03 April 2009: National Post
By Peter Goodspeed, National Post
With the world standing on what some experts fear is the beginning of a dangerous new nuclear age, U.S. President Barack Obama received thunderous applause on Friday when he told a European audience one of his goals was “a world without nuclear weapons.”
“Even with the Cold War now over, the spread of nuclear weapons, or the theft of nuclear material, could lead to the extermination of any city on the planet,” he said in Strasbourg, France, as NATO leaders gathered for summit talks.
He is backed by a bevy of international dignitaries, some of the most celebrated veterans of the Cold War who have launched a major disarmament movement to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely.
Calling themselves Global Zero, the group of 100 influential world leaders includes former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, former U.S. defence secretary Robert McNamara, former U.S. national security advisors Zbignew Brezezinkski, Sandy Berger and Robert McFarlane, Ehsan Ul-Haq, former chief of staff of Pakistan’s military, and Brajesh Mishra, a former Indian national security
advisor.
Global Zero is backed by nine former heads of state, eight former foreign ministers, three former defence ministers, six former national security advisors and 19 former top military commanders from the United States, Russia, China, Britain, India and Pakistan.
They warn the world’s most urgent security threat is the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the risk of nuclear terrorism. And they are demanding a comprehensive international agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons, through phased and verified reductions, over the next 20 years.
The world now has nine “nuclear countries” since the United States exploded the first atom bomb on July 16, 1945. There are more than 26,000 nuclear weapons, many of them programmed for hair-trigger launches. The United States and Russia still stand poised for nuclear attack, as do India and Pakistan; Britain and France are in the midst of renewing their nuclear strike forces; China is refining its nuclear arsenal; Israel refuses to discuss its nuclear capabilities; North Korea continues to carry out nuclear tests, and on Friday was threatening to conduct a long-range missile test disguised as a satellite launch; and Iran is secretly advancing its bomb-building capabilities.
It was the fear of an increasingly dangerous new nuclear age that impelled the Cold War titans to launch their disarmament movement last December in Paris.
“This will not happen quickly, easily and unilaterally,” says Chuck Hagel, a former U.S. senator from Nebraska and a Global Zero signatory. “Getting to Global Zero will require the reduction of all nations’ nuclear arsenals over many years. But it is important to begin now and set the world on a new course.”
Through a combination of private diplomacy, high-level policy work and high-powered public relations, Global Zero intends to give nuclear disarmament the same sort of public profile as global warming.
After the group’s launch, signatories began to lobby U.S. and Russian leaders to adopt a step-by-step reduction of nuclear arsenals.
Those efforts may have contributed in part to Wednesday’s announcement in London the U.S. and Russia will launch a new round of nuclear arms-reduction talks aimed at replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires in December.
Because the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals account for 96% of the world’s nuclear weapons, Global Zero argues those two states should begin with deep reductions to their stockpiles, then start a disarmament dialogue with other nuclear weapons states.
The group believes a commitment to disarmament by the major nuclear powers will make it harder for any non-nuclear nation to acquire such weapons and will set the stage for the world’s first multilateral negotiations on nuclear reductions.
At the same time Global Zero is pushing the idea of establishing a new international management system of the nuclear fuel cycle, so countries seeking the benefits of nuclear energy can get fuel supplies from a regulated international agency, without having to dabble in proliferation-prone technologies.
By early next year the group hopes to hold an international disarmament summit that will draw more than 500 world leaders to press for arms reductions.
In the meantime, tens of thousands of Internet users have joined the campaign and signed an on-line declaration: “We the undersigned believe that to protect our children, our grandchildren and our civilization from the threat of nuclear catastrophe, we must eliminate all nuclear weapons globally.”
Others have launched support campaigns on networking sites like Facebook.
“It’s not about idealism, it is about public safety and security,” says Malcolm Rifkind, a former British defence and foreign secretary, now a Global Zero signatory.
“Nuclear weapons helped ensure peace and security during the Cold War, but we live in a different world. We do not need 26,000 nuclear weapons, [but] more countries are seeking nuclear arms and the proliferation of fissile material expands every year.”
Debate on disarmament is about to dominate the public agenda in the United States.
The U.S. Senate is preparing once again to decide whether to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and, in coming months, the Pentagon will conduct two crucial reviews of defence policy, the Quadrennial Defence Review and a Nuclear Posture Review – only the third formal study of U.S. nuclear strategy since the Cold War ended.
In addition, Washington is caught up in debates over whether to spend billions to refit its nuclear arsenal with a proposed reliable replacement warhead, while pondering the creation of a controversial anti-missile defence system in eastern and central Europe.
The international community has also scheduled a major conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty next year.
In yet another high-powered anti-nuclear initiative, a group of influential former Cold Warriors have coalesced around former U.S. secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former U.S. defence secretary William Perry and former U.S. senator Sam Nunn to campaign for a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons.
Based at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, the group is pressing for expanded nuclear disarmament talks and insists immediate steps be taken to improve security standards for nuclear weapons.
“The accelerating spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear know-how and nuclear material has brought us to a nuclear tipping point,” they wrote in a recent op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal.
“We face a very real possibility that the deadliest weapons ever invented could fall into dangerous hands.
“The steps we are taking now to address these threats are not adequate to the danger.
“With nuclear weapons more widely available, deterrence is decreasingly effective and increasingly hazardous.”
At the height of the Cold War in 1985, there were about 65,000 nuclear weapons in the world, but the numbers have been reduced by arms control agreements and the unilateral decisions of some countries to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
According to London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, at least 13 countries in the Middle East have announced new or revived plans to explore civilian nuclear energy projects, all of which carry the potential for further nuclear proliferation.
The sudden surge of interest is linked to rising energy needs in the region but is also directly related to growing concerns over Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technologies that appear designed to achieve a nuclear weapons capability.
On Friday, Mr. Obama urged his allies to stand firm against Iran’s nuclear ambitions, saying, “We cannot have a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.”
“If Iran does achieve nuclear status it doesn’t just affect things with regard to Israel,” Mr. Rifkind says. “There is also the question of how states around it will react, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. All may feel obliged to become nuclear powers.”
In the past, countries like India and Pakistan used civil nuclear programs as stepping stones to nuclear weapons.
That’s why Iran is such a concern. It is the only country, so far, to have constructed a uranium-enrichment plant before it has a single working reactor that needs its uranium. A Russian-built reactor at Bushehr will come on stream for the first time this year, but will operate on Russian-supplied fuel.
Nuclear experts believe Iran has already produced enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, similar to the one dropped on Nagasaki.
Still, the Iranians boast they will have an additional 6,000 centrifuges enriching uranium by the end of the year.
As recently as March 10, Dennis Blair, the U.S. director of national intelligence, declared Iran has yet to make a decision to produce highly enriched uranium or to press forward to put a nuclear warhead atop a ballistic missile. But he estimated the minimum time it would need to produce a workable nuclear weapon at between one and five years, depending on how intensively it pursues the project.
That could still leave time for the rest of the world to strengthen its non-proliferation programs and advance down the road toward nuclear disarmament.
“Obama could have some time left to implement his carrot-and-stick strategy – time which may also bring to power more moderate Iranian political leaders after that country’s June, 2009, election,” says Leonard Spector, deputy director of the Washington-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
But any move by Iran to suddenly break out and become a nuclear power overnight could derail all further hopes for disarmament and increase the risks of nuclear terrorism.
Most experts believe the more fissile material that exists, the more likely some will fall into the hands of terrorists.
In the past, nuclear disarmament was treated as a highly technical matter confined to the margins of political debate. But now, with a growing chorus of national security officials warning of the dangers of proliferation, the topic is going to receive a much higher profile.
Global Zero has produced public opinion polls that it says show 76% of people in 21 countries – including the big nuclear states – favour an international agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
“Nuclear proliferation is not unidirectional,” says Stephen Younger, former head of nuclear arms at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, who has just written the book The Bomb: A New History.
“Given the right conditions and incentives, it is possible for a nation to give up its nuclear aspirations.”
