Kansas City, MO.
Pax Christi USA Executive Director Dave Robinson expressed fresh optimism for a long sought after goal by disarmament advocates - the abolition all nuclear weapons from the earth - in the wake of a conference held in Paris last week.
One hundred international political, military, business, and civic leaders from across political lines came together to launch a new initiative to eliminate nuclear weapons globally. Called Global Zero, the initiative is expected to combine high-level policy work with global public outreach to achieve a binding agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons through phased and verified reductions.
The group met Dec. 9th and 10th to develop a step-by-step plan to eliminate nuclear weapons
“Eliminating these weapons is a core issue for Catholics,” Robinson told NCR by telephone. “In their 1983 peace pastoral letter, ‘The Challenge of Peace,’ the U.S. bishops condemned such weapons. It was a prophetic document that is still just as relevant today as we witness a bold new advance in the effort to eliminate nukes from the world’s arsenals. It’s a move we’ve long been waiting for.”
The Global Zero declaration, endorsed by a “who’s who” of the world’s foreign policy aristocracy from the past 30 years, calls for a binding and verifiable agreement to dismantle all nuclear weapons by a specified date.
Signatories on the declaration include former President Jimmy Carter; former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev; Nobel Prize winners Muhammad Yunus and Bishop Desmond Tutu; British businessman Sir Richard Branson; Ehsan ul-Haq, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Pakistan; Brajesh Mishra, former Indian national security advisor; and Amr Moussa, Arab League secretary-general.
The conference opened with a presentation on what would happen to the city of Paris if a nuclear device was detonated within its boundaries. “It’s not about idealism, it is about public safety and security,” said former British Defense Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, one of the declaration signers.
Current tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan also underline the dangers inherent in nuclear proliferation.
A sea change among political leaders from key countries has taken place in recent months, according to a spokesperson for Global Zero. New leadership in the United States appears to support the goal of nuclear abolition, while there is a feeling that if this moment passes without action, then the nuclear race will gather pace quickly, with more countries acquiring weapons and the increasing risk that terrorists will get their hands on weapons or the material and know-how needed to construct a nuclear device.
President-elect Barack Obama said in a July campaign speech at Purdue University in Indiana: “It’s time to send a clear message to the world: America seeks a world with no nuclear weapons. … As long as nuclear weapons exist, we’ll retain a strong deterrent. But we’ll make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy.”
In a September speech, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said: “Had I been told just two or three years ago I wouldn’t believe that it would be possible, but I believe it is now quite possible to liberate humanity from nuclear weapons. The thing is there are some technological developments in the non-nuclear, in conventional weapons, which make the nuclear weapons in certain cases obsolete. So why would we need nuclear weapons if we have other means? Why should we be keeping the world constantly in apprehension of some nuclear disaster? Especially when there are so many aspirations on behalf of other states to acquire nuclear weapons. We believe that we should close this Pandora’s box.”
In the United States, the debate over nuclear weapons was ratcheted up significantly when a group of veteran Cold War national security figures, including Henry Kissinger, William Perry, Sam Nunn and George Schultz, coauthored an article last year in The Wall Street Journal warning of the dangers of nuclear proliferation and endorsing nuclear abolition as a solution.
Global Zero will begin discussions at high levels in both Washington and Moscow in coming months. It also plans to convene a world summit of hundreds of political, military, business and civic leaders in January 2010 to move the campaign forward.
Key steps in the Global Zero plan will begin with “de-alerting” U.S. and Russian weapons from their current ready-to-launch status, followed by major weapons reductions in the two nations, then total elimination of these weapons by all nuclear-armed nations accompanied by strict verification of nuclear fuel activities around the globe, according to Global Zero’s spokesperson.
There are now nine countries with nuclear weapons and 40 more with sufficient nuclear infrastructure to build their own arsenal, according to Global Zero’s fact sheet. “The gravest danger facing the world now is that these weapons continue to spread until one day they are used by a country or a terrorist group, with catastrophic consequences,” it says. The only lasting solution to this grave threat, it says, is to eliminate all weapons.
“We cannot persuade terrorists to stop seeking nuclear weapons,” the Global Zero fact sheet says. “The only solution is to eliminate the weapons themselves: to drain the swamp. Global Zero’s plan calls for the verified and enforced destruction of all nuclear weapons and international oversight of all nuclear energy production to prevent the clandestine development of weapons.”
These current efforts are driven by a fear of proliferation and “loose nukes,” Robinson said. “Efforts to eliminate the weapons must eventually involve the lab directors and nuclear infrastructure throughout the country and finally ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that would stop all underground testing.”
[Rich Heffern is an NCR staff writer. His e-mail is rheffern@ncronline.org.]
