Stopping the Spread of Deadly Weaponry

The International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, whose key organizer, Jodie Williams, won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, is a prime example of what nongovernmental organizations can do to shape the international security agenda in a positive direction. When the campaign was launched less than a decade ago, few people had even heard of the land mines problems. But after a few years of persistent campaigning and public education by veterans groups, organizations of handicapped individuals, human rights advocates, doctors, relief organizations, and arms control groups, more than one hundred governments were persuaded to support the Oslo agreement to eliminate anti-personnel land mines. (By late 1998, 41 nations had already ratified the accord, enough to make it an official treaty.) The campaign was given a huge boost by the work of Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who prevailed upon his colleagues in the Senate to impose a moratorium on U.S. exports of antipersonnel land mines. The land mines campaign succeeded because it was able to drive home the immense human consequences of these senseless and indiscriminate weapons. The millions of innocent civilians who have been killed and wounded by land mines finally found their voice in the land mines campaign, which was largely championed by citizen organizations, with important assistance from key governments like Canada and Norway.

The same organizations that have put the land mines issue squarely on the international agenda are now zeroing in on so-called small arms or light weapons—the rifles, hand grenades, and light vehicles that are the stock-in-trade of the world’s ethnic killing fields. Because small arms are standard issue with most armed forces of the world, and because the issue intersects with the controversial issue of domestic gun control, the small arms fight will no doubt be longer and more complex than the land mines campaign. But to the extent that progress can be made in limiting the access of combatants to their weapons of choice, the cause of peace and disarmament will be advanced exponentially. At a May 1999 peace conference in the Hague, the global campaign to curb small arms was officially launched under the umbrella of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA).²⁸

A second strand of work against the arms trade is the global campaign for a Code of Conduct on arms sales. The Code of Conduct, which is embodied in legislation sponsored by Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (D-CA), calls for sharp restrictions on arms sales to human rights abusers, undemocratic governments, and nations involved in aggression against their neighbors. In the United States, the bill passed the House of Representatives in the summer of 1997 and has been championed in the Senate by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA). In the meantime, the European Union has passed its own Code of Conduct, which, although lacking the specifics some arms control advocates were seeking, nonetheless represents a first step toward making human rights a priority in the arms sales decisions of EU members. Last but not least, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias has created a Nobel Laureates Commission (including other peace prize winners such as Elie Wiesel, Betty Williams, José Ramos Horta, and the Dalai Lama) that is pressing for an international Code of Conduct on arms sales modeled on the McKinney/Rohrabacher bill.²⁹

Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Building on the work of the Canberra Commission—a panel of former government officials and top military personnel that included Gen. Lee Butler, the former head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command—the movement to abolish nuclear weapons has gained new momentum in recent years. Galvanized by Jonathan Schell’s latest book, The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, the Abolition 2000 campaign has rallied around the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons as soon as is practically possible.

In the United States, the campaign is supporting legislation to eliminate funding for so-called "subcritical" nuclear weapons testing—a $40 billion, ten-year program that would allow the U. S. government to violate the spirit of the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty by designing new weapons by computer—and is encouraging a sense of Congress resolution that would press the executive branch to move toward abolition of U.S. nuclear forces. The value of the nuclear abolition movement lies not only in progress toward eliminating existing arsenals of mass destruction but also in providing the best hope of establishing a higher international norm to mitigate against the development of future nuclear weapons and be persuasive to new nuclear powers like India and Pakistan, countries that have long pointed to the hypocrisy of the U.S. government’s "Do as I say, not as I do" approach to the development and possession of nuclear weapons.³⁰

Cut the Military Budget

Nearly a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. military budget is still $270 billion, which equals the peace time cold war average. This excessive spending causes two kinds of problems: first, it depletes scarce funds that could be used for more worthwhile purposes such as education, health care, transportation, and other job creating activities with far more economic payoff than building weapons. Second, when the most powerful nation in the world continues to put the majority of its surplus resources into outmoded weapons instead of preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping, or other more constructive approaches, it sends the wrong signal by implying that force is still the ultimate arbiter of international disputes.

Efforts to reduce the military budget are now gathering force on two fronts. In the United States, an organization called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities has brought together 400 business executives to work on a multiyear publicity campaign designed to achieve a $40 billion reduction in the Pentagon budget by the year 2001, with the resulting funds to be invested in more pressing domestic needs. On a global scale, Nobel Laureate Oscar Arias has been working with organizations such as the Washington-based Demilitarization for Democracy and the New York-based Council on Economic Priorities to promote reductions in military spending worldwide. This effort is linked to a series of UN-supported security talks aimed at reducing arms and increasing mutual cooperation and confidence among potential rivals in regions of tension.

And a new proposal has emerged from the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, the World Order Models Project, and the Union of Concerned Scientists under the ambitious title "Global Action to Prevent War." The proposal outlines a series of four treaties that would be phased in over a 40 to 50 year period with the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, radically reducing conventional arms production and sales, and establishing a global mechanism for cooperative peacekeeping and conflict prevention designed to render war obsolete. Ambitious though it may be, the unique strength of the Global Action to Prevent War proposal is that it provides a long-term vision for peace and security that can compete for public attention with the dire worst-case scenarios that the Pentagon and the weapons contractors have been using to drive up weapons spending and fuel arms races for the past five decades. Until the international community learns how to plan for peace rather than prepare for war, the arms makers and military hawks will always have the upper hand in debates about how to use our common resources.³¹

All of these campaigns—to limit the arms trade, to abolish nuclear weapons, and to reduce global military spending—are examples of conflict prevention in practice. If they can be linked to new ways of solving security dilemmas—both through international law, as embodied in a World Court and an International Criminal Court that should have the support of all of the world’s major powers and through international cooperation, utilizing better funded, more democratically structured arrangements for international and regional peacekeeping—then the era of stockpiling weapons to "solve" security problems may be brought to an end. The sooner all this happens, the better.