The Case for Nuclear Abolition
GSI Factsheet
If we fail in our efforts to address nuclear weapons and civilization is destroyed and humanity exterminated, no other issues will matter.
Of all the great issues we confront at the dawn of the new millennium, nuclear weapons still hold the greatest potential for inflicting the greatest harm on all of humankind. The challenge is whether our social practices, our political institutions, and our imagination can match our scientific and technological prowess. Nuclear weapons are the great unfinished business of the Cold War. The threat of deliberate nuclear apocalypse which haunted humanity after 1945-a deliberate massive East/West atomic exchange ending in mutual destruction-has indeed virtually disappeared, but the threat of an accidental or unauthorized Russian/U.S. nuclear exchange has actually risen. The threat that some city, somewhere, will be destroyed by a nuclear detonation has increased since the end of the Cold War. We see four dangerous trends emerging:
.Nuclear Proliferation. The End of the NPT? After the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan last year, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is in jeopardy. Many NPT signatories share the frustration at what India has long called “permanent nuclear apartheid.” Mexico has already suggested that it may withdraw from the Treaty after three long decades of delay of implementation of the treaty’s terms. Egypt and Indonesia may well do likewise, and could be candidates to actually commence their own weapon development programs. The consistent refusal of the five nuclear states to comply with their obligation, under NPT Article VI, to move seriously toward abolishing their nuclear arsenals moves us inexorably toward a world with not eight, but many nuclear states. This movement was given an extra push by the recent rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the United States Senate. The Treaty’s rejection robbed the United States of any moral authority it could have in addressing the world community as a nation committed to disarmament. For many foreign nations the Treaty’s rejection in the U.S. proved that the United States is interested only in preserving the international nuclear apartheid. The possible repercussions will be cataclysmic unless we take steps to ensure that the United States undoes its mistake.
.Nuclear Terrorism. “Theories of deterrence” become meaningless when applied to the most likely form of atomic apocalypse today-nuclear terrorism in a major American city. Terrorists cannot be deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation because they provide no clear target for retaliation. Instead, the existence of nuclear arsenals around the world-particularly in chaotic Russia-makes it more likely that terrorists can obtain and proceed to use nuclear weaponry.
.Nuclear Accident. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, was awakened in the middle of the night in 1980, and told that 220 Soviet missiles had been launched against the U.S. One minute before he intended to awaken the President-who would have had seven minutes to decide whether to order the nuclear counterattack called for by U.S. policy under such circumstances then and now-Brzezinski learned it was a false alarm.. President Yeltsin was awakened in the middle of the night a few years ago and told the U.S. had launched a missile aimed at Moscow. For the first time in history, the Russian briefcase containing the small computer that can be used to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. was opened- this was also discovered to be a false alarm just in time to avoid catastrophe.
.Nuclear War. We cannot assume that because there may be a low immediate prospect of a deliberate war between major nuclear states, that that possibility has disappeared. In the future, there surely will be a confrontation between nuclear-armed antagonists if these weapons are not abolished. Robert McNamara says: “Many people don’t understand the risk that we can maneuver into a position where these things would be used. They don’t understand the fog of war.. It became very clear to me during the Cuban missile crisis that the indefinite combination of human fallibility (which we can never get rid of) and nuclear weapons carries the very high probability of the destruction of nations.” The distinguished Canberra Commission stated that it defies credulity to believe that the world can indefinitely retain thousands of nuclear warheads-or any-without their being used someday, somewhere. At present there is a dangerous confrontation between two new nuclear nations, India and Pakistan.
It is the U.S. policy, NATO policy, and the policy of all nations possessing nuclear weapons to rely on them to deter nuclear attacks upon them by others. General Lee Butler, who commanded all U.S. nuclear weapons during the latter years of the Cold War, warns that the trouble with deterrence is that if it ever fails, the result will be utter catastrophe: mutual assured destruction. He believes that it is unworthy of the United States and of civilization to base its security upon terror, upon the threat of inflicting a massive genocidal attack on civilians. General Butler declared in Washington on February 2, 1998, at an event arranged by the State of the World Forum:
“Deterrence at best is a gamble no mortal should pretend to make. At worst it invokes death on a scale rivaling the power of the creator.. We cannot at once keep sacred the miracle of existence and hold sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it.”
The only way to diminish and ultimately end these dangers is for the international community to commit formally and proceed speedily down the road to total abolition.