Renewed Opportunities to Bring the CTBT Into Force
CTBTO Spectrum
Issue 10, August 2007
by Rebecca Johnson

Eleven years after it was opened for signature, ten countries still have to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) before it can take full legal effect. For a treaty that has been sisigned by 177 countries and ratified by nearly 140, this is a ridiculous - and potentially dangerous - situation.

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Nuke War Watch: Arms Race Shadow
United Press International
August 7, 2007
by Craig Eisendrath

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 7 (UPI) -- In December 1957 I was a private first-class in the U.S. Army stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. We had a Russian kid in our unit, and when we weren't on guard duty or peeling potatoes, he would translate programs for us from Radio Moscow.

Right before Christmas, we heard a narrator telling a story to some children. He said, "Aloysha, look up in the sky. There are three moons, and two of them are Russian."

We were in the Space Age! The Russians had just put up their first sputniks, pre-empting the Americans much to their acute dismay. The Americans, not to be outdone, launched their own satellites early in 1958. Though they were not as large or impressive as the Russians', the space race had begun.

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The Human Factor- Revising Einstein
SGI Quarterly
July 2007
by Alyn Ware

On November 6, 1995, Lijon Eknilang, a quiet, unassuming woman from the Pacific island of Rongelap, made what is probably the longest trip in the world for a court appearance. It took her more than two days traveling to reach the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the highest judicial body in the world. She relayed to the 14 officiating judges horrifying testimony about the effects of nuclear testing in the Pacific.

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Old thinking about a new threat The politics of missile defenses
International Herald Tribune
June 8, 2007
By Theodore Postol and James Goodby

"President Vladimir Putin's compromise proposal to President George W. Bush concerning the U.S. ballistic missile defense system currently slated to be installed in Poland and the Czech Republic makes very good sense. By using a Russian early warning radar in Azerbaijan, the United States would have the ability to track and engage all Iranian long-range missiles launched against both the East and West Coasts of the United States, thus turning the barrel of the U.S. missile defense away from Russia and directly and unambiguously onto Iran."

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A New Moment for Non-Proliferation
Disarmament Times
Spring, 2007, Vol. 30, No. 1
by Hon. Douglas Roche, O.C.

The first preparatory meeting for the 2010 Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty is set to begin in Vienna on April 30, beginning a new cycle in the long struggle to rid the world of nuclear weapons. A number of other factors are likely to affect that struggle.

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A New US Government Could Be the Bright Light in a Bleak Nuclear Arms Future
Analysis by Douglas Roche
Embassy Magazine
May 2, 2007

A new moment has arrived in the long struggle to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Representatives of 188 nations, which have ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), are meeting in Vienna this week and next to try again to construct a viable plan for nuclear disarmament. They will continue these meetings each year until 2010 when a critical decision will have to be made on whether the NPT is still viable.

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Time for US Values in the Heavens
Op-Ed by Jonathan Granoff
Published in Commondreams.org and The Huffington Post
February 10, 2007

It is high time that the US returns to its own values. We are the first country founded on confidence in the power of law. We rejected the law of power asserted by the British overreaching empire. Let’s not let this Administration’s quest for “full spectrum dominance,” a radical assertion of empire, blind us to our own values and self interest. It is time to negotiate prohibitions against an arms race in space.

Click here for a PDF version of the article

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Remembering the Marshall Islands
Op-Ed from the San Francisco Chronicle
Jane Goodall, Rick Asselta
Friday, June 30, 2006

As a result of nuclear testing on the Marshall Islands 60 years ago, many of the Marshallese Islanders still suffer today. Yet, few Americans know about this shameful chapter of history. Today, June 30, which marks a painful anniversary for many in the South Pacific, is just another day for those unaware of the atrocities that took place there. This year, I hope the anniversary might open the eyes of people in America and around the world: We must acknowledge the damage done in the past and rise up out of our apathy to ensure such horrors are not perpetrated again.

To view the online version of this article, please click here.

George W. Bush thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He was wrong. Now Mr. Bush has returned from India, and has proposed a nuclear deal that he believes will help both the Indian and American people. He is wrong again.

Mr. Bush wants to cut a deal that will advance India's nuclear capabilities, with potential profit for US corporations. The deal will bring some of India's nuclear reactors under international safeguards, but will have the effect of further undermining the nuclear non-proliferation regime.

During the past five years the United States has abandoned many of the nuclear arms control agreements negotiated since the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. This change in policies has sent uncertain signals to other countries, including North Korea and Iran, and may encourage technologically capable nations to choose the nuclear option. The proposed nuclear deal with India is just one more step in opening a Pandora's box of nuclear proliferation.

The only substantive commitment among nuclear-weapon states and others is the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), accepted by the five original nuclear powers and 182 other nations. Its key objective is "to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology . . . and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament." At the five-year U.N. review conference in 2005, only Israel, North Korea, India and Pakistan were not participating -- three with proven arsenals.

WASHINGTON - State Department officials appointed by President Bush have sidelined key career weapons experts and replaced them with less experienced political operatives who share the White House and Pentagon's distrust of international negotiations and treaties.

The reorganization of the department's arms control and international security bureaus was intended to help it better deal with 21st-century threats. Instead, it's thrown the agency into turmoil and produced an exodus of experts with decades of experience in nuclear arms, chemical weapons and related matters, according to 11 current and former officials and documents obtained by Knight Ridder.

Nobel Laureate Says World Must Abandon Nuclear Weapons

Oslo, Norway - Fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, the risk of nuclear disaster is as great as ever with terrorists zealously pursuing atomic weapons, chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei said Saturday in accepting the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency he leads received the coveted award in the Norwegian capital for their efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons -- a job ElBaradei nearly lost because of a dispute with the United States over Iran and Iraq.

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.

The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades.

Regrettably, there are times when multilateral forums tend merely to reflect, rather than mend, deep rifts over how to confront the threats we face. The review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which ended on Friday with no substantive agreement, was one of these.

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The Framework of Human Unity
By Jonathan Granoff
Enlightenment Magazine
June-August, 2005

Nobel Peace laureates have a right, an ability, and a responsibility to articulate a morally empowered vision for all people on the planet. Most leaders, when they say 'we,' are referring to their own nation, race, religion, or community. But when Nobel Peace laureates say 'we,' they mean the entire human community. Articulating that framework of human unity is the first step that needs to be taken to address the crises facing our world.

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A Revolution in American Nuclear Policy
By Jonathan Schell
Common Dreams
Thursday, May 26, 2005

A metaphorical "nuclear option" - the cutoff of debate in the Senate on judicial nominees - has just been defused, but a literal nuclear option, called "global strike," has been created in its place. In a shocking innovation in American nuclear policy, recently disclosed in the Washington Post by military analyst William Arkin, the administration has created and placed on continuous high alert a force whereby the President can launch a pinpoint strike, including a nuclear strike, anywhere on earth with a few hours' notice. The senatorial "nuclear option" was covered extensively, but somehow this actual nuclear option - a "full-spectrum" capability (in the words of the presidential order) with "precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations)" - was almost entirely ignored.

The United States is sending the wrong signal to signatories of the global pact against nuclear weapons by backing out of previous arms control pledges, arms experts and diplomats said on Wednesday.

The 188 parties to the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty are near the end of a monthlong conference that participants said would almost certainly fail to agree on any steps to improve the pact aimed at halting the spread of nuclear arms.

The U.N. Secretary-General and Security Council should take on the job of blocking the spread of nuclear weapons if the troubled conference on the nonproliferation treaty fails to take action, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara said Tuesday.

"There's a high probability - I would say a certainty - that the conference will fail," said McNamara, who once oversaw 30,000 nuclear warheads but has since become a leading voice for disarmament.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said Tuesday he feared the U.N. nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference will fail to strengthen the measure as needed, more states will get nuclear weapons and the Security Council will have to act.

But, he told reporters at U.N. headquarters, he didn't know what the body charged with the world's peace and security could do, given its five permanent members hold vetoes and all are nuclear states.

United Nations - U.S. and NATO nuclear policies are immoral, dangerous and destructive for the global nuclear non-proliferation regime, a former Defense Secretary from the Vietnam War era, Robert McNamara, said on Tuesday.

McNamara, who spoke at a conference taking stock of the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, was defense secretary in the 1960s under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He was the architect of early U.S. policy in the Vietnam War.

Robert McNamara is worried. He knows how close we've come. His counsel helped the Kennedy administration avert nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, he believes the United States must no longer rely on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. To do so is immoral, illegal, and dreadfully dangerous.

It is time-well past time, in my view-for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. At the risk of appearing simplistic and provocative, I would characterize current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous. The risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch is unacceptably high. Far from reducing these risks, the Bush administration has signaled that it is committed to keeping the U.S. nuclear arsenal as a mainstay of its military power-a commitment that is simultaneously eroding the international norms that have limited the spread of nuclear weapons and fissile materials for 50 years. Much of the current U.S. nuclear policy has been in place since before I was secretary of defense, and it has only grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years.

Fifty years ago, I joined Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and eight others in signing a manifesto warning of the dire consequences of nuclear war. This statement, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, was Einstein's final public act. He died shortly after signing it. Now, in my 97th year, I am the only remaining signatory. Because of this, I feel it is my duty to carry Einstein's message forward, into this 60th year since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which evoked almost universal opposition to any further use of nuclear weapons.

As the review conference of the Nonproliferation Treaty convenes in New York this month, we can only be appalled at the indifference of the United States and the other nuclear powers. This indifference is remarkable, considering the addition of Iran and North Korea as states that either possess or seek nuclear weapons programs.

Renewal talks for the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) are scheduled for May, yet the United States and other nuclear powers seem indifferent to its fate. This is remarkable, considering the addition of Iran and North Korea as states that either possess or seek nuclear weapons programs. A recent United Nations report warned starkly: "We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation."

To view the online version of this article, please click here.

The inspection disarmament efforts through the UN system worked in Iraq. The invasion was not necessary. Billions of dollars have been squandered, thousands of lives and limbs lost, and the people of Iraq live in increasing poverty and insecurity. Did this happen because important facts were ignored?

As we witness the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq, I wonder what my father, the late Sen. Alan Cranston, D-Calif., would have thought about the situation there.

A few days before he passed away in December 2000, he completed a book entitled "The Sovereignty Revolution." The book explored ways humanity can effectively address global challenges, from climate change to terrorism and genocide. He concluded that our concept of sovereignty, which is "widely and unwisely thought . . . to mean only national sovereignty," helped make the 20th century the bloodiest in history. He argued humanity will not survive the next century unless we revise our concept of sovereignty to acknowledge the primacy of the individual and emphasize the importance of strengthening transnational organizations and international law.

People make mistakes. We should not be too surprised or dismayed at the failure of intelligence regarding weapons in Iraq. We now know that blood and treasure is being spent based on speculation or evidence ignored. David Kay's testimony that Iraq did not pose a threat to the US highlights why we must return to American values. Our founding fathers knew that because people make mistakes the inefficiencies of checks and balances must be legally mandated. We should be very alarmed that these restraints on action were and continue to be ignored with bravado.

In his memoir, A World Transformed, former President George Bush in discussing the Gulf War made the following observation: ''Trying to eliminate Saddam would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. There was no viable exit strategy we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that one hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in the bitterly hostile land.''

There are approximately 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world, 90 percent of which are possessed by Russia and the United States. The United States has about 11,000 nuclear weapons, and the Russians have about 19,500 nuclear weapons. Thousands of these are Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles; they are armed, targeted and poised, waiting for three short computer signals to fire. These hair trigger devices represent the devastation of approximately 100,000 Hiroshimas and pose a horrific threat to life. From the moment the early-warning systems cry danger (real or cyber-glitch), the U.S. government allows itself less than twenty five minutes before launch keys are turned in retaliation; experts believe that the Russian government allows itself less than ten.

The Bush administration and its critics agree that the viability of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is crucial to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials. Any actions to prevent nuclear proliferation must reinforce the treaty and not weaken it.

North Korea's withdrawal from the treaty and its claim that it has and will continue to produce weapons grade nuclear material put the NPT and international security at risk. A nuclear armed North Korea with excess weapons grade nuclear material available for export would be an intolerable threat and must be dealt with promptly and firmly. The issue is how to deal with the threat. There are no easy answers, only difficult choices, and even with prudence, patience and the best of intentions it may not be possible to get North Korea to give up the nuclear option.

Nothing but trouble
WASHINGTON, DC--Even as U.S. forces struggle to consolidate victory in a war justified largely to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the White House is preparing to build and test new nuclear weapons for America's own arsenal. The administration supports provisions in the 2004 Defense Authorization Bill eliminating a 1994 ban on low-yield nuclear weapons, funding research on them, and compressing the time needed to prepare nuclear tests.

The Bush administration wrongly believes it can eliminate the nuclear threat by wars of prevention. This policy may actually stimulate efforts by other countries to quickly obtain nuclear weapons.

Sept. 11, 2001 focused the attention of the world on the threat of global terrorism, and the international community responded collectively to the threat it posed.

But the tools for collective international action are being undermined by a small, radical and vociferous minority in the United States. It is difficult to see what sort of mandate this cult of radical unilateralists has, though many of them hold influential but unelected positions within the Bush administration.

War does not exist without the shedding of innocent blood. Under the best-case scenario, Iraq's children - present victims of the Ba'ath Party mafiocracy with its Don, Saddam Hussein - will suffer most. Destruction of Baghdad's electronic grid will collapse hospitals and water supply systems, and innocent civilians will certainly be the chief victims.

From Senator Douglas Roche and Mr Jonathan Granoff.

Sir, If Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction, their control and elimination must be done in an effective manner that reinforces international stability.

It is in the utmost interest of the US that its response conforms to international law. Should President George W. Bush decide to use military force in the Gulf, he must conform with the UN charter. Violating it would violate the US constitution, which makes treaties the supreme law of the land (Article VI.2).

To the Editor:
Re "U.S. Rejects All Support for New Court on Atrocities" (news article, May 7): The Bush administration's repudiation of the International Criminal Court is a grave disappointment with lasting, harmful implications.

Details of the US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) make explicit a dangerous shift that threatens to undermine US security by encouraging others to develop new nuclear weapons and use them, and would violate US political and legal obligations. The NPR is a political roadmap to ultimate catastrophe.

The idea of waging nuclear war is taking flight in Washington. Canada must protest, says Douglas Roche, former chair of the UN Disarmament Committee.

Nuclear weapons are back on the front pages, with news of a Bush administration policy document, the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, which projects the role of nuclear weapons into the future -- not as deterrents, but for the purpose of waging wars. The document even names potential targets. This document and the thinking behind it are reckless. They not only jeopardize international law but the support of America's closest allies. Canada must state its opposition immediately.

MOSCOW - In the past month, the world has witnessed something previously unknown: a common stand taken by America, Russia, Europe, India, China, Cuba, most of the Islamic world and numerous other regions and countries. Despite many serious differences between them, they united to save civilization.

It is now the responsibility of the world community to transform the coalition against terrorism into a coalition for a peaceful world order. Let us not, as we did in the 1990's, miss the chance to build such an order.

Since World War II, humanity has mastered extraordinary challenges. We can orbit the earth. We can transplant organs. We can travel faster than sound, and we can communicate across the globe almost instantaneously.

We can commit global suicide, too. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., are stunning, sickening proof of humanity's capability to reduce the best of what we are to rubble, smoke and death.

To the Editor:

Conservatives and liberals alike should be wary of the alarmist rhetoric of Americans for Missile Defense (news article, Aug. 6). The coalition's spokesman, Jeffrey Baxter, suggests that we need a missile defense rather than diplomacy: "When I look at people in North Korea, Libya, Iraq and Iran, understand folks, these folks don't sit around and watch 'Seinfeld' and eat Milky Way candy bars all day."

Is he suggesting that digesting American popular culture is a prerequisite for rational thought?

It is misleading to suggest that missile defense is an issue for conservatives to rally around. America prides itself on values of freedom and democracy, and assisting, rather than bullying, other countries. A better defense is to strengthen trust and cooperation among people and countries.

ZACHARY ALLEN
Program Director
Global Security Institute
San Francisco, Aug 6, 2001

In their July 22 meeting in Genoa, Italy, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to consider the topics of national missile defense and further cuts in nuclear arsenals. While discussion is preferable to confrontation, agreement here is by no means assured. Russia wants to continue to have some influence over future U.S. missile defense developments.

WASHINGTON: Much media attention has been focused on cabinet selections and partisan politics. But it has become clear that any legislative success in the 107th Congress will require a coalition of centrists from both sides of the aisle.

Nowhere is bipartisan cooperation more important than in the realm of national security. The new Congress must identify issues on which bipartisan agreement is possible. The spread of weapons of mass destruction is one such issue. Seeking a bipartisan approach to nuclear nonproliferation should be among the principal goals of the next administration and Congress.

When Air Force One touched down in Moscow yesterday, nuclear politics again took center stage, just as they did so often during the Cold War. Nearly three decades ago, the Nixon administration and the Brezhnev regime came to agreement on a "big idea" about their nuclear-arms race: nuclear defense would beget ever more nuclear offense and diminish the security of all. Today, U.S. plans to deploy a National Missile Defense, or NMD, threaten to cast that idea onto the rubble heap of history. In doing so, and in insisting that Russia and the United States both retain thousands of nuclear warheads, they leave little hope for preventing some kind of nuclear conflagration in the 21st century.

YOU ARE POINTING a loaded machine gun at someone just a few feet away. His loaded machine gun is aimed at your chest.

You've been doing this for 50 years, and now your adversary is weaker and less bellicose -- but you still aren't sure if you can trust him. Meanwhile strangers are arriving, pulling up chairs and loading machine guns of their own.

But you remain calm. You have a plan: If anyone pulls the trigger, you'll fire first, knocking down all their bullets before they hit you.

SAN FRANCISCO -- This Sunday, a live television drama will reintroduce millions of viewers to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. The CBS television network will broadcast a remake of Fail Safe, the 1964 best-selling novel and subsequent film about how a nuclear war could be launched accidentally.

Every five years, the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) comes up for reassessment by the countries that have signed it. This is the treaty that provides for international restraints (and inspections) on nuclear programs... It covers not only the nuclear nations but 180 other countries as well, including Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Libya. An end to the NPT could terminate many of these inspections and open a Pandora's box of nuclear proliferation in states that already present serious terrorist threats to others.

LOS ALTOS HILLS: Shortly after atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I met Albert Einstein. He warned if the bomb were developed further, and ever used all-out, the human race could be exterminated.

The bomb has been developed further. One super bomb could now let loose more destructive energy than all that has been released from all weapons fired in all wars in all history.

A century of war, the twentieth century spawned the devil's own weapons-nuclear weapons-and humankind has yet to free itself of their threat.Nonetheless, inspired by the memory of the hundreds of thousands who died so tragically in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all of war's victims, we have fought for the fifty-four years since those bombings for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.

BEIJING: For 50 years, hanging over our heads like a sword of Damocles, nuclear weapons have never ceased threatening humanity's survival. The end of the Cold War has not brought about their disappearance.

India's and Pakistan's nuclear tests reveal the impotence of current policies intended to prevent proliferation. Moralizing appeals, threats of sanctions and offers of military and economic aid for not testing have done nothing to contain the crisis.

The abolition statement by international civilian leaders, made public on 2 February 1998 by General Lee Butler and the State of the World Forum - the full text of which follows this article - follows the pattern set by the two widely noted statements made by retired generals and admirals made public in late 1996 by General Andrew Goodpaster, General Butler and the Forum. Like the military professionals, the civilian leaders advocate that specific steps be taken now to reduce ongoing nuclear weapon dangers still facing us all after the end of the Cold War, and they urge that the nuclear powers declare umabiguously that their goal is eventual abolition.