Foreign Policy In Focus

The West insists on nuclear nonproliferation, but refuses to reciprocate with meaningful disarmament.

Cross-posted from Truthout.

(Read Parts 1 and 2.)

Disarmament and Nonproliferation: No Longer Two Sides of the Same Coin
According to conservatives and many realists, it's not the enduring nature of our nuclear-weapons infrastructure that's lost on non-NWS. It's those disarmament measures themselves, which by their reckoning, are much more substantial than they appear to non-NWS. They believe that disarmament "leadership" by NWS does little to discourage non-NWS from proliferating. If anything, disarmament creates a national-security vacuum into which non-NWS can't wait to insert themselves.

In a briefing for the Hudson Institute, where he's a senior fellow, Christopher Ford, who served as U.S. Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation for the George W. Bush administration, describes the argument that NWS have failed to demonstrate the requisite disarmament leadership to non-NWS.

First, it explicitly assumes that the commitment of the NWS [nuclear weapons states] to the ideal of disarmament lacks credibility, and implicitly assumes that the United States is both the most important locus of the problem and the key to its resolution.

This point of view was illustrated by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini in a 2011 speech during which he said: "the greatest violators of the NPT are the powers that have reneged on their obligation to dispose of nuclear weapons mentioned in Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty." Credibility may also be undermined by NWS toleration for Israel's nuclear-weapons "ambiguity." Another likely sticking point for non-NWS is the 123 Agreement that the United States signed with India, which, like Israel, is not party to the NPT. Notable for its lack of a call for disarmament on India's part, it provided for full cooperation on nuclear energy between India and the United States.

Second, Ford writes, the thesis "assumes that if this disarmament 'credibility gap' is closed, it will be possible to meet today's proliferation threats much more effectively and with a much wider base of diplomatic support." But, he maintains, "few people seriously argue that countries such as Iran and North Korea seek nuclear weapons simply because the United States or other NWS possess such devices themselves, and that proliferators' interest in such devices would accordingly diminish if only the United States reduced its arsenal further." 

The West insists on nuclear nonproliferation, but refuses to reciprocate with meaningful disarmament.

Cross-posted from Truthout.

(Read Part 1.)

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Imperfect Arbiter

The drafters of the NPT, as with any treaty, sought to balance the needs of different parties. In this case it was between NWS -- states with nuclear weapons -- and non-NWS -- those without. Signatories (or the treaty's signers) among the latter forfeited their rights to develop or acquire nuclear weapons. The former, meanwhile, promised to roll back the numbers of their weapons with an eye toward total disarmament. In addition, they would assist non-NWS to establish their nuclear-energy programs and use their own possession of nuclear weapons to extend an umbrella of deterrence to certain non-NWS.

Ideally, the NPT bestows equal benefits on all parties. But, like many treaties, it's riddled with loopholes and gray areas. For example, Article VI -- debated nigh unto death -- is chock full of them. It reads:

Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

Where there should be key words are noncommittal terms. For example, preceding "to pursue" with "undertakes" adds a preliminary step that almost seems designed to allow parties with nuclear weapons to stall. "Good faith" may be inherent to contracts, but in the context of a nuclear treaty it sounds Polyanna-ish. "Effective measures" and "early date" are much too open to interpretation.  

With regards to disarmament, a recent report that the Obama administration may be considering reducing the total numbers of deployed strategic nuclear weapons to as low as 300 generated a flurry of excitement -- and a blizzard of overwrought reactions from conservatives. Whether or not the leaked news was just red meat for conservatives, no weapon reductions will be enacted until after the election.

In fact, even though President Obama assumed office with an apparent personal investment in disarmament, his administration seems to have suffered few qualms about letting it, if not exactly die, wither on the vine. When push came to shove over the New START treaty, it bet the farm to secure Republican ratification of a treaty that guaranteed little more than verification and confidence building. The administration proposed to increase funding for nuclear-weapon modernization to $88 billion during the next decade -- 20 percent more than the Bush administration sought. Even the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee balked at such exorbitance in the current economic climate and allocated $500 million less than the administration's $7.6 billion request for fiscal year 2013.

As Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, recently wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine: "Obama has let the bureaucracy suffocate his plan to move step by step toward, as he said in Prague, 'the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.'" He explained that "there are far more entrenched officials and contractors that benefit from the sprawling nuclear complex than officials who believe in the president's stated vision."

The apparent intention on the part of the United States to fund, at however fluctuating levels, its own program into perpetuity likely isn't lost on non-NWS. This realization has finally begun to rear its head in established media such as the London Review of Books. In the February issue, national-security specialists Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka write of the vast sums that the Obama administration committed to nuclear-weapon modernization.

What clearer demonstration could there be that the US government is not serious about reducing its stockpiles? Central to the idea of nonproliferation is the presumption that if smaller states are to be discouraged from acquiring a bomb, nuclear states will need to take real steps towards disarmament. Otherwise, non-nuclear states will regard their demands as self-serving and hypocritical -- reason enough to think about creating an arsenal of their own.

Extending this line of thinking one step further, New START may not only seem perfunctory to non-NWS, but a smokescreen for continued nuclear-weapons funding.

The West insists on nuclear nonproliferation, but refuses to reciprocate with meaningful disarmament.

Cross-posted from Truthout.

When dueling narratives clash and the subject is nuclear weapons, the sparks that fly could make flashing sabers seem dim in comparison. According to conventional thinking in the West, Iran is not abiding by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and restraining itself from all nuclear weapons activities. Thus it should be denied its right to enrich uranium. But, in the view of much of the rest of the world, the West is making little more than cosmetic efforts to roll back its nuclear arsenals. Therefore, it has no business denying Iran nuclear energy -- not to mention nuclear weapons (but that's another story).

In other words, the side that committed to disarming thinks that the side that promised not to proliferate is. And the side that promised not to proliferate thinks that the side that committed to disarming is not.

In truth, abundant evidence exists that any nuclear-weapons work Iran has done since 2003 is conceptual, if that, which is not expressly forbidden by the NPT. The uranium it enriches to the higher levels that worry the West seems to be for medical isotopes, which are used for radiation therapy, as well as diagnosis. Combined with enrichment at lower levels for nuclear energy, it serves as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

Achieving nuclear disarmament protest requires more than the baby steps that arms control advocates seem content to take today.

As Focal Points readers no doubt have heard, on July 29, three peace activists, representing a modern-day version of the original Plowshares peace group founded by the Berrigan brothers, penetrated the highest-security area of the Y-12 nuclear weapons facility for uranium storage and nuclear modernization in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The New York Times reported:

Inside the complex, the three graying pacifists painted “Woe to the empire of blood” and “the fruit of justice is peace” on the exterior of Y-12’s Highly-Enriched Uranium Manufacturing Facility, and splashed what they said was human blood.

… But despite what appears to have been a slow crawl through the defenses (the three had bolt cutters, hammers, flashlights and cans of spray paint, and went under the fences), they did not draw a prompt response.

In fact,

… they apparently spent several hours in the Y-12 National Security Complex before they were stopped — by a lone guard, they told friends — as they used a Bible and candles in a Christian peace ritual.

Consequently, the actual anti-nuclear activism was eclipsed by the outcry about the poor plant security that the terrorists exposed, as if they were only practicing a dry run for terrorists. But that comes with the territory for those who engage in extreme acts of terrorism. Perhaps attention to Transform Now Plowshares' mission can be refocused during the trial. Along with a misdemeanor, each of the three is charged with two felonies.

Adding insult to plant-security injury is that one of them, Megan Rice, is not only a nun, but 82 years old. At his Knoxville News Y-12 blog Atomic City Underground, Frank Munger wrote:

I communicated with Frank von Hippel, a Princeton University professor who's been in the forefront of nuclear policy work for decades with a special focus on control and protection of special nuclear materials, about the recent break-in. … "This should indeed be an embarrassment," von Hippel responded via email. "An 82-year-old nun with a bolt cutter is certainly within the post-9/11 design-based threat envelope."

One would think, but as mentioned above, that's not Transform Now Plowshares' concern. Sister Rice (Sister Megan?) has been an anti-nuclear, as well as more broad-based, activist for decades and once served six months in a minimum-security prison for a 1998 protest at the one-time School of the Americas. On August 11, at the New York Times, William J. Broad reported on Sister Rice's reaction to her incarceration.

“It was a great eye-opener,” she said. “When you’ve had a prison experience, it minimizes your needs very much.”

Of nuns' acts of civil disobedience in general,* Broad wrote:

They also illustrate the fierce independence of Catholic nuns, who met this week in St. Louis to decide how to respond to a Vatican appraisal that cast them as rebellious dissenters.

“We’re free as larks,” Sister Rice said of herself and her older religious friends. “We have no responsibilities — no children, no grandchildren, no jobs.”

… “She’s a pretty sympathetic character,” Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, said of the nun. “[A 16-year prison term] would be signing her death warrant.”

…“So the lot fell on us,” she said of fighting nuclear arms. “We can do it."

In a sense, Sister Rice is absolving the rest of us disarmament advocates, who have families and bills to pay, of acts that require substantial sacrifices. Though she adds, "But we all do share the responsibility equally."

We live in a time when arms control is being overtaken by creeping incrementalism. As Andrew Lichterman wrote recently for Reaching Critical Will:

US arms control and disarmament groups focus mainly on preventing the expansion of nuclear weapons capabilities and budgets, or on taking advantage of what are perceived as opportunities for incremental progress. The common denominator is that the limits to the disarmament agenda are set by what is thought to be achievable in government for a without challenging anything fundamental about the existing order of things, or the role of US military forces in sustaining it.

Activism, such as the Y-12 break-in, or when the Berrigans and the original Plowshares movement trespassed onto the General Electric Nuclear Missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, in 1980, damaged nuclear warhead nose cones, and poured blood onto documents and file, doesn't exactly endear itself to the American public. Aside from raising the prospect of a terrorist attack, it violates an ethos arguably more sacrosanct to much of the American public than averting mass destruction -- respect for property.

But, along with Sister Rice, her fellow Transform Now Plowshares members Michael Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed hold out the gauntlet to nuclear-disarmament activists (such as this author). What are we willing to sacrifice to abolish nuclear weapons?

*For some reason, in 2005, the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, funded by the Department of Energy, felt compelled to include an interview with her. It serves as a fascinating case study in how a social-justice conscience is nurtured and becomes self-sustaining.

The motives for dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were political, the targets civilian -- a textbook case of terrorism.

Cross-posted from Scramble for Africa.

Terrorism, despite continual abuse, is a word like any other. It has an actual definition: violence against a civilian target undertaken to send a political message. It is not merely a slur to be affixed willy-nilly to whomever, as geopolitical needs dictate.

On August 6th 1945 Washington dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. One hundred fifty thousand civilians were incinerated or condemned to slow and terrible deaths by radiation exposure (as immortalized in the Japanese manga and animated film Barefoot Gen). On August 9th, the Truman Administration released a plutonium core atomic bomb over Nagasaki, killing an additional 75,000 people.

A justifying mythology was immediately crafted and remains firmly lodged in popular understanding -- at least in the U.S. The bombs were dropped, reluctantly, to save the lives of U.S. servicemen fighting Japan. Perhaps a half million (Truman’s claim) would have died before Japan would have unconditionally surrendered had the U.S. not deployed the bombs. The story has long been debunked, but with little popularization. If fact, Japan was already prepared to surrender, having only a few (trivial next to hundreds of thousands of lives) conditions. The actual reasons the bomb was dropped, included, as Gar Alperovitz has long argued, intimidating Russia and to demonstrate U.S. power on the world stage. Any street gangster would recognize the dynamic. There was also a concern to forestall any further Soviet influence in Asia. Thus the motive was political and the target was civilian. It is a textbook case of terrorism. Perhaps the preeminent example.

Truman’s successor continued developing the arsenal. In 1954, the federal government, in a secret test, detonated a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb -- the most powerful device the country ever exploded -- on the Bikini Atoll island range in the Pacific Ocean. Rongelap Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, was downwind. The people were temporarily relocated, only to be sent back a few years later to their now radioactive homelands.

The documentary Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1 (a deeply moving preview is available online here) exhumes the history of the episode.

“In 1957,” Barbara Rose Johnston writes,

“the people of Rongelap were returned to their homelands with great fanfare, moving into newly built homes on islands still dangerously contaminated from prior nuclear weapons tests and clearly vulnerable to the fallout from the 33 bombs detonated in 1958. This repatriation of the Rongelap community was both planned and celebrated by scientists and officials at the US Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, who saw a significant opportunity to place a human population in a controlled setting to document how radiation moves through the food chain and human body. Annually, and then as the years progressed and degenerative health symptoms increased, biannually, the US medical teams visited by ship to examine, with x-ray, photos, blood, urine and tissue samples, the relative health of the community.”

In the documentary, footage from the era plays -- “these are fishing people,” announces a narrator in the inimitable timbre of broadcasters of the era, “savages by our standards”. Such was the condescension of the powerful and the damned.

The mayor of Rongelap is introduced as “a savage, but a happy amenable savage.” He later developed thyroid cancer. As did his daughter. And then a grandson. Two of his sons also grew cancers. Another died of leukemia. The title of the film is an appropriate double entendre indeed.

The subtitle references the U.S. government medical study of the incident, which, as Johnston explains, “documented the array of health outcomes from their acute exposures, but did not treat the pain or discomfort of radiation burns, nor utilize antibiotics to offset any potential infection.”

A woman recounts how her first child was born without bones and “looked like a jellyfish.” Washington continues to maintain that the radiation fallout was an accident. It is not enough to suffer the blast. One must be insulted with such denials as well.

Unlike, Truman, the Eisenhower Administration had no terrorist motive. Theirs was purely a scientific experiment. They wanted to see how impressive their new weapon was. What would be the effect on humans? Best to find out on humans that did not matter. The people of the Marshall Islands were no more significant than lab mice. Though the Nazis had been defeated a decade earlier, the fascination with barbarous science, complete with Nuremburg Code violations, had evidently not been entirely quelled. Rongelap became an island of Dr. Moreau for the nuclear age.

There were plenty of remote corners of the world where Washington’s dark sciences could have been conducted far from human populations. The location was chosen precisely because there were homosapien unpeople inhabiting the area. Ordinary terrorism seems rather noble by comparison with the cynical motivations of Eisenhower’s grand secret experiment.

Subsequently, and to the species’ great fortune, no other nation has ever had the audacity to follow suit. The U.S. record remains blissfully unchallenged.

Along with Kevin Funk, Steven Fake is the author of "Scramble for Africa: Darfur – Intervention and the USA" (Black Rose Books). They maintain a website with their commentary at scrambleforafrica.org.