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From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Thu May 5, 2005 6:59pm Subject: Towards A Nuclear Armageddon? From: "sacw" <aiindex@... Il Manifesto, Italy, May 1, 2005 A grim nuclear question-mark hangs over the planet's future By Praful Bidwai* An important international conference begins in New York on Monday, in which as many as 188 states will participate, and which will review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). On the outcome of the review will depend Planet Earth's survival and security. The treaty is one of the basic arms control agreements ever negotiated globally. It came into force 35 years ago and was indefinitely extended in 1995. The NPT is the world's sole bulwark against the uncontrolled spread of nuclear weapons. The review conference is taking place just when the global danger of nuclear proliferation is probably greater than ever before. Clandestine nuclear activities in North Korea, Libya and Iran, and disclosures about Pakistani expert A. Q. Khan's "nuclear Wal-Mart" highlight that danger. There is also a growing black market in nuclear materials suspected to be smuggled out of Russia. The first NPT review conference was held in 2000. It agreed on 13 steps towards complete global nuclear disarmament and re-emphasised the goal of complete elimination of these horror weapons from the world. This generated hope. Today, despair, rather than hope, prevails. Intervening between the two reviews were not just five years, but the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US. Following these, Washington set its face against all the 13 commitments of 2000. It says that post-9/11, it is no longer prepared to accept any constraints on its weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, or on ways of using them pre-emptively to "defend" itself. The US is mounting pressure to amend the NPT so that it will no longer obligate the NWSs to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. This could greatly weaken the moral force of the treaty, and open the floodgates for the unlimited spread of nuclear weapons, with potentially catastrophic global consequences. In a world where there are no barriers to the proliferation of horror weapons, no state or people can be secure. The NWSs may thus be opting for a suicidal long-term bargain by wilfully undermining the NPT's positive aspect. This NPT, despite its flaws, has won near-universal adherence. Only India, Pakistan and Israel have refused to join it. All three of them possess nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan crossed the nuclear threshold in 1998. Israel is believed to have between 100 and 300 nuclear bombs, each enough to kill perhaps 100,000-200,000 people at one go. The NPT is widely seen as a bargain or trade-off under which the five NWSs agree under the treaty's Article VI to eliminate their nuclear arsenals, while everyone else agrees not to acquire nuclear weapons. The bargain is not exactly equal. The obligations on the non-NWSs are immediate and subject to close physical verification. They must allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor their nuclear power facilities to ensure there is no diversion of atomic material to military uses. But the obligation on the NWSs is neither time-bound, nor subject to verification. Article VI only mandates them to "pursue negotiations in good faith" to end the arms race, leading "to nuclear disarmament." Despite this imbalance, the NPT has effectively limited the number of NWSs to under 10. (In the 1960s, it was feared there would be 20 to 30 NWSs by 2000.) That is partly because the NWSs at least verbally pay obeisance to Article VI and can cite some progress in reducing the number of missiles and warheads, especially since the 1980s. However, after 9/11, the Bush Administration claims the NPT can only work if it allows the nuclear powers to keep their nuclear weapons, but strictly prevents the non-NWSs from having them! It says the 2000 review conference resolution is merely "a historical document" and can be set aside. However, Article VI does not allow anyone to keep their nukes. According to an International Court of Justice verdict of 1996, the NWSs have a duty to bring to a successful conclusion talks for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. The ICJ is the world's highest authority on international law and has declared nuclear weapons to be incompatible with it. The 13 steps agreed in 2000 include early entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, talks on a fissile material cutoff, an "unequivocal" undertaking to eliminate nuclear arsenals, the principle of irreversibility for nuclear disarmament measures, and establishment of a subsidiary body in the Conference on Disarmament to deal with nuclear disarmament. Unfortunately, the US has "unsigned" the CTBT and reneged on other commitments. Worse, it wants to develop "usable" mini-nukes and redesign older bombs for "bunker-buster" capabilities. The US has launched multi-billion dollar programmes to do research on fusion-based weapons, and space-based nuclear weapons. At the same time, the US has weakened the concept of "negative security assurances"-whereby NWSs would not threaten non-nuclear states. Washington says it might use nuclear weapons in response to a biological or chemical attack, or even in other circumstances. The blatant contradiction in US policy is being translated into a rejection of Article VI of the NPT, coupled with even stricter obligations on the non-NWSs. These obligations do not produce foolproof results. Inspections can often fail to detect nuclear activities. The Bush Administration now emphasises "counter-proliferation", which will mean intrusive searching of the nuclear facilities and ships of "rogue states", including searches on the high seas, much like modern-day "official" pirates! The US would like certain countries (e. g. Iran) not to have materials like enriched uranium even to produce power because they can "undermine the NPT's fundamental role in strengthening international security". But Washington turns a blind eye to Israel's substantial nuclear arsenal. These double standards send out the message that possessing nuclear weapons can earn you respect-the worst message from the non-proliferation perspective! The bargain at the NPT's heart has always been fragile. If the NWSs, led by the US, undermine that bargain altogether, the whole global non-proliferation regime can come crashing down. The fate of the world hangs by a slender thread in New York.-end- * The writer is a Delhi-based journalist, a co-author of South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament, Oxford University Press (New Delhi, 1999), and winner of the Sean MacBride International Peace Prize 2000 of International Peace Bureau, Geneva. http://japanfocus.org/269.html Nuclear Renaissance By Jonathan Schell The review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), a five-yearly event, opened in New York on May 2 without benefit of an agenda. The conference had no agenda because the world has no agenda with respect to nuclear arms. Broadly speaking, two groups of nations are setting the pace of events. One -- the possessors of nuclear arms under the terms of the treaty, comprising the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China -- wants to hold on to its nuclear arsenals indefinitely. The other group -- call them the proliferators -- has only recently acquired the weapons or would like to do so. Notable among them are North Korea, which by its own account has built a small arsenal, and Iran, which appears to be using its domestic nuclear-power program to create a nuclear-weapon capacity. As the conference began, Iran announced that it would soon end a moratorium on the production of fissile materials and Pyongyang declared that it had become a full-fledged nuclear power -- a declaration buttressed by testimony in the Senate from the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, that North Korea now has rockets capable of landing nuclear warheads on the United States. If the two countries establish themselves as nuclear powers, a long list of other countries in the Middle East and North Asia may seek to follow suit. In that case, the NPT will be a dead letter, and the gates of unlimited proliferation will swing open. The two groups of nations are in collision. The possessors want to stop the proliferators, and the proliferators want to defy them as well as ask them to get rid of their own mountainous nuclear arsenals. One of the liveliest debates at the conference concerns the nuclear fuel cycle, whereby fuel for both nuclear power and nuclear bomb materials is made. In the possessor countries, proposals abound to restrict this capacity to themselves, thus digging a moat around not only their arsenals but their nuclear productive capacities as well. The proliferators respond that the world's nuclear double-standard should not be fortified but eliminated: In the long run, either everyone should have the right to the fuel cycle -- and for that matter to the bombs -- or no one should. (This was the view of Pakistan and India until, in May 1998, they remedied the inequity in their own cases by testing nuclear weapons and declaring themselves nuclear powers.) Far more contentious is the new American military doctrine of pre-emptive war, aimed at stopping proliferation by force, as the United States said it sought to do by overthrowing the government of Iraq. Inasmuch as the Bush administration has suggested that even nuclear force might be used, the new policy represents the ultimate extreme of the double standard: The United States will use nuclear weapons to stop other countries from getting those same weapons. The proliferators accordingly fear a world whose commanding heights will be guarded by the nuclear cannons of a few nations, while the rest of the world cowers in the planet's lowlands and back alleys. Nuclear disarmament, once the domain of the peace-loving, would become a prime engine of war in an imposed, militarized global order. The debate between the nuclear haves and have-nots is probably unresolvable anytime soon. Certainly it will not be settled at the review conference. And yet, as is true of so many adversaries, the two groups of nations have more in common with each other than with other nations: They both want nuclear weapons. And if one looks at what is happening on the ground, a remarkable uniformity appears. All the parties in this quarrel are expanding their nuclear capacities and missions. In a sense the two groups, even as they threaten each other with annihilation, are cooperating in nuclearizing the globe. The end of the cold war was supposed to be the beginning of a farewell to nuclear danger, but now, fifteen years later, it's clear that a nuclear renaissance is under way. China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Britain are all increasing their arsenals and/or their delivery systems. (In an amazingly undernoticed development, the shadow of danger from Chinese nuclear weapons is falling over larger and larger areas of the United States.) The United States, even as it reduces the number of its alert nuclear weapons -- though not the total number of nuclear weapons, alert or otherwise -- is rotating its nuclear guns away from their traditional Cold War targets and toward Third World sites. (The United States and Russia built up such an excess of nuclear bombs during the Cold War that they can string out their dismantlement almost indefinitely without carving into their joint capacity to finish off most of human civilization.) Britain likewise is redirecting its targeting. Its Defense Secretary has stated that even the modest step of declaring no-first-use of nuclear weapons "would be incompatible with our and NATO's doctrine of deterrence, nor would it further nuclear disarmament objectives." In other words, Britain may find it necessary to initiate a nuclear war to achieve nuclear disarmament. Finally, individuals and terrorist groups are reaching for the bomb and other weapons of mass destruction. Osama bin Laden, for instance, has declared that obtaining such is the "religious duty" of Muslims, and September 11 gave us an example of how he might use them. All but unheard in the snarling din are the true voices of peace -- voices calling on the one group of nations to resist the demonic allure of nuclear arms and on the other group to rid themselves of the ones they have, leaving the world with a single standard: no nuclear weapons. Of the countries represented at the conference, fully 183 have found it entirely possible to live without atomic arsenals, and few -- barring a breakdown of the treaty -- show any sign of changing their minds. In the UN General Assembly the vast majority of them have voted regularly for nuclear abolition. Behind those votes stand the people of the world, who, when asked, agree. Even the people of the United States are in the consensus. Presented by AP pollsters in March with the statement, "No country should be allowed to have nuclear weapons," 66% agreed. In other countries, the percentage of supporters is higher. On the day their voices are heard and their will made active, the end of the nuclear age will be in sight. This report appeared at TomDispatch on May 4, 2005. It was posted at Japan Focus on May 4, 2005. ----------------------------------------------------------- INDIA THINKERS NET quote "Justice is as strictly due between neighbor nations as between neighbor citizens. A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang": Benjamin Franklin to Benjamin Vaughan, 14 March 1785 (B 11:16-7) ----------------------------------------------------------- |
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May07, 2005 - [India Thinkers Net]AIDWA on Model Nikahnamah of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board >> |
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