Tactical Nuclear Weapons In Europe
By The Danish Pugwash Group
20 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Countercurrents.org
Abstract
The danger of nuclear war is very great today, especially because of the Ukraine crisis and the danger of accidents. We
would like to suggest that, in exchange for withdrawal of U.S. Nuclear
weapons from Europe, the Russian government might be persuaded to
eliminate its tactical nuclear weapons directed against Europe.
The dangers are very great today
Let us first consider the urgent reasons
why all nuclear weapons must be eliminated. Although the Cold War has
ended, the danger of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than ever
before. There are 16,300
nuclear weapons in the world today, of which 15,300 are in the hands of
Russia and the United States. Several thousand of these weapons are on
hair-trigger alert, meaning that whoever is in charge of them has only a
few minutes to decide whether the signal indicating an attack is real,
or an error. The most important single step in reducing the danger of a disaster would be to take all weapons off hair-trigger alert.
Bruce G. Blair, Brookings Institute, has
remarked that “It is obvious that the rushed nature of the process, from
warning to decision to action, risks causing a catastrophic mistake…
This system is an accident waiting to happen.” Fred Ikle of the Rand
Corporation has written,“But nobody can predict that the fatal accident
or unauthorized act will never happen. Given the huge and far-flung
missile forces, ready to be launched from land and sea on on both sides,
the scope for disaster by accident is immense… In a matter of seconds, through technical accident or human failure, mutual deterrence might thus collapse.”
Although their number has been cut in
half from its Cold War maximum, the total explosive power of today’s
weapons is equivalent to roughly half a million Hiroshima bombs. To
multiply the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by a factor of half a
million changes the danger qualitatively. What is threatened today is
the complete breakdown of human society.
Nuclear terrorism
There is no defense against nuclear terrorism.
We must remember the remark of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan after
the 9/11/2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. He said, “This time it
was not a nuclear explosion”. The meaning of his remark is clear: If the
world does not take strong steps to eliminate fissionable materials and
nuclear weapons, it will only be a matter of time before they will be
used in terrorist attacks on major cities. Neither terrorists nor
organized criminals can be deterred by the threat of nuclear
retaliation, since they have no territory against which such retaliation
could be directed. They blend invisibly into the general population. Nor
can a “missile defense system” prevent terrorists from using nuclear
weapons, since the weapons can be brought into a port in any one of the
hundreds of thousands of containers that enter on ships each year, a
number far too large to be checked exhaustively.
As the number of nuclear weapon states
grows larger, there is an increasing chance that a revolution will occur
in one of them, putting nuclear weapons into the hands of terrorist
groups or organized criminals. Today, for example, Pakistan’s
less-than-stable government might be overthrown, and Pakistan’s nuclear
weapons might end in the hands of terrorists. The
weapons might then be used to destroy one of the world’s large coastal
cities, having been brought into the port by one of numerous container
ships that dock every day. Such an event might trigger a large-scale nuclear conflagration.
The Ukraine crisis
Today, the world is facing a grave danger
from the reckless behavior of the government of the United States,
which recently arranged a coup that overthrew the elected government of
Ukraine. Although Victoria Nuland’s December 13 2013 speech talks much
about democracy, the people who carried out the coup in Kiev can hardly
be said to be democracy’s best representatives. Many belong to the
Svoboda Party, which had its roots in the Social-National Party of
Ukraine (SNPU). The name was an intentional reference to the Nazi Party
in Germany.
It seems to be the intention of the US to
establish NATO bases in Ukraine, no doubt armed with nuclear weapons.
In trying to imagine how the Russians feel about this, we might think of
the US reaction when a fleet of ships sailed to Cuba in 1962, bringing
Soviet nuclear weapons. In the confrontation that followed, the world
was bought very close indeed to an all-destroying nuclear war. Does not
Russia feel similarly threatened by the thought of hostile nuclear
weapons on its very doorstep? Can we not learn from the past, and avoid
the extremely high risks associated with the similar confrontation in
Ukraine today?
Lessons from World War I: The danger of escalation
Since we have recently marked the 100th
anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, it is appropriate to
view the crisis in Ukraine against the background of that catastrophic
event, which still casts a dark shadow over the future of human
civilization. We must learn the bitter lessons which World War I has to
teach us, in order to avoid a repetition of the disaster.
We
can remember that the First World War started as a small operation by
the Austrian government to punish the Serbian nationalists; but it
escalated uncontrollably into a global disaster. Today, there are many parallel situations, where uncontrollable escalation might produce a world-destroying conflagration.
Another lesson from the history of World
War I comes from the fact that none of the people who started it had the
slightest idea of what it would be like. Science and technology had
changed the character of war. The politicians and military figures of
the time ought to have known this, but they didn’t. They ought to have
known it from the million casualties produced by the use of the
breach-loading rifle in the American Civil War. They ought to have known
it from the deadly effectiveness of the Maxim machine gun against the
native populations of Africa, but the effects of the machine gun in a
European war caught them by surprise.
Nuclear war: an ecological catastrophe
Few
politicians or military figures today have any imaginative
understanding of what a war with thermonuclear weapons would be like.
Recent studies have shown that in a nuclear war, the smoke from
firestorms in burning cities would rise to the stratosphere where it
would remain for a decade, spreading throughout the world, blocking
sunlight, blocking the hydrological cycle and destroying the ozone
layer. The effect on global agriculture would be devastating, and the
billion people who are chronically undernourished today would be at
risk. Furthermore, the tragedies of Chernobyl and Fukushima remind us
that a nuclear war would make large areas of the world permanently
uninhabitable because of radioactive contamination. A
full-scale thermonuclear war would be the ultimate ecological
catastrophe. It would destroy human civilization and much of the
biosphere.
One can gain a small idea of the terrible
ecological consequences of a nuclear war by thinking of the radioactive
contamination that has made large areas near to Chernobyl and Fukushima
uninhabitable, or the testing of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific, which
continues to cause leukemia and birth defects in the Marshall Islands
more than half a century later.
The illegality of NATO
In recent years, participation in NATO
has made European countries accomplices in US efforts to achieve global
hegemony by means of military force, in violation of international law,
and especially in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles.
Former UN Assistant Secretary General
Hans Christof von Sponeck used the following words to express his
opinion that NATO now violates the UN Charter and international law: “In
the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, the
Charter of the United Nations was declared to be NATO’s legally binding
framework. However, the United-Nations monopoly of the use of force,
especially as specified in Article 51 of the Charter, was no longer
accepted according to the 1999 NATO doctrine. NATO’s territorial
scope, until then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was expanded by
its members to include the whole world”
Article 2 of the UN Charter requires that
“All members shall refrain in their international relations from the
threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political
independence of any state.” This requirement is somewhat qualified by
Article 51, which says that “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair
the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed
attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the
Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international
peace and security.”
Thus, in general, war is illegal under
the UN Charter. Self-defense against an armed attack is permitted, but
only for a limited time, until the Security Council has had time to act.
The United Nations Charter
does not permit the threat or use of force in preemptive wars, or to
produce regime changes, or for so-called “democratization”, or for the
domination of regions that are rich in oil. NATO must not be a party to the threat or use of force for such illegal purposes.
In 1946, the United Nations General
Assembly unanimously affirmed “the principles of international law
recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of
the Tribunal”. The General Assembly also established an International
Law Commission to formalize the Nuremberg Principles. The result was a
list that included Principles VI, which is particularly important in the
context of the illegality of NATO:
Principle VI: The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:
a Crimes against peace: (I) Planning,
preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in
violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii)
Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for accomplishment of any
of the acts mentioned under (I).
Robert H. Jackson, who was the chief
United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, said that “To initiate
a war of aggression is therefore not only an international crime, it is
the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes in
that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
At present, NATO’s
nuclear weapons policies violate both the spirit and the text of the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in several respects: Today there are an
estimated 200 US nuclear weapons still in Europe The air forces of the
nations in which they are based are regularly trained to deliver the US
weapons. This “nuclear sharing”, as it is called, violates Articles I
and II of the NPT, which forbid the transfer of nuclear weapons to
non-nuclear-weapon states. It has been argued that the NPT would no
longer be in force if a crisis arose, but there is nothing in the NPT
saying that the treaty would not hold under all circumstances.
Article VI of the NPT requires states possessing nuclear weapon to get rid of them within a reasonable period of time.
This article is violated by fact that NATO policy is guided by a
Strategic Concept, which visualizes the continued use of nuclear weapons
in the foreseeable future.’
The principle of no-first-use of nuclear
weapons has been an extremely important safeguard over the years, but it
is violated by present NATO policy, which permits the first-use of
nuclear weapons in a wide variety of circumstances.
Russian tactical nuclear weapons
Russian nuclear weapons, both tactical and strategic, also represent a grave danger to human civilization and to the biosphere. We
would like to suggest that a bargain might be reached. In exchange for
the withdrawal of US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, as well as the
lifting of the present European sanctions directed against the Russian
economy, it might be possible to persuade the Russian government to
eliminate all of their tactical nuclear weapons directed against Europe.
Establishment opinion shifts towards nuclear abolition
The complete elimination of nuclear
weapons is by no means a hopeless cause. While the Ukraine crisis is a
great step backwards, there are indications that the establishment is
moving towards the point of view that the peace movement has always
held: – that nuclear weapons are essentially genocidal, illegal and
unworthy of civilization; and that they must be completely abolished as
quickly as possible. There is a rapidly-growing global consensus that a
nuclear-weapon-free world can and must be achieved in the very near
future.
One of the first indications of the
change was the famous Wall Street Journal article by Schultz, Perry,
Kissinger and Nunn advocating complete abolition of nuclear arms. This
was followed quickly by Mikhail Gorbachev’s supporting article,
published in the same journal, and a statement by distinguished Italian
statesmen. Meanwhile, in October 2007, the Hoover Institution had
arranged a symposium entitled “Reykjavik Revisited; Steps Towards a
World Free of Nuclear Weapons”.
In Britain, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Lord
Hurd and Lord Owen (all former Foreign Secretaries) joined the former
NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson as authors of an article in The
Times advocating complete abolition of nuclear weapons . The UK’s
Secretary of State for Defense, Des Brown, speaking at a disarmament
conference in Geneva, proposed that the UK “host a technical conference
of P5 nuclear laboratories on the verification of nuclear disarmament
before the next NPT Review Conference in 2010” to enable the nuclear
weapon states to work together on technical issues.
In February, 2008, the Government of
Norway hosted an international conference on “Achieving the Vision of a
World Free of Nuclear Weapons”. A week later, Norway’s Foreign Minister,
Jonas Gahr Støre, reported the results of the conference to a
disarmament meeting in Geneva. On
July 11, 2008 , speaking at a Pugwash
Conference in Canada, Norway’s Defense Minister, Anne-Grete
Strøm-Erichsen, reiterated her country’s strong support for the complete
abolition of nuclear weapons .
In July 2008, Barack Obama said in his
Berlin speech, “It is time to secure all loose nuclear materials; to
stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to reduce the arsenals from
another era. This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace
of a world without nuclear weapons.” Later that year, in September,
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 that it is now
quite possible to liberate humanity from nuclear weapons…”
Other highly-placed statesmen added their
voices to the growing consensus: Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin
Rudd, visited the Peace Museum at Hiroshima, where he made a strong
speech advocating nuclear abolition. He later set up an International
Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament co-chaired by
Australia and Japan. On January 9, 2009, four distinguished German
statesmen (Richard von Weizäcker, Helmut Schmidt, Egon Bahr and
Hans-Dietrich Genscher) published an article entitled “Towards a
Nuclear-Free World: a German View” in the International Herald Tribune.
Going to zero
On December 8-9, 2008, approximately 100
international leaders met in Paris to launch the Global Zero Campaign .
They included Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan, Norway’s former Prime
Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, former UK Foreign Secretaries Sir
Malcolm Rifkind, Margaret Beckett and David Owen, Ireland’s former Prime
Minister Mary Robinson, UK philanthropist Sir Richard Branson, former
UN Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala, and Nobel Peace Prize
winners President Jimmy Carter, President Mikhail Gorbachev, Archbishop
Desmond Tutu and Prof. Muhammad Yunus. The concrete steps advocated by
Global Zero include:
• Deep reductions to Russian-US arsenals, which comprise 96% of the world’s nuclear weapons.• Russia and the United States, joined by other nuclear weapons states, cutting arsenals to zero in phased and verified reductions.• Establishing verification systems and international management of the fuel cycle to prevent future development of nuclear weapons.
The Global Zero website contains a report
on a new public opinion poll covering 21 nations, including all of the
nuclear weapons states.The poll showed that public opinion
overwhelmingly favors an international agreement for eliminating all
nuclear weapons according to a timetable. It was specified that the
agreement would include monitoring. The average in all countries of the
percent favoring such an agreement was 76%. A few results of special
interest mentioned in the report are Russia 69%; the United States, 77%;
China, 83%; France, 86%, and Great Britain, 81%.
On April 24, 2009, the European
Parliament recommended complete nuclear disarmament by 2020. An
amendment introducing the “Model Nuclear Weapons Convention” and the
“Hiroshima-Nagasaki Protocol” as concrete tools to achieve a nuclear
weapons free world by 2020 was approved with a majority of 177 votes
against 130. The Nuclear Weapons Convention is analogous to the
conventions that have successfully banned chemical and biological
weapons.
More recently, U.N. Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon initiated a comprehensive 5-point program for complete nuclear
disarmament, and in December, 2014, Austria hosted the Third
International Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons.
At the conference, the Austrian government issued an extremely strong
statement in which they pledged to work for the complete abolition of
nuclear weapons. More than 50 governments have already signed statements
endorsing the Austrian pledge.
Long-term goals
Both the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
and the 1996 decision of the International Court of Justice require all
nuclear weapons states to rid themselves completely of their nuclear
weapons. In response to questions put to it by WHO and the UN General
Assembly, the IJC ruled that “the threat or use of nuclear weapons would
generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in
armed conflict, and particularly the principles and rules of
humanitarian law.” In addition, the Court added unanimously that “there
exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion
negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under
strict international control.” Article VI of the NPT also requires
signatories of the treaty to completely eliminate their nuclear weapons.
It is a life-or-death question. We can
see this most clearly when we look far ahead. Suppose that each year
there is a certain finite chance of a nuclear catastrophe, let us say 2
percent. Then in a century the chance of survival will be 13.5 percent,
and in two centuries, 1.8 percent, in three centuries, 0.25 percent, in 4
centuries, there would only be a 0.034 percent chance of survival and
so on. Over many centuries, the chance of survival would shrink almost
to zero. Thus by looking at the long-term future, we can clearly see
that if nuclear weapons are not entirely eliminated, civilization will
not survive.
Civil society must make its will felt. A
thermonuclear war today would be not only genocidal but also omnicidal.
It would kill people of all ages, babies, children, young people,
mothers, fathers and grandparents, without any regard whatever for guilt
or innocence. Such a war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe,
destroying not only human civilization but also much of the biosphere.
Each of us has a duty to work with dedication to prevent it.
The Pugwash Conferences on Science
and World Affairs is an international organization that brings together
scholars and public figures to work toward reducing the danger of armed
conflict and to seek solutions to global security threats. It was
founded in 1957 by Joseph Rotblat and Bertrand Russell in Pugwash, Nova
Scotia, Canada, following the release of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto
in 1955. Rotblat and the Pugwash Conference won jointly the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1995 for their efforts on nuclear disarmament
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