US for holding the conference -
that had been mandated by the 2010 NPT Review
Conference - hostage "for the sake of Israel".
Nabil Elaraby, the Arab League's
secretary-general, warned that failure to convene
the conference "would negatively impact on the
regional security system and the international
system to prevent nuclear proliferation".
As Israel bombs Palestinians in Gaza,
Israelis are being frightened and hurt by missiles
on buses that are being fired in retaliation.
Nuclear weapons bring no security, but their
deployment in volatile regions like the Middle
East, South Asia, North-East Asia and also Europe
distract from genuine security requirements and
add a massive additional threat to peace.
The nuclear possessors make the situation
worse by talking about preventing nuclear
terrorism while hiding behind the voodoo of
nuclear deterrence ญ as if by wearing the weapons
they can avoid having to worry about anyone using
them.
Recent initiatives by the
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
(ICAN), the Red Cross and a growing number of
governments have begun to arouse global interest
in the humanitarian effects of nuclear weapons.
On November 22, Norway's Foreign Minister
Espen Barth Eide invited all United Nations
governments to send senior officials and experts
to participate in an international conference on
the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons on
March 4-5, 2013, in Oslo.
The aim of the
conference is "to provide an arena for a
fact-based discussion of the humanitarian and
developmental consequences associated with a
nuclear weapon detonation. All interested states,
as well as UN organizations, representatives of
civil society and other relevant stakeholders are
invited to the conference."
This
conference aims to bring together not only
scientists and doctors to talk about the immediate
blast, flash-burns, fires and radiation that would
incinerate and contaminate millions, but also
agencies that deal with refugees, food insecurity
and the medical needs of millions of homeless,
starving people, all of which will be compounded
by predicted longer term effects such as nuclear
winter and global famine that the detonation of
less than 1% of today's nuclear arsenals would
cause.
Leaders have to think in
humanitarian and environmental terms, as Gorbachev
did.
The nuclear free countries have to
stop behaving like passive supplicants, giving
veto powers to their nuclear-armed neighbors.
Unlike traditional arms control, humanitarian
disarmament approaches recognize that everyone has
the right and responsibility to take steps to
prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
The
best way to do this is to ban and eliminate
nuclear weapons. Once the nuclear-free countries
acknowledge their own power and responsibility,
they will find that a nuclear ban treaty can be
far quicker and simpler to achieve than they
thought. By changing the legal context, such a
treaty would be a game changer, draining power and
status from the nuclear-armed governments and
hastening their understanding of their own
security interests, increasing the imperative for
concerted nuclear disarmament rather than
perpetual proliferation.
Rebecca
Johnson is executive director and co-founder
of the Acronym Institute and vice chair of the
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
(ICAN).
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