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Nukes back in fashion, warns Hiroshima
mayor
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - The mayor of the Japanese city of Hiroshima,
Tadatoshi Akiba, is convinced that 58 years after his
city was laid to waste by an atom bomb, the world is
about to use nuclear weapons once again.
According to Akiba, the world has become
sufficiently inured to the horrors of nuclear weapons as
to change its justification for the building up and
maintenance of nuclear stockpiles, from one of
"deterrence" to one of talking in terms of "usable
nuclear weapons" and "pre-emptive options".
"The
policy [of the United States] has now shifted to
something which will be used," Akiba, who is on an
anti-nuclear campaign in South Asia' s nuclear-armed
states, India and Pakistan, told IPS on Tuesday.
The Bush administration plans to resume the
design, production and testing of a new generation of
"low-yield" nuclear weapons - called mini-nukes - and
nuclear "bunker busters", which are deemed to be more
"usable".
But Washington's plans to develop
mini-nukes have come under widespread criticism as being
violative of the 1968 nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty
(NPT), to which the other recognized nuclear-power
states, including Britain, China, Russia and France, are
signatories.
Among those critics is Mohamed
ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) who has warned that Washington's example
may encourage other countries that have nuclear weapons
to violate the NPT, not to mention those that are not
signatories to the treaty.
The IAEA, tasked with
monitoring the NPT and its violations, has at present
trained its sights on Iran, and given that country an
October 31 deadline by which to prove that it does not
have an atomic weapons program as alleged by Washington.
Iran has begun releasing details of components
imported unofficially for its nuclear program. But
Iranian Foreign Minister Karnal Kharrazi was quoted as
telling religious leaders earlier this month, "We will
not allow anyone to deprive us of our legitimate right
to use nuclear technology, particularly enrichment for
providing fuel for nuclear power stations."
There are many who think that countries like
Iran are being unfairly targeted by the US - and the
IAEA acting at Washington's behest - and that they are
meanwhile allowing countries like Israel - known to have
a sizeable nuclear arsenal without ever acknowledging it
- to go scot-free.
India and Pakistan fall in a
class by themselves as self-declared nuclear powers that
are not among the 190-odd signatories to the NPT or the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. They consider these
accords discriminatory.
While Pakistan is a
close ally of the US in its "war against terror" in
neighboring Afghanistan, India has, under a
five-year-old, right-wing government, openly sought
military alignment with the US, and more recently with
Israel.
"The United States and other nuclear
weapon states have failed to take any clear action to
abolish nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan, while
chronic tension between these two countries make their
continued possession of these horrific weapons
intolerable," said Akiba, who ended a two-day visit
Wednesday and left for London.
On his tour of
the sub-continent, Akiba is carrying with him a message
for the leaders of India and Pakistan, urging them to
visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and "see with their own
eyes what nuclear weapons have in store for humanity".
"I urge President Pervez Musharraf and Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the strongest terms to
rid their countries of these heinous, inhumane, illegal
and evil weapons," said Akiba, who is going to Pakistan
later in October.
But while in India, Akiba
failed to catch the eye of senior leaders. A meeting
with the usually accessible Defense Minister George
Fernandes was cancelled at the last minute, leaving him
with less than influential interactions with members of
the academic community at the Jawaharlal Nehru
University.
Akiba said he expected to do no
better in Pakistan but still hopes to meet Pakistan
Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali, if not Musharraf
himself, to convey his anti-nuclear message and promote
the "Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons".
When India and Pakistan carried out tit-for-tat
nuclear weapons tests in 1998, their governments were
enthusiastically cheered on by supporters who took to
the streets with raucous celebrations that betrayed
ignorance of the devastation they faced from a possible
all-out nuclear war.
Also, far from acting as
deterrents, the possession of nuclear weapons seemed
only to have goaded the neighbors into open warfare at
Kargil in 1999 and a dangerous military standoff in 2002
when the leaders of both countries announced readiness
to engage in nuclear warfare.
Currently, the
South Asian neighbors are engaged in an arms race that
can only further any possibility of a peaceful
settlement of the their territorial dispute in Kashmir.
On Friday last week, India signed a
billion-dollar deal with Israel to buy Phalcon
early-warning radar systems that would enable it to look
deep within Pakistan territory when mounted on its
Russian-built IL-76 bomber aircraft.
Phalcon
systems can act as airborne surveillance systems capable
of spotting hostile aircraft round the clock, regardless
of weather conditions, and take measures to intercept
them.
Pakistan's answer to the Phalcon deal has
been the test-firing this month of a series of
nuclear-capable missiles, the last of which was fired on
Tuesday.
Akiba said he could not understand how
the leaders of Pakistan and India could consider their
nuclear weapons as guarantors of peace. "All they have
to do is come and visit the Hiroshima Museum and talk to
the hibakusha [survivors of the 1945 nuclear
bombs]."
"Once the bomb is let loose, it will be
pointless talking about academic concepts such as
'deterrence' and 'nuclear umbrellas'," he pointed out.
(Inter Press Service)
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