South Asians Against Nukes - Year 10
April 1, 2009
URL: groups.yahoo.com/group/SAAN_/message/1241

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POINT OF VIEW/ Jayantha Dhanapala: Remove, don't reset, the nuclear
button
SPECIAL TO THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200904010050.html


2009/4/1

It was the winter of discontent for the disarmament community. But
surely spring cannot be far away?

The administration of President George W. Bush, with Dick Cheney
serving as vice president, is widely regarded as one of the most
unpopular ever. More importantly for the world, it was one of the
most negative in recent history as far as making progress goes on
nuclear disarmament and nuclear nonproliferation.

Barack Obama was decisively elected president of the United Sates on
a platform of change. This has been universally welcomed.

The change we need must now come in the vital security area of
nuclear weapons, which ranks equally with the global financial
crisis, climate change and the achievement of the U.N. Millennium
Development Goals. These issues, the critical challenges of our
times, are inextricably linked to the threat of terrorism waged by
international networks like al-Qaida.

Based on statements Obama made during his campaign, expectations of
America's first black president are exceptionally high.

These expectations were justified by the confirmation hearings of
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who promised to resubmit
the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) to the Senate and engage
Russia in negotiations for new nuclear arms reduction treaties. With
the U.S.-Russian summit due to be held April 1 in London, Clinton
called for the button to be reset in U.S.-Russia relations.

As for U.S. policy regarding nuclear weapons, what is needed is a
more radical step--removal of the nuclear button.

Under the Clinton administration, the State Department's Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) was dismantled in a Faustian bargain
with the Republicans. While it has not been restored, Obama has
managed to nominate experts who are knowledgeable on nuclear
disarmament issues to key positions.

Meantime, the nuclear weapons lobby has not been inactive. Suddenly,
a rash of articles started appearing that argued the U.S. nuclear
weapons arsenal is aging and requires renovation; that those with
weapons expertise are retiring and need to be replaced; and that U.S.
security can only be ensured by a credible nuclear deterrent.

We have even had the extraordinary spectacle of a serving general,
Kevin Chilton, who heads the U.S. Strategic Command for the Air
Force, contradicting his commander-in-chief, Obama.

Usually moderate scientific groups are no longer using the language
of the Wall Street Journal op-ed pieces penned by George P. Shultz,
secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan, and company. They
talk of coming down to 1,000 nuclear warheads and modest steps like
ratifying the CTBT, replacing START 1 and refurbishing the U.S.
nuclear stockpile.

To add to this, Dr. Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under
President Richard Nixon, has written equivocally about the message
conveyed in the op-ed pieces he co-authored with Shultz, former
Senator Sam Nunn and William Perry, defense secretary in the Clinton
administration, emphasizing an incremental approach to the problem.

Admittedly the global financial crisis triggered by U.S. fiscal
indiscipline and Wall Street greed has preoccupied Obama's attention.
But when the nuclear weapons complex is estimated to cost $52 billion
a year (more than what the U.S. government spends on international
diplomacy and foreign assistance), the arguments for deep cuts make
as much economic sense as the notion they serve international
security needs.

An article at the beginning of 2009 in the magazine Foreign Policy in
Focus by Darwin Bond-Graham, a sociologist, and Will Parish, an
expert on nuclear issues, titled "Anti-nuclear Nuclearism" warned:
"The Obama administration is likely to continue a policy that we call
'anti-nuclear nuclearism.' Anti-nuclear nuclearism is a foreign and
military policy that relies upon overwhelming U.S. power, including
the nuclear arsenal, but makes rhetorical and even more substantive
commitments to disarmament, however vaguely defined.

"Anti-nuclear nuclearism thrives as a school of thought in several
think tanks that have long influenced foreign policy choices related
to global nuclear forces. Even the national nuclear weapons
development labs in New Mexico and California have been avid
supporters and crafters of it."

William Walker, a professor of international relations at the
University of St. Andrews in Scotland, in a paper for the Institut
Francais des Relations Internationales (IFRI), walks us through four
reasons for the re-emergence of the debate over nuclear weapons and
five obstacles to the elimination of nuclear weapons before
concluding with lowered expectations of "the international nuclear
order's stabilization and the avoidance of nasty surprises."

Specifically, Walker predicts that at the end of Obama's first term
there will have been "no military use of nuclear weapons anywhere, no
threshold-crossing by Iran, no discovery of additional clandestine
programs, no resumption of serious arms racing among the great powers
(including in space) and a record of co-operation with Russia, China,
France, India and Britain in pegging nuclear arsenals to low numbers
of weapons; a reasonably successful NPT Review Conference in 2010;
progress in bringing the CTBT into force and negotiating the FMCT
(Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty); and a strengthened export control
and IAEA safeguards system."

So is this what the cumulative effect of the campaign for a nuclear
weapons-free world will be four years hence?

As if to confirm our worst fears over the cozying up of the Obama
administration to the nuclear arms lobby, not a word was expressed in
the president's inaugural address on nuclear weapons issues unless
you count "With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly
to lessen the nuclear threat" as a promise to reduce, let alone
eliminate, nuclear weapons. Nor did the impressive rhetoric of the
State of the Union address contain a reference to nuclear weapons.

Efforts to smuggle in funding for the nuclear weapons program in the
financial stimulus package were fortunately detected in time and
excluded. The language of Obama administration officials is also
reverting to Cold War postures and of the nuclear arms controllers
with no hint of concrete plans to reach a nuclear-free world which
will be, as before, the stated "ultimate goal" for the dim and
distant future.

Perhaps the strategy will be to kick the can further down the road
when the Nuclear Posture Review mandated for 2009-10 is due.
Meanwhile the message being put out is that we should lower our
expectations.

The recent mid-Atlantic collision between nuclear-armed submarines of
France and Britain reminds us of the scary potential of nuclear
accidents. The global disarmament community, especially in civil
society, must be vigilant of this trend to use the old language of
the nuclear arms controllers and resist the fundamental change toward
a nuclear-free world which Obama's campaign statements had led his
supporters to expect in an "audacity of hope."

Anti-nuclear nuclearism will certainly not ensure the success of the
NPT Review Conference of 2010, let alone prevent the feared cascade
of proliferation, especially to terrorist groups. More immediately,
it will not help make the first Obama-Medvedev summit on April 1 a
success.

* * *

Jayantha Dhanapala is a former ambassador of Sri Lanka and a former
U.N. undersecretary-general for disarmament affairs who is currently
president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs. The
views expressed here are the author's own.(IHT/Asahi: April 1,2009)



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