Europe and NATO Expansion

From END Info 26 DOWNLOAD

Frank Blackaby

Frank Blackaby was Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute from 1981 to 1986. First published as a pamphlet of the same title by Spokesman for the European Labour Forum in July 1996. We republish here for historical context and as a contribution towards further analysis of NATO’s policy, dynamics and the dangers it poses.

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Introduction

If you say ‘Europe’ to anyone in Britain these days, it triggers comments on beef, fish, the Conservative Party, and, just possibly, the Inter-Governmental Conference. These are ephemerae. The big issue is as it has always been – how do we make sure that we never again have a great war in Europe? We failed twice this century. It would be wicked to fail again. Could it happen? The way things are going, the answer is – Yes.

Five years ago, peace over the whole of Europe was there for the taking. Western Europe was already a ‘security enclave’, in this sense: that it was absurd to think that the three old contenders – France, Britain and Germany – would ever again resort to military force to settle disputes between them. Germany had been brought into the Western comity of states: it was no longer an expansionist power. Then from 1985 on, Gorbachev set about removing for good the idea of Soviet expansionism.

It is easy to forget the enormity, and the totality, of that change. Indeed it was not one change: it was about nine changes. The Berlin Wall came down. All Soviet troops left Eastern Germany, and all other Warsaw Pact states as well. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved. The USSR broke up, and two new states were created – Belarus and the Ukraine which stood between Russia and Poland. So Russian troops, withdrawn to their new border, were over 1,000 kilometres away from the new German border. The USSR accepted the reunification of Germany.

There was more. In the five years before its dissolution, the USSR assented to a whole series of Western arms control proposals. It accepted a total zero for all ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges from 500km to 5,500km – a proposal the US had put forward in the certainty that the USSR would turn it down. The USSR signed a Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe which meant far more dismantling and destruction of weapon systems on the Eastern than on the Western side. It agreed to a START Treaty reducing Soviet nuclear weapons much more than those of the US.

Finally, any idea of furthering the worldwide spread of Communism was abandoned. What else could the USSR (and later Russia) have done, to convince the world that it was not an aggressive expansionist power?

A chance

Here then was a chance. For the first time in recorded history there was a chance to create a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals where the risk of inter-state (not intra-state) war could be reduced down towards zero. This had already happened in Western Europe. Within the region of the European Union security was no longer a military matter. In any dispute between EU members, their relative military capability was irrelevant. Even the fiercest British Eurosceptic, angry at the ban on British beef exports, does not suggest calling the chiefs of staff into Cabinet meetings. The idea of settling disputes within the EU by military means is off the map of political possibility.

This ‘security enclave’ could have been extended to Eastern Europe. Two things were needed. One was to bring Russia into the comity of nations as an equal partner as had already been done with the Second World War enemy, Germany. The other was to avoid at all costs the creation of a new dividing line in Europe. There should be no going back to the old pattern – an alliance of selected European states against the threat from a European enemy outside the group.

The opportunity was lost. It is not going to be easy to salvage things now.

NATO was clearly not the right body for the new Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty, the Washington Treaty, is a simple, monochrome Treaty. Security organisations fall into two classic categories. There are collective security treaties, which are concerned primarily with conflicts between their members and there are collective defence treaties, which are created to deal with an enemy or enemies outside the group. The Washington Treaty is a collective defence treaty, addressed to an outside threat. It is not - repeat not a collective security treaty. It has no provisions for dealing with conflicts between its own members. That is one reason why it is so short: it can be printed out on one sheet of A4 paper.

Further, NATO was a single-enemy treaty. It had one purpose and one purpose only – to deter the USSR from an attack on Western Europe. It was a military treaty, and nothing else. It had no concern with human rights – there was no question of suspending Greece or Turkey when they were under military dictatorships. It had nothing to do with economic issues. Its purpose was to confront an enemy, the Soviet Union, with military power.

How has it been possible to promote NATO as the dominant security organisation in Europe, when the Soviet Union was no longer the enemy? There has been no revision to the Washington Treaty of 1949. It is still for collective defence, and that presumes some enemy. These are some answers to that question.

The promotion of NATO

It soon became clear that, in spite of the loss of the enemy, NATO would remain the United States’ chosen instrument of influence in Europe. The US had no intention of allowing the Pan-European Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the CSCE, later the OSCE) to take its place. In NATO, the United States had an undisputed position of leadership. It dominated NATO’s decision-making process – for the threat, spoken or unspoken, of US withdrawal from Europe was always there. The CSCE was much too European for American tastes. The USA had (in its view) won the Cold War. Russia was in a chaotic state, so that there was no need to pay much attention to Russian views on any security issue. The general US attitude was: ‘We are the masters now’.

In the early period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, some of the Eastern European states, former members of the Warsaw Pact, initially favoured the idea of a pan-European security body. They changed their minds when they understood the US position. Their long period of subjection to Soviet hegemony had left them with one main security obsession: to stay out of any Russian sphere of influence. They wanted a guarantee from the United States that this would not be permitted. The only way they saw of obtaining that guarantee was by becoming members of NATO. For them, NATO was still an organisation for deterring Russia. As one Polish diplomat put it – though not on a diplomatic occasion: ‘We are not interested in the fun and games. [He was referring to Partnership for Peace manoeuvres, discussed below]. We just want to make sure that, if there is trouble with Russia, the US marines will be there’.

NATO moved in a somewhat crab-like way to its present position, of accepting the idea that states which were previously members of the Warsaw Pact should be enrolled as full members of NATO. The first move, in 1991, was to establish the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, open to all Central and East European states and later to all the successor states of the old USSR. Virtually all the eligible states joined. The Council’s function was to provide consultation on defence planning and other military matters. Whether in fact Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have benefited much from such consultations is perhaps doubtful.

The next step was to develop with some of these states Partnership for Peace (PfP) programmes. It is always as well to be wary when military organisations adopt the word ‘Peace’. The US Strategic Air Command had as its motto ‘Peace is our Profession’ at a time when it was sending B52s with nuclear bombs to loiter near the Soviet border. President Reagan decided to christen the MX Intercontinental Ballistic Missile the ‘Peacekeeper’ – though most of those writing about US nuclear weapons seem to have jibbed at using this designation.

‘Partnership for Peace’ programmes might suggest such items as educational programmes in schools designed to encourage children not to hate other nationalities, or the financing of films which show the appalling consequences of modern war. In fact the NATO Partnership for Peace programmes are concerned exclusively with the military: peace was a military matter, to be obtained by military means. So PfP programmes involve such items as joint military exercises, force planning and the development of interoperability. Russia accepted the idea of PfP programmes because it assumed that they were a relatively innocuous substitute for full NATO membership.

Then in January 1994 NATO, at US instigation, decided in principle to admit former Warsaw Pact states as full members of NATO. This epoch-making decision was taken with little public debate in Europe Europeans were preoccupied with Maastricht and all that. So PfP programmes, instead of being substitutes for NATO membership, were billed as part of the necessary preparations for full membership. The promise of full NATO membership has perhaps been made most explicitly to Poland. In July 1994 President Clinton, no doubt with Polish-American votes in mind, stated before the Polish Parliament: ‘Bringing new members into NATO, as I have said many times, is no longer a question of whether, but when and how’.

NATO eventually published a study on enlargement in September 1995. It conveys the message that this enlargement will improve security and stability for all states: the phrase ‘security and stability’, sometimes varied to read ‘stability and security’, appears thirty times in the first 11 pages of the paper. The early part of the paper accepts that things have changed, and that there is virtually no risk of ‘a re-emergent large-scale military threat’. It then refers to ‘risks to European security which are multi-faceted and multi-directional’. The facets or directions are not specified.

However, the later sections which deal with the modalities of expansion imply that nothing has changed. The conditions of membership are the same. There should be no change in the Treaty – it stays a collective defence Treaty. It is strongly suggested that it would be a good idea for new members to accept the stationing of other allied forces on their territory: ‘. . . the stationing of allied forces offers specific military advantages in relation to collective defence’. However, this should be ‘neither a condition of membership nor foreclosed as an option’.

On nuclear weapons, ‘there is no a priori requirement for the stationing of nuclear weapons on the territory of new members’: however, this also is not foreclosed. New members must accept NATO’s nuclear weapon doctrine, which still includes possible first use. President Havel of the Czech Republic recently changed the view he previously held, and now allows for the possibility of nuclear weapons on Czech soil. The document states: ‘New members should concentrate, in the first instance, on interoperability’. That means that new weapon systems should be bought from manufacturers in NATO countries, not any longer from Russia.

Consequences

This decision – the Eastwards expansion of NATO – seems to have been taken without asking what would happen next. Here three questions are asked. What would happen to relations between Russia and the West? What about the new dividing line, between those states which are in NATO and those which are not? If Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic join NATO, will they be more secure?

The NATO document on enlargement has a section on relations with Russia. It leaves a vague impression of Russian cooperation, although it does concede that ‘Russia has raised concerns with respect to the enlargement process of the Alliance’. This is a massive understatement. The document offers this anodyne reply to those concerns: ‘. . . The Alliance has made it clear that the enlargement process ... will threaten no-one and contribute to a developing broad European architecture based on true cooperation throughout the whole of Europe, enhancing security and stability for all’.

How does the idea of NATO extension play in Petrozavodsk? Not well. In Russia, unlike Western Europe, the expansion of NATO has been extensively discussed. There is a consensus: it is negative. In 1993 Yevgeniy Primakov, now Foreign Minister, said that if ‘the biggest military grouping in the world with colossal offensive potential moved closer to Russia’s borders, then this would call for ‘a substantial reassessment of the Russian defence concept and a redeployment of armed forces, a change in operative plans’. More recently we have had the speech of the Russian Deputy Defence Minister, Andrei Kokoshin, who in the 1988-92 period had been one of the more prominent advocates of Soviet accommodation with the West. In February this year he reminded a Munich audience that the 1990 Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany prohibited the stationing of foreign troops in Germany’s eastern Lander: the point of the prohibition had been precisely to prevent any Eastward move for NATO. Now NATO was proposing an extension which leap-frogged east Germany and which could bring possibly nuclear weapons and very probably foreign troops even further to the East. Kokoshin said that it would usher in a new era of ‘dangerous confrontation’.

In Russia the condemnation of the NATO decision seems universal – in articles, think-tank reports, reactions of political parties and collective statements from the Russian equivalent of the ‘great and good’. Opinions differ about what Russia should do if it happens. These are three of the more moderate proposals (the extremists want a military reoccupation of the Baltic republics):

(a) Russia should move to build up a military-political alliance to counter NATO expansion. Belarus would certainly join, and Russia would put great pressure on Ukraine to join as well. President Kuchma of Ukraine has already spoken in Moscow, opposing NATO expansion. So a new, hostile border would be created, between Poland and the states to the East.

(b) Russia should then reintroduce ground-based tactical nuclear weapons to protect the border. Since NATO would then have a formidable superiority in conventional forces, Russia would have to rely much more on nuclear warheads. The decision to withdraw ground-based tactical nuclear weapons was a kind of gentlemen’s agreement between Bush, Gorbachev and later Yeltsin. There is no Treaty to prevent their reintroduction. Agreement would be sought to put them on the Belarus-Polish border.

(c) Russia should not ratify either the START II Treaty or the Open Skies Treaty until the idea of an Eastward expansion of NATO is jettisoned.

For the moment Western politicians have put the idea of NATO expansion on the back burner. They hope, by their temporary silence, to be of some help to President Yeltsin’s campaign. No doubt President Zyuganov would react more fiercely if the expansion does happen. However, in Russia the hostility to the idea is so widespread that any President would be bound to take some action of some kind - military as well as political – if the expansion goes ahead.

Which states?

The leading candidates for joining NATO are Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic; Slovakia is more doubtful. The states at the bottom of the list are the Baltic Republics. This is in some ways a rather odd ranking. In spite of disclaimers, the applicant states are interested in NATO membership for one reason and one reason only - as protection against a resurgent Russia. The Baltic states could claim to be in the greatest need, because of their problems with substantial Russian minorities. However, NATO Governments recognise that if these states joined NATO all hell would break loose in Russia: so the Baltic states are at the end of the queue.

So what would happen if Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic became full members of NATO? There would be a clear new dividing line in Europe. Further, there would be a de facto declaration of spheres of influence. The Western powers would be saying to Russia, in effect: ‘We will take those three states into the Western sphere of influence. You can have the rest’. There is no way in which this decision could fail to make a new dividing line in Europe – and a hostile one at that. As a consequence Russia might well put pressure on the Baltic states, on Belarus and on the Ukraine to accept the stationing of Russian forces on their territory.

If Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined NATO, would they in fact be more secure? One argument used a good deal is that these three states are in a ‘security vacuum’. This metaphor was extensively used in the debates on NATO expansion in the US Congress. Representative Christopher Smith, for example, described central Europe as a ‘no-man’s land ... between Germany and Russia’. He cited US political, economic, and security interests on the continent, and argued that NATO could fill a vacuum that would sustain progress made towards democracy and free-market economies in the region.

The vacuum metaphor is not helpful. Vacuums have to be filled by something. The implication is clear: if NATO doesn’t move in, Russia will. Why would Russia ‘move in’, whatever that might mean? It has no common border with the three states any longer. Which would be more profitable for Russia - good relations with these three states, or bad relations? Again, the parallel with Western Europe is useful. Belgium and the Netherlands have common borders with militarily powerful states. They are in a ‘security vacuum’: NATO does not fill it, since it has no provision for dealing with disputes between Treaty members. For Belgium and the Netherlands the concept of a security vacuum is meaningless: their relations with France and Germany are such that the overwhelming military power of those two states is not relevant.

The sensible course for the three applicant states is to work on developing good relations with Russia, which should not be difficult. If they join NATO, that will simply help to bring about the very thing they fear – a Russia which stops the decline in military spending, starts to build up more powerful military forces, and moves back to military confrontation with the West.

The applicant states should note that the ‘NATO guarantee’ in Article V of the Washington Treaty is not unequivocal. It does begin by saying that ‘an armed attack against one or more [allies] shall be considered an attack against them all’. However, it then goes on to say that each party to the Treaty will assist the ally under attack with ‘such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.’ There is no unequivocal military commitment. In the US Congressional debate opponents of NATO expansion said that, due to US conventional force reductions in Europe, such expansion would ‘create a dangerous gulf between our commitments in Europe and the resources required to meet them’. Representative Hamilton said that ‘these conventional force reductions would leave too great a reliance on US strategic nuclear forces to meet the US commitment’. Would the US really threaten a nuclear war in defence of Poland?

However, in spite of this questioning, NATO’s military establishment in Brussels has probably already started military contingency planning for three new entrants. It is hard to think of any realistic contingencies – a Russian incursion into Poland through Belarus? – but no doubt military imagination will think of something. There has already been discussion about Poland’s flat terrain: does it give more advantage to the invader or the defender? It clearly suggests the use of heavy armour, and that in turn suggests prepositioning. The next stage would be military exercises, which would provoke counter-exercises on the other side. No doubt some of those on the military side in NATO would find it in some ways comforting to be back to business as usual.

For Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, the cost of joining NATO, and obtaining such guarantees as Article V provides, is likely to be a much more hostile border to the East. This is a doubtful bargain.

How to get out of this mess

It will not be easy to find a way out of this foolish and unnecessary confrontation with Russia, because neither side will want to lose face. The Americans – fully conscious of their position as the one remaining superpower – have promised NATO membership particularly to Poland. They seem determined to take no notice of anything the Russians say. The Russians, increasingly angry at being treated as some kind of basket case whose views can be totally ignored, would have to do something if this Eastward expansion went ahead. The NATO decision in principle, and the US refusal to accept any modifications which might make the decision more palatable, has already served to increase Russian hostility to the West.

Once it is accepted that NATO’s present policy will build up great trouble for the future, it should be possible to find a proposal less provocative to the Russians. For example, NATO and Russia could jointly agree to guarantee existing borders in Central and Eastern Europe. There is the Ukrainian proposal, for a nuclear-weapon-free zone from Sweden in the North to Bulgaria in the South, taking in all the Central and East European states. The range of non-provocative possibilities is wide. The dominant requirements for European security remain - that Russia should be within the structure and not outside it, and that there should be no new dividing line in Europe.

According to Article 10 of the Washington Treaty, any invitation to a new state to join NATO has to have the unanimous agreement of all the existing members. In the debates in the US Congress, the representatives seem not to have noticed this particular clause. They clearly regarded NATO expansion as a matter for the United States alone to decide. Perhaps one or other of the European members of NATO might be prepared to incur US displeasure, and indicate that it might be better to wait for a more comprehensive European security agreement.

Envoi

It is silly to keep repeating that NATO’s Eastwards expansion will not create a new dividing line in Europe. Of course it will. It is silly to revert to the old ‘fallacy of the last move’ that once NATO moves Eastwards, it is the end of the game. It is not. The Russian Government – any Russian Government – will react, militarily as well as politically. Those who draft NATO documents seem to believe that, if they intone the mantra ‘security and stability’ thirty times, all problems will disappear. They will not. The course is being set for Europe to drift gradually downwards towards Cold War II – ‘that stale imposture played on us once again’.

Nuclear Disarmament is a precondition for real security in Europe

From END Info 26 DOWNLOAD

Ludo De Brabander – Büchel 07/07/2021

We can look with optimism or pessimism to the future.

On the negative side: it appears that we are living in a more dangerous decade compared to even the difficult episodes of the cold war. In the last two consecutive years, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the hands of the ‘Doomsday Clock’ – measuring the likelihood of man-made global catastrophe – at one hundred seconds to midnight – closer than it has ever been before, due to the imminent threats of nuclear war and climate disaster. Arms control treaties are no longer upheld, and governments have started updating and expanding nuclear arsenals.

But there are also hopeful developments. On 22 January 2021, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force. Meanwhile 54 states ratified the Ban Treaty. A milestone in history. Four years ago (the 7th of July 2017), after several years of negotiations, 122 countries voted in favour of the new Ban Treaty, with one against (Netherlands), and 1 official abstention (Singapore).

Unfortunately, 69 nations did not vote at all. They didn’t even take part in the negotiations. Among them the nuclear weapon states and all NATO members except the Netherlands.

NATO: nuclear alliance

NATO and governments of member states claim that the TPNW is incompatible with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and even undermines it. It is important to recall that a key motivation of the states that negotiated the TPNW was to take forward the implementation of the nuclear disarmament obligations of article VI of the NPT. This intention is also clearly stated in the preamble of the TPNW. Article VI of the NPT legally obliges all states parties to pursue “negotiations” and “effective measures” “on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control”. That is exactly what the TPNW does. UN secretary-general, António Guterres, flatly rejected in 2018 in Geneva claims that the TPNW undermines the NPT declaring that the two treaties are “fully compatible” and complementary. The research services division of the German federal parliament, wrote in a detailed paper in January 2021: “The TPNW does not undermine the NPT; it is part of a common nuclear disarmament architecture.”

Nevertheless, despite the obligations under article VI of the NPT, most NATO member states as well as all nuclear states, have been boycotting the negotiations. Worse, NATO started a disinformation campaign with the false claim that the Ban Treaty undermines the nuclear disarmament regime. The real reason is that NATO sees the treaty as a threat to the organization's political unity over its nuclear strategy. According to NATO: “Nuclear weapons are a core component of NATO's overall capabilities for deterrence and defence, alongside conventional and missile defence forces. NATO is committed to arms control, disarmament and non- proliferation, but as long as nuclear weapons exist, it will remain a nuclear alliance.”

However, NATO defined itself only recently as a nuclear alliance. In NATO's earliest years, nuclear weapons were in fact not even mentioned in the alliance's strategic concepts. Nuclear arms were considered as a responsibility of NATO's nuclear states. Only in the last decade did NATO accept a strategic concept in which it considered itself a ‘nuclear alliance’.

The collectivization of nuclear responsibility

From the 1960s, the US began to deploy nuclear weapons in other NATO member states, giving them a role in the planning and preparation of nuclear war. In the years that followed, all countries except France became involved in the nuclear deterrent policy, which was increasingly defined as a form of alliance solidarity. The reason?

International support among the population for nuclear disarmament grew. In the 80’s many hundreds of thousands demonstrated in European and US cities opposing new deployments of nuclear arms. The strengthening of humanitarian and anti-nuclear norms during and after the Cold War played a key role in pushing NATO to adapt.

This led to the collectivization of political responsibility for nuclear weapons.

Why? First, the nuclearization of NATO as an organizational identity allowed pro- nuclear actors to justify costly nuclear modernization programs and nuclear deployments as contributions to alliance "solidarity" and "cohesion". Second, this nuclearization of NATO undercut the potential for intra-alliance resistance to nuclear arms. Calls for nuclear disarmament could thus be seen as anti-NATO.

Nuclear sharing became a core component of NATO’s strategy. Of the three nuclear powers in NATO (France, the United Kingdom and the United States), only the United States has nuclear arms in other member states: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Once there were also US nuclear arms in Canada (1950-1984), Greece (until 2001) and the UK (until 1992). This means, by the way, that it was possible to send nuclear weapons back to the United States without it being considered an act against ‘NATO obligations’.

Currently, the US has about 150 tactical B61 gravity bombs deployed in Europe. They have to be mounted into (not in Turkey) dual capable aircraft (DCA) in war time. This can be considered as a transfer of control by non-nuclear states of nuclear arms which would be in breach with the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) of 1970. The NPT prohibits the direct or indirect transfer or control of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states. But according to the US the NPT is not valid anymore in war time (argument: the purpose of the NPT to avoid war failed).

These bombs will soon be replaced by new B61-12 bombs. They are equipped with an electronic tail kit that can guide the bomb to its target. They have also lower yield options. The mixture of both, precision and lower yield options could be seen by war planners as more ‘useable’ allowing some targets that previously would not have been attacked because of too much collateral damage to be attacked anyway. This is a very dangerous development. The new B61-12 will increase the danger of a war with nuclear weapons eroding the concept of ‘deterrence’.

European population opposes nuclear weapons

According to recent surveys in several European countries, a majority of the population in Europe is in favour of a ban on nuclear weapons. This is what 77% of those surveyed want in Belgium, 89% in Spain, 87% in Italy, 78% in the Netherlands and Denmark. The challenge for the peace movement is to translate that support from the population into political pressure and to get nuclear weapons back high on the political agenda. For several months, representatives of the peace movement have been preparing a call to hold a month of actions against nuclear weapons in September 2021. We must not miss that opportunity because in a few years' time the new B61-12 bombs will be deployed in Europe. We are also witnessing an increase in investments by nuclear weapon states for the maintainence and renewal of nuclear arsenals in nuclear weapon states. According to an ICAN report the nine nuclear weapon states invested 72.6 billion dollars in 2020, an increase of 1.4 billion compared to 2019. The billions thrown away on nuclear weapons could instead be funding health care, climate measures or for the promotion of social justice.

The world is at a crossroads and Europe has to make a strategic choice: remain part of the arms race or demonstrate global leadership by promoting a peaceful approach towards common global security.

I invite all of you to participate actively in the new "Nuke Free Europe" network against NATO's nuclear sharing policy and for the removal of all nuclear weapons in Europe. During the month of September, in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and the UK there will be actions near military bases with US nuclear weapons. Our first goal is to get nuclear arms back on the political agenda and to raise awareness among other movements (trade unions, the climate movement, women and youth movement) about the planetary threat of nuclear weapons and the need to act.

We need to discuss and find ways to increase pressure on governments of the nuclear sharing countries to embrace the vision of nuclear disarmament as a preventative tool for shaping Europe’s security environment. A first condition is to end nuclear ambiguity which means that the governments of nuclear sharing states acknowledge that nuclear weapons are deployed on its territories. We need a free and open democratic discussion so that the presence of nuclear weapons in the sharing countries can be politically and legally contested. As a peace movement we should join forces with social movements in Europe in making nuclear disarmament a political priority. We must believe that the return of the anti- nuclear mass movement of the eighties is not impossible. Secondly, we need a clear political commitment and time schedule for European nuclear disarmament, starting with negotiations between the US/NATO and Russia to dismantle US nuclear bombs followed by agreements on nuclear disarmament in France, UK and at least the European part of Russia. Once nuclear disarmament is achieved Europe can legally become a nuclear weapon free zone. At the same time the door is open for European countries to fulfil their obligations under the NPT and to sign and ratify the TPNW.

To recall the iconic slogan of Greenpeace: “No time to waste!”

Ludo De Brabander is a Belgian writer and spokesman for the Belgian peace organisation Vrede vzw. https://vrede.be/en

NATO, nuclear weapons and Europe

From END Info 26 DOWNLOAD

Joachim Wernicke

Evaluation of the communiqué on the NATO summit on 14 June 2021

It was a major endeavor to evaluate the 31-page NATO communiqué of June 14, 2021 (covering 79 topics, with much self-praise and repetition), in search of facts about the possible stationing of new US intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Following US President Trump’s termination of the 1987 INF Treaty in 2019, new such missiles – Long-Range Hypersonic Weapons (LRHW) for the US Army and Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) for the US Navy – were tested and ordered, for delivery from 2024.

What follows are selected and annotated citations from the communiqué (topic numbers in brackets), in their own translation, as the original NATO text is published in English, French, Russian and Ukrainian, but not in German:

(3) “Russia’s aggressive actions pose a threat to Euro-Atlantic security.” So NATO officially states Russia is a military adversary.

(9) “While NATO adheres to international agreements, Russia continues to break the values, principles, trust and agreements that underlie the NATO-Russia relationship.” No indication of which agreements have been broken from NATO’s point of view. And the claim conceals the Western breaches of international agreements, for example: promises to the Soviet head of state Gorbachev in 1990 and the breaking of these promises by NATO’s eastward expansion since 1997; permanent stationing of NATO units in countries of the former Warsaw Pact, thereby breaking the NATO-Russia Basic Act.

(11) “(...) the creation of modern dual-capable [i.e. conventional and nuclear] missiles in Kaliningrad (...), which increasingly threaten the security of the Euro-Atlantic area.” NATO does not specify how, in its view, these missiles which have been stationed in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad (formerly German North-East Prussia) since US President Trump’s termination of the INF Treaty in 2019 “increasingly threatens the security of the Euro-Atlantic area”. What is the difference between whether the missiles are stationed in Kaliningrad, in the Russian heartland or on Russian naval ships? Unfortunately, NATO is silent about the presumably important reason that Russia stations missiles in vulnerable circumstances in the small Kaliningrad area which is only the size of Thuringia and in the crosshairs of NATO guns from Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea. And NATO fails to mention that it was US President Trump’s termination of the INF Treaty that allowed Russia to produce and deploy the intermediate-range missiles necessary to shell the US command structure in West Germany from Kaliningrad. Thus, this threat was caused by the NATO chief himself. The communiqué does not ask why this happened.

(22) “NATO is advancing a new military strategy through the implementation of two significant military concepts that will further strengthen our ability to deter and defend against any potential adversary and to maintain and develop our military lead in the future.” Thus, NATO confirms its superiority over the Russian armed forces, which is also known and documented by a comparison of the military budgets (the USA spends more than ten times that of Russia).

“The concept of warfare envisages a long-term vision for the maintenance and further development of NATO’s decisive military lead.” NATO confirms that it is preparing for warfare. But it fails to specify where the battlefield would be.

There is a general consensus that any warfare in Europe is incompatible with the protection of civilians in European countries, including Russia. That is why warfare in Europe inevitably means genocide. Successful military defence is no longer possible in Europe. On the other hand, non-violent civil defense is possible. Political problems in Europe can no longer be solved by military force. The main task of any European government is to prevent any warring party from bringing the effects of weapons of war to its territory. The reasons for this are Europe’s centralized infrastructure, the extreme dependence on electrical power and the lack of shelters for the civilian population.

(25) “We will not be constrained by any possible adversary regarding the movement of Alliance troops on land, in the air or at sea and within any part of the Alliance territory.” Thus, NATO claims the right to deploy new US intermediate-range missiles near Russia’s borders, despite the violation of the NATO-Russia Basic Act, and on Europe’s inland seas. NATO fails to mention that the presence and movement of foreign NATO troops on the soil of NATO members requires the prior permission of these members.

(26) “We reaffirm our commitment to respond in an appropriate, balanced, coordinated and timely manner to Russia’s growing and evolving range of conventional and nuclear-equipped missiles, which is increasing in scale and complexity, and which poses significant risks to security and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area from all strategic directions (...) We have no intention of stationing land-based nuclear missiles in Europe.” Thus, the new US intermediate-range missiles are claimed as a “response” to Russian missiles (following the example of NATO’s argument for the stationing of US intermediate-range missiles in Europe in the 1980s). And of the Russian missiles, it is claimed that they are “conventional and nuclear-deployable”. However, NATO fails to add that the new US LRHW and CPS intermediate-range missiles have the same technical feature of dual capability.

NATO avoids talking more precisely about its intentions with regard to new US medium-range missiles. Land-based conventionally equipped missiles and sea-based nuclear and conventionally equipped missiles are expressly not excluded. The U.S. government claims that the new LRHW and CPS missiles will only carry conventional warheads — the “C” stands for “conventional”. There are reasons to doubt the truth of this claim. Replacing conventional warheads with nuclear warheads is technically easy, and the lower weights of recent nuclear warheads gives the missile greater range.

(31) “In cases of hybrid warfare, the [NATO] Council could decide to invoke Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, as in the case of an armed attack.” The success of “hybrid warfare” against a state presupposes that it has delivered its critical infrastructure to insecure data networks – a self-inflicted vulnerability that can be easily avoided by appropriate technical protection measures and by humans instead of remote-controlled robots at critical control points. It is therefore doubtful that “hybrid warfare” or a “cyber attack” can be considered a military attack under Article 5 of the Charter of the United Nations – or whether it is merely a euphemism for and irresponsible dereliction of duty to exercise caution in data security. If I leave my front door open and then complain about a stolen item, who is to blame? The thieves or me? In World War II, no one could shut down a power plant or waterworks via a telephone line or a radio link.

NATO gives the impression here that the proclamation of Article 5 of the NATO Treaty is a strong measure of the NATO Council, which inevitably leads to military action against an adversary. However, this is not the case. NATO is ‘sovereignty-friendly’. Each member state decides individually how to proceed in the event of a NATO alliance case, ranging from a diplomatic touch of compassion to military participation. There is no obligation of any kind for the individual member state to participate in warfare that NATO intends or begins.

The only exception is those NATO member states that allow foreign troops on their soil. The sovereignty of these states is undermined because, under international law, foreign troops are allowed to stage military actions in alleged “self-defense”, at their own discretion, with weapons of their own choice, regardless of the decisions or wishes of the host country. This problem affects Germany and Great Britain, for example. On the other hand, France, Denmark, the Czech Republic and other NATO members act differently: no deployment of US troops.

(34) “We continue to improve our increased forward presence in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland by adapting to plans and by ensuring the ability of the four combat-ready battle groups to operate in conjunction with the national homeland defense forces.” Thus, NATO acknowledges that there is a permanent ‘reinforced forward estate’ in the territory of the former Warsaw Pact, consequently in violation of the NATO-Russia Founding Act.

(40) “The Alliance’s strategic forces, especially those of the United States, are the highest guarantee of allies’ security. The independent strategic nuclear forces of the United Kingdom and France have their own role and contribute significantly to the overall security of the Alliance. The separate decision-making centers of these allies contribute to deterrence by complicating the calculations of possible adversaries. NATO’s nuclear deterrence set-up is also based on United States nuclear weapons deployed forward in Europe and infrastructure provided by the allies concerned.” This fundamentally correct description results from the fact that NATO is legally a foreign legion of the US president. The Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Forces in Europe also serves as NATO Commander-in-Chief. The US nuclear weapons stationed forward in Europe allow the US president to cause crisis in Europe while keeping his the ‘homeland’ safe.

The French nuclear forces are outside this purely US national chain of command of NATO. Britain’s nuclear weapons use Trident II launchers leased from the US, so they must realistically be seen as part of the US national chain of command, at least as long as it is only a matter of blocking British actions that are not acceptable to the US government.

(44) “We have told Russia many times that the BMD system [ballistic missile defense] cannot work against Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent [intercontinental ballistic missiles] and that there is no intention to redevelop this system in the future to give it the capability.” This claim is obviously false, because the GMD/GBI heavy defense system against intercontinental ballistic missiles is in use in California and Alaska.

(46) “NATO will continue to respond in an appropriate and responsible manner to the material risks posed by the Russian 9M729 missile to the security of the Alliance and by other short- and medium-range missiles (...) Russia’s proposal for a moratorium on the stationing of mid-lying missiles in Europe does not fit in with Russia’s unilateral and continued deployment of such systems on the continent and would not prevent Russia from deploying such missiles outside its European territory; this proposal is therefore not credible and unacceptable.” What kind of “essential risk” do Russian cruise missiles 9M729 (SSC-8) pose compared to Russian sea-based cruise missiles 3M14 (SS-N-30)? What other Russian short- and medium-range missiles pose such a “significant risk”?

Russia’s rejection of US claims of violation of the INF Treaty by SSC-8 has never been independently investigated. The SSC-8 thus serves as a pretext for stationing new US missiles in Europe, as the Soviet SS-20 missiles did in the 1980s.

This paragraph reveals the structure of NATO’s public relations work for the stationing of new US medium-range LRHW and CPS missiles in Europe: unlike in the 1980s, there will be no negotiations on a new INF Treaty, claiming that the Russian proposal was “not credible and unacceptable”. Due to the prevailing media coverage of corona and climate change, the European public has not yet noticed the situation of the new US missile stationing and its consequences.

(47) “Allies remain strongly committed to the full fulfillment of the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968] and all its aspects, as an irreplaceable platform, and to strengthening the NPT through its mutually reinforcing three pillars (...) NATO’s nuclear arrangements have always been fully in line with the NPT, which is the only credible path to nuclear disarmament.” This NATO claim is obviously false: for more than 50 years, the three nuclear-weapon states in NATO have been permanently violating Article VI of the NPT, because during this time they have never sought nuclear disarmament “in good faith”, but have continuously participated in an international nuclear arms race.

“We reiterate our opposition to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which does not fit with the Alliance’s nuclear deterrence strategy, is incompatible with the existing non-proliferation and disarmament architecture, risks undermining the NPT and does not take into account the current security environment. The TPNW does not change the legal obligations of our countries regarding nuclear weapons. We do not accept any argument that the TPNW in any way reflects or contributes to the development of customary international law.” NATO’s business model is based on nuclear weapons. That is why NATO rejects the TPNW, against the majority will of the peoples of NATO member states. But NATO’s claim that the TPNW “does not get along with the existing architecture for non-proliferation and disarmament” and “undermines the NPT” is false. The TPNW is based on the NPT and essentially corrects its fatal shortcoming, namely not to give a date for nuclear disarmament. Since 1968, the five nuclear-weapon states in the NPT have been taking advantage of this deficiency by mutual agreement, with the USA and Russia endangering the existence of civilization through their excessive nuclear armament. That is why signing the TPNW is the most important task of all governments today, even with priority over domestic tasks such as corona pandemic, climate protection, education, social services, etc.

All NATO member states except the US and Turkey are members of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has been prosecuting and convicting war criminals since 2002. The legal standard for war crimes is the ICC’s interpretation of the international humanitarian law of war. The state of customary international law on nuclear weapons was established by the International Court of Justice in 1986, at the request of the UN General Assembly. The TPNW continues to strengthen this status, which also becomes important for states that are not participants in the TPNW.

As Richard Falk points out in The Spokesman 147 (Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 2021), UN General Assembly Resolution 1653 (XVI) of 1961 also has significance; it declared the threat of and use of nuclear weapons to be unconditionally illegal under the UN Charter. In addition, Falk points to the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons, which has been observed internationally since 1945, and to the NPT itself. Both documents have weight in delegitimizing and stigmatizing nuclear weapons, with 122 of the 193 UN members (63 percent) voting for the TPNW in 2017. Regardless of NATO positions, compliance with international humanitarian law is a duty of every single citizen of the European NATO states. After committing a war crime, he or she stands alone before the ICC – neither their government nor NATO are able to protect him or her against prosecution, conviction and punishment.

Conclusion

Russia is now in a much worse military situation than the Soviet Union was in 1984. At that time, there was a security strip about 1000 km wide as a separation from NATO territory. The Pershing II missiles in West Germany, with their accuracy of meters and flight time of about ten minutes, were seen in Moscow as presenting an acute danger of decapitation strike against the underground bunkered Soviet command structure. The Soviet missiles of that time did not yet have the accuracy necessary to reliably destroy deep underground bunker targets. Therefore, in a situation of acute military tension in Europe in the 1980s, the Soviet military would have led a massive area-wide first strike as far as foreseeable, primarily the mass of the European-based US military, concentrated in West Germany, with destruction of the entire country as collateral damage, with an atmospheric total explosive force of a few tens of megatons, complete loss of the German population, moderate damage caused by radioactive fallout in neighboring states (mainly in eastern states due to the main wind direction) and a large area in Central Europe uninhabitable for at least future centuries.

The US forces in West Germany would have been destroyed in this proxy war. But by mutual agreement, both sides would have strictly avoided nuclear hits on the core countries of the USA and the Soviet Union. Both sides (Reagan/Gorbachev) recognized the remaining risks for their countries and defused the nuclear duel in Europe by concluding the INF Treaty with each other in 1987.

Today, the situation is fundamentally different. As a part of NATO’s eastward expansion, the new US medium-range missiles will be stationed directly near the Russian land border and in the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. As a result of their longer range (around 2700 km), these missiles will be LRHW and CPS – faster than the old Pershing II, which will shorten flight times. This makes a nuclear decapitation strike on the command bunkers in Moscow possible within about five minutes. Given this stronger US position, there will be no new INF Treaty, not even negotiations with Russia, as NATO has made explicitly clear.

On the other hand, instead of a few tens of megatons of nuclear explosive power on West Germany in the past, Russia has gained a unique new and advantageous situation, thanks to the termination of the INF Treaty by US President Trump. With this termination, Russia was again given the freedom to produce and station land-based medium-range missiles. Due to technical progress in accuracy, a first strike with “only” a small number of nuclear hits of so-called “small” explosive force (comparable to Hiroshima/Nagasaki) would be sufficient to decapitate the bunkered US command system in Europe, which is located (also for the new missiles) in West Germany (at least with targets in Stuttgart, Ramstein, Wiesbaden and Spangdahlem). The enclave of Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg, East Prussia) is in a sufficiently close firing position for medium-range ballistic missiles, about 1000 km or seven minutes flight time away from the US bunkers in Germany. The required total nuclear explosive force would be a few tens of kilotons – a thousand times lower than in the 1980s.

This Russian first strike can be carried out at little risk for Russia, because the area of damage is limited to Germany, and a pretext is at hand, namely a ‘regrettable computer error in the automatic alarm system, which is unfortunately required since the US stationed the new missiles’. Russia could even immediately take responsibility and offer help and compensation. The hard-hit target areas (explosion areas and radioactive fallout drags) would make up a few percent of the area of Germany, with less than one percent of the population as victims of the attack. In view of this “minor” damage only to economic rival Germany and the now non-existent operational capability of US troops in Europe, the US government would possibly refrain from reacting militarily, because the Russian command system and the intercontinental ballistic missiles targeted at the USA would be fully functional and in a high state of alert.

The German-Russian relationship would be severely disrupted. Russia would have lost export customers for a while. But presumably the US would have permanently lost the role it had held as a European power since 1945, so Russia would have significantly and permanently increased its security. When Stalin annexed the area around Königsberg in 1945, he was reportedly interested in an ice-free Baltic Sea port. He probably never expected that one day this small enclave could play an existential military role for Russia.

The scenario described above must never happen. It can easily be prevented: The nuclear-weapon-free zone in Central Europe and in the European inland seas must be urgently established, starting with Germany immediately following Austria’s example (since 2017) and signing the UN Nuclear Ban Treaty. This is a sovereign German decision, regardless of the assessments and wishes of the US and NATO. The German signature of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is demanded by 80 percent of the German population. The territory of the former GDR – a third of today’s Germany – has been a nuclear-weapon-free zone since 1990, thanks to the Two-plus-Four Treaty. Now the rest of Germany must achieve the same status. Thus, there will be no more US targets for Russian missiles in Central Europe. The next step: NATO and Russia embedded in the pan-European peace order of the OSCE, and a ban on any future attempt to solve political problems in Europe through military force, with gradual demilitarization of the continent and meaningful reallocation of the saved funds for urgent civilian tasks.

Translated from German. Any errors the responsibility of END Info.

Hypersonic threat

From END Info 26 DOWNLOAD

According to Hypersonic Weapons: Background Issues for Congress, produced by the Congressional Research Service (accessed at: www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/R45811.pdf):

The Department of Defense (DOD) is currently developing hypersonic weapons under the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike program, which is intended to provide the U.S. military with the ability to strike hardened or time-sensitive targets with conventional warheads, as well as through several Air Force, Army, and DARPA programs. Those who support these development efforts argue that hypersonic weapons could enhance deterrence, as well as provide the U.S. military with an ability to defeat capabilities such as advanced air and missile defense systems that form the foundation of U.S. competitors’ anti-access/area denial strategies. In recognition of this, the 2018 National Defense Strategy identifies hypersonic weapons as one of the key technologies “[ensuring the United States] will be able to fight and win the wars of the future.” Similarly, the House Armed Services Committee’s bipartisan Future of Defense Task Force Report notes that hypersonic weapons could present challenges to the United States in the years to come.

The report notes further that:

U.S. hypersonic weapons are to be conventionally armed. As a result, U.S. hypersonic weapons will likely require greater accuracy and will be more technically challenging to develop than nuclear-armed Chinese and Russian systems. Indeed, according to one expert, “a nuclear-armed glider would be effective if it were 10 or even 100 times less accurate [than a conventionally-armed glider]” due to nuclear blast effects.

The different branches of the US armed forces are developing their own hypersonic weapons systems:

U.S. Navy

In a June 2018 memorandum, DOD announced that the Navy would lead the development of a common glide vehicle for use across the services. The common glide vehicle is being adapted from a Mach 6 Army prototype warhead, the Alternate Re-Entry System, which was successfully tested in 2011 and 2017. Once development is complete, “Sandia National Laboratories, the designer of the original concept, then will build the common glide vehicles. ... Booster systems are being developed separately.”

The Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) is expected to pair the common glide vehicle with a booster system to create a common All Up Round (AUR) for use by both the Navy and Army ...

U.S. Army

The Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon program is expected to pair the common glide vehicle with the Navy’s booster system. The system is intended to have a range of over 1,725 miles and “provide the Army with a prototype strategic attack weapon system to defeat A2/AD capabilities, suppress adversary Long Range Fires, and engage other high payoff/time sensitive targets.”

U.S. Air Force

The AGM-183 Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon is expected to leverage DARPA’s Tactical

Boost Glide technology to develop an air-launched hypersonic glide vehicle prototype capable of travelling at average speeds of between Mach 6.5 and Mach 8 at a range of approximately 1,000 miles. Despite testing delays due to technical challenges, ARRW successfully completed a “captive carry” test flight in June 2019; its first free-flight test failed in April 2021.

The development of these weapons is in part a response to similar developments in Russia and China, which the US and allies view as strategic competitor nations. The race to develop and deploy such weapons systems is part of the new ‘arms race’ which seeks to enhance existing military capabilities by introducing new technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence etc... into the battlefield.

The questions that remain unanswered are: when will these weapons be deployed and where will they be stationed?

According to a report (11 August 2021) on the Breaking Defense website:

The US Army is steadily progressing with its Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) prototype, to the point the service plans to start training operations staff on ground-based equipment by mid October, says Bob Strider, deputy director of the Army Hypersonic Project Office.

“We are moving very rapidly toward getting this capability put in place,” he told the annual Space and Missile Defense Symposium on Tuesday. “We’re very, very confident that we’re going to meet our 2023 fielding date.”

The U.S. Navy and Air Force versions of these weapons will be in use wherever the Navy and Air Force deploy their ships and planes (the US has an extensive ‘boot print’) and as such the range of the weapons will not limit the scope of deployment as they will be carried by machines that themselves have significant ranges. The exact positioning of the ground-based hypersonic weapons by the US Army has not been revealed.

Various news reports on the operational requirements of the LRHW indicate that nearby airfields will be required to supply the equipment and military bases will be needed to house troops, conduct repairs etc...

The nature of the ground-based LRHW’s, their capabilities and the fact that they are intended to ‘meet the threat’ posed by Russia and China narrows down the likely field of deployment.

For example, with a reported range of 2,775km the LRHW could reach China from Guam. Likewise, if the LRHW was deployed in any part of Europe then Russia would be in range. It is worth noting that if LRHW was based in London, UK, for example, then it would be within comfortable range of Moscow, Russia, and the complex of command-and-control facilities in the area.

When these new weapon systems are deployed in Europe, it looks likely that they will be stationed in Germany or a neighbouring NATO member state (Poland, for example). It seems unlikely, but not impossible, that they will be stationed in the UK and whether or not the US is able to station them in Germany will depend to one degree or another on the outcome of the upcoming Federal elections.

Wherever these missiles are based in Europe, they are unlikely to increase security on the continent. More likely, the presence of such weapons will increase tensions further and lead to a deterioration of general security. There deployment will surely spark reciprocal deployments by Russia.

A further concern is addressed in more detail in Joachim Wernicke’s article on page 18. Although the LRHW’s are to ‘conventionally’ armed upon deployment, it appears that the missile technology is capable of ‘dual use’, which means that a conventional payload could be replaced with a nuclear payload. A similar situation exists with the Aegis Ashore missile systems: a fact we have pointed out on a number of occasions.

The European peace movements should be alert to the prospect of LRHW’s being stationed in Germany, Poland, Romania or elsewhere on the continent. We should be clear that any such stationing will degrade security and increase risk. Wherever possible, the alarm should be raised on this prospect and plans formulated to resist the deployment.

Reflections on Hiroshima

From END Info 26 DOWNLOAD

Tom Unterrainer

Tom Unterrainer delivered the following ‘reflection’ on behalf of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at Coventry Cathedral, UK, on Hiroshima Day 2021.

On October 21, 1945, the physicist Daniel Posin wrote to an esteemed colleague in the following terms:

The final total confirmation of your principle … should mark the beginning of an era of light; but we stand perturbed and seem to see ahead an impenetrable night …

The recipient of this letter was, of course, Albert Einstein.

How could Einstein have possibly known the destructive, genocidal consequences of his discoveries in advance?

Is the world in which such creative impulses are inhibited by fear a desirable one? I think not.

Instead, we should question why an era of light gave way to impenetrable night. Einstein’s last public act, in 1955, was to put his name to the ‘Russell-Einstein Manifesto’, which stated:

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

And continued:

If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

The light-seekers set an example for us all.

Take Setsuko Thurlow as an example. Thurlow was a 13-year-old schoolgirl when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, her home.

She recalls:

I still vividly remember that morning. At 8:15, I saw a blinding bluish-white flash from the window. I remember having the sensation of floating in the air … Then, suddenly, I felt hands touching my left shoulder, and heard a man saying: “Don’t give up! Keep pushing! I am trying to free you. See the light coming through that opening? Crawl towards it as quickly as you can.”

Setsuko survived the bombing. She moved towards the light. Not everyone who survived the initial blast, not everyone who – like her – emerged from the rubble of a city destroyed by the American bomb made it. She continues:

As I crawled out, the ruins were on fire. Most of my classmates in that building were burned to death alive. I saw all around me utter, unimaginable devastation.

In the decades that followed Setsuko Thurlow deployed her powerful testimony and a determination that such events should never occur again to build an international movement to ban nuclear weapons once and for all. The fruits of her efforts and those of thousands of others can be found in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or ‘The Ban’.

‘The Ban’ is now in force. It is international law. The non-nuclear-armed world has come together to say “enough”. Yet the nuclear-armed states retain their nuclear machines of mass death. ‘The Ban’ opened the prospect of a “new era of light”, but the nuclear powers seem hellbent on perpetuating the “impenetrable night”.

Yet we continue with our work, for to do otherwise is to abandon hope for the world. Our task is obvious: the abolition of nuclear weapons, war and injustice.

The great American abolitionist John Brown once wrote that:

I cannot remember a night so dark as to have hindered the coming day.

Despite his forceful character and heroic efforts, Brown did not live to see the abolition of slavery in the United States. Will we live to see the abolition of nuclear weapons, war and injustice? Will the demands of “no more Hiroshima’s, no more Nagasaki’s” be heard in our lifetimes?

The night is, after all, pretty dark and it is getting darker.

When the world faces the triple threats of climate catastrophe, pandemic and nuclear dangers you would hope to see increased international cooperation and solidarity. Instead, a carrier strike group is making its way from these shores to the other side of the world. Whether this voyage of provocation results in acute embarrassment or acute danger largely relies on the tolerance of others.

When international laws are broken and additional billions of pounds are expended on an increased nuclear warhead stockpile, sharp questions must be raised.

When poverty and inequality stalk the land, the world is re-arming: developing new nuclear weapons, new killer drones, automatic death machines and much else. There is a new arms race when the race that really matters – to vaccinate the world, to end poverty, eradicate inequality – has hardly begun.

In all this darkness, we must keep pointing and moving towards the light. In these efforts, we are not alone. We number in the millions. We exist in every village, town and city in every corner of the world.

With John Brown, surely we cannot remember a night so dark as to have hindered the coming day.

German elections: what prospects for peace and disarmament?

From END Info 26 DOWNLOAD

German voters go to the polls on Sunday, 26 September. The outcome of this election will determine not only who will replace Angela Merkel as German Chancellor, but the political composition of the Bundestag. Merkel is standing down from office after almost sixteen years, a period during which Germany has maintained and extended its position as Europe’s most influential nation. Consequently, Germany is an important voice in international affairs.

Polling in the first week of September suggests that Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), will not maintain control of the Chancellory. The polling may or may not change. The German electoral system has resulted in broad representation in the Bundestag. However, the much prized ‘stability’ of the German system has meant that the Chancellor comes from the party with the largest vote share: this will likely mean either the CDU or Social Democratic Party (SDP).

With a single party unlikely to achieve a basic majority of votes, a coalition government will be formed again. The political composition and dynamics of such a coalition is therefore important for determining the dimensions of future foreign, defence and security policy. If, for example, either the Green Party or Left Party were to join a coalition, what impact might this have? It is not possible to guess, but a brief survey of the stated positions of the main contending parties may provide some clues.

According to the ‘Alliance for Securing Democracy’, a US organisation with links to the security services and government:

The four centrist parties—CDU/CSU, FDP, Greens, and SPD—all have a strong commitment to the European and transatlantic orientation of German foreign policy. Despite varying policies, the parties all advocate for further European integration through the European Union (EU) and consider the transatlantic relationship and its defense alliance NATO to be integral to German foreign and defense policy. In contrast, the [Left] calls on the EU to make major policy changes and structural reforms, while the AfD [right-wing] demands a renationalization of European politics. Furthermore, the AfD calls for NATO to limit itself to defense measures and refrain from deployments outside member countries. The [Left] considers NATO a relic of the Cold War and advocates for a new collective security alliance that includes Russia.

So in terms of the basic approach to the ‘broad stroke’ foreign policy agenda, the main parties look likely to continue as before. It is unlikely that Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) will be invited to join a coalition but it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the Left might achieve some influence. What might be achieved if they get the opportunity?

German policy towards Russia and China has been more nuanced than in the USA and UK. With regards to Russia, a continual process of engagement has been balanced with the ‘containment’ approach pursued by NATO. The Left calls for further engagement whilst the Greens call for maintaining EU sanctions. The ‘Nord Stream 2’ gas pipeline is an issue where the parties differentiate themselves, with the Greens calling for an immediate end to the scheme in contrast to the other parties. Whatever the exact approach to Russia, those interested in peace and security will not want to see a deterioration in relations.

The CDU, Greens, SPD and others parties of the ‘centre’ call for a coordinated European approach to China. At the same time, the Greens and CDU characterise China as having ‘authoritarian, hegemonic aspirations’, as wanting to ‘divide Europe’ and call for a ‘transatlantic’ approach.

The American Institute for Contemporary German Studies argues that the question of China is not a major concern for the German public. 53% of German’s see China’s growing influence as either ‘neutral’ (43%) or ‘positive’ (10%). The same poll indicates that 82% think that Germany should remain ‘neutral’ in “the case of a new US-Chinese cold war”. Will public opinion guide the new government or will existing alliances and demands determine Germany’s course? If the outcome of the election looks unlikely to usher in a new, much less confrontational and completely independent, approach, it should be hoped that some constructive nuance and partial independence is maintained.

How will the new government approach the question of the ‘militarisation of Europe’? The existing CDU/SDP coalition has failed to generate an overall strategic approach to defence questions but has been a key participant in the steady militarisation of the EU. Writing on the European Council on Foreign Relations website, Ulrike Franke speculates on what a ‘Black-Green’ (CDU-Green) coalition might produce in terms of defence policy. She writes:

[H]ow could a Black-Green coalition, of all things, improve this situation? After all, the Greens partly developed out of the peace movement of the 1970s, and they oppose most of the CDU’s views on military and defence. The Greens want to introduce highly restrictive arms export rules, and are critical of what they see as the “militarisation” of the European Union.

There are three reasons to be optimistic. Firstly, the bar is low. It would be difficult for a new coalition to do worse than the current one. For the last few years, the CDU/CSU and its current coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party, have been at loggerheads with each other, especially over defence questions.

Whilst there is room for optimism for those keen to see greater European military integration and spending, those who oppose such developments have fewer options. It seems that only the Left Party, which has consistently opposed European militarisation and which has used its platform in both the Bundestag and European Parliament to coordinate opposition, provides hope.

Although Germany is not itself nuclear-armed, the question of nuclear weapons is a live public issue in German politics. The questions of ‘nuclear sharing’ and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) are issues of debate. Germany hosts US nuclear weapons and under ‘sharing’ agreements the German armed forces are obliged to ‘deliver’ these weapons upon request. This arrangement is deeply contentious in the ranks of the SDP and in all political organisations to the left of it. Despite voices within the SDP being opposed to the continuation of this arrangement, the party itself has no settled view on the matter. Both the Greens and the Left are pledged to ending nuclear sharing as soon as possible. Such a move will be popular with the German public (see page 13). However, as Steven Pifer reports in a recent paper for the Brookings Institute (Germany’s Upcoming Election and the Future of Nuclear Sharing):

[Some] argue that the Greens would not want to cause problems with NATO; while maintaining the aspirational goal of withdrawal of US nuclear weapons, they would be prepared to “stomach” continued nuclear sharing for the time being.

The 2009 coalition agreement between the CDU/CSU and FDP offers a warning. Guido Westerwelle, then leader of the FDP who went on to become German Foreign Minister, secured the following clause in the agreement:

[The German government] will work to support the conclusion of new disarmament and arms control agreements internationally ... In this context and in the course of developing a strategic concept for NATO, we will work in the alliance and with our American allies to ensure that the nuclear weapons remaining in Germany are withdrawn.

No progress was made towards the goal of withdrawing US nuclear weapons following this agreement. What stopped the progress? Westerwelle encountered very strong opposition within NATO. It looks unlikely that progress will be made in the future without the question of NATO being confronted in a serious fashion.

Both the Greens and the Left are pledged to Germany signing and ratifying the TPNW. The significance of Europe’s ‘leading nation’ taking such a move would be enormous. Writing a pledge to join the TPNW into any coalition agreement will be a massive step forward. However, Germany is likely to meet sharp resistance within NATO for any such move. NATO and Germany’s membership of it remains a key issue for peace and disarmament in Europe.

Scottish independence and the future of Trident

From END Info 26 DOWNLOAD

According to reports in the Financial Times (1 September 2021), the British government has “drawn up secret contingency plans to move its Trident nuclear submarine bases from Scotland to the US or France in the event of Scottish independence.”

The background to the formulation of these plans is that the Scottish National Party remains committed to pursuing independence; opposes nuclear weapons and was recently re-elected to head the devolved government with a strong mandate. In short, it is not out of the question that the people of Scotland will have the opportunity to vote again for independence and it seems possible that a majority will vote in favour.

Whatever your specific thoughts on independence, two things are clear: firstly, that the London government of Boris Johnson is deeply unattractive, reactionary and has pursued policies against the will of the majority of Scottish voters and to their material detriment; secondly, that an independent Scotland would pitch Britain’s nuclear weapons systems into crisis.

Writing in The National newspaper (6 September 2021), the SNP’s Stewart McDonald comments:

Negotiating Trident’s removal will be one of the most important tasks a newly independent Scotland will face, and capitals across Europe – indeed the world – will be looking to Edinburgh for assurance that we will be a reliable and trustworthy partner in this and in future international negotiations.

How we handle Trident’s removal will be our first big test on the international stage.

Building and maintaining strong international relationships is about more than stability, shared values and shared interests. It also relies on each state recognising and respecting the national interests of other states, even when they might diverge from their own.

Submarines armed with the UK’s nuclear weapons are based at the Faslane naval base at HMNB Clyde, near Glasgow, Scotland. The base is also home to a number of nuclear-powered but conventionally armed ‘hunter killer’ submarines, which are used to escort the nuclear armed, Trident subs. Glasgow itself is Scotland’s most populated city and locals are very well informed about the fact that their city is itself a potential target for nuclear attack.

The FT article raises possibilities for alternative arrangements for Trident should Scotland become an independent state:

The first [option] would be to relocate the bases elsewhere on the British Isles, with the Royal Navy’s Devonport base cited as the most likely location to replace Faslane...

The second option would be to move the UK’s nuclear bases to an allied country such as the US, with one defence expert citing Kings Bay, Georgia, the base for the US Navy’s Atlantic fleet of Trident submarines. Officials also examined moving the UK’s submarine base to Île Longue in Brittany, France.

The third option is to negotiate a new British Overseas Territory within an independent Scottish state that would contain the Faslane and Coulport bases, dubbed by one insider as a “Nuclear Gibraltar”.

The late John Ainslie, of Scottish CND, provides an indispensable guide for the questions raised by the FT and the SNP’s commitment to removing nuclear weapons from Scotland, in his 2013 report Trident: Nowhere to Go. Ainslie’s report makes clear that incredible barriers exist to the relocation of Trident to an alternative location in the British Isles. He writes:

50 years ago the [Ministry of Defence] drew up a list of possible locations for Polaris [the old nuclear missile system], including sites in England and Wales. Today these papers will be dusted off. Officials may also revive an option that was raised in 1981 - basing the UK Trident fleet in the United States. A second overseas possibility would be Ile Longue in France. Building a floating support ship might be a further option.

There were three English sites on the Polaris shortlist. One was Portland, near Weymouth. This was dismissed because there was no suitable location for a nuclear warhead depot nearby. Today there are houses adjacent to the required area. The site was the venue for the sailing events in the 2012 Olympics.

A second alternative was Devonport. In 1963 the MOD considered transforming part of the Cornish shore, opposite the dockyard, into a nuclear weapons’ store. A modern equivalent would be far larger. It would be adjacent to a residential estate as well as being close to the city of Plymouth. It is inconceivable that this would be permitted.

The third location was Falmouth. The proposed submarine base would be on National Trust land close to St Just in Roseland. Acquiring this would be very difficult. The warhead depot would be North of Falmouth. Two villages would be so close to the depot that they would have to be abandoned. In 1963 the MOD concluded that the costs of acquiring and developing this site for Polaris would be so great that the project wasn’t feasible. A Trident depot would be much larger and even less viable ...

An existing nuclear site that might be considered is Barrow in Furness, where the submarines are built. This might be suitable if the Navy only deploys Trident when there is a full moon and a high tide. Otherwise it is a non-starter. Walney Channel is too shallow. The Barrow option was not seriously considered in 1963.

The one Welsh location on the old shortlist was Milford Haven. Siting Polaris here would have resulted in the closure of one oil refinery. Introducing Trident in this estuary today would end four major petrochemical facilities and cut off one of Britain’s main sources of gas. The grounds for dismissing Milford Haven, as with all the other sites, are even stronger today than they were fifty years ago.

In 1963 each of these options was rejected.

So it would seem that the first option listed by the FT and considered in the “secret contingency plans” looks like a complete non-starter.

What of option 2? What the British government still fancifully refers to as an “independent nuclear deterrent” is completely dependent on US nuclear operations. The FT refers to Kings Bay in Georgia, US, as being the base for the US Navy’s Atlantic fleet, but fails to mention that this naval base is also the first stop for subs in Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet on each voyages. As Commander Robert Forsyth points out is his book, Why Trident? (Spokesman, 2020):

When the government says UK Trident is ‘Independent’ they are being very economical with the facts. Whilst it is correct to say that RN missiles do not require specific US aid for targetting, launch or guidance in flight, with the notable exception of supply of missiles in the first case, the UK’s deep dependency on US technical and political support means that the US does have the tools to inhibit or frustrate launch if it so wished ...

The UK Parliament’s Defence Select Committee detailed report of UK dependency on US support shows that the level of dependency is significantly higher than the Government would lead the public to believe. Not included in the report is the fact that the UK is designing and building (with US assistance) a common 12 missile module for both USN and RN Trident successor submarines.

Britain’s ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ is wholly reliant on US missile capabilities, repair and renewal facilities. Not so ‘independent’. Relocating the fleet to the US would expose this fantasy once and for all. For this reason alone, the British government may be reluctant to pursue such an option. If such a relocation did take place, how would the development, renewal and transit of nuclear warheads from Britain to the US function? Major obstacles exist to such an option, even though it may be entirely logical and consistent with reality.

What of relocating the fleet to France? Any such move would be a major political humiliation for the British government and would doubtless meet fierce resistance from the French peace movement.

The ‘third option’ is, in fact, no option at all. A follow-up report in the FT makes clear that a future independent Scotland would not accept the creation of a ‘British Overseas Territory’ at the existing base:

“There is just not a snowball’s chance in hell of nuclear weapons being based here for any longer than is necessary,” said one senior SNP member familiar with the party leadership’s thinking on defence issues.

“It will become obvious to [UK policymakers] that madcap ideas like treaty ports from 100 years ago in Ireland will not be accepted and are unworkable for any state wanting to credibly operate a strategic nuclear deterrent,” the senior party member said.

Britain’s nuclear weapons may well have ‘nowhere to go’ in the event of Scottish independence. Such a possibility should cheer the hearts of all nuclear disarmers. The prospect of the British government going cap-in-hand to the US or France for assistance reveals the fragile nature of the nuclear infrastructure in the UK. John Ainslie struck an appropriately optimistic tone when he wrote:

Because there is no viable alternative site for Trident, Scottish independence could result in there being no nuclear weapons in Britain. This would be welcomed by all those around the world who seek disarmament, and it could encourage other countries to follow suit. A Scotland which votes for independence and then sustains a clear policy of banning these Weapons of Mass Destruction will also to set an example to the world.

Peace, Power and Politics

From END Info 26 DOWNLOAD

The Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty (ANZUS), signed in 1951, extended Washington’s ‘nuclear umbrella’ to two key states in the Pacific Region. Billed as a ‘collective security’ agreement, ANZUS clearly exposed the centrality of nuclear weapons in the US approach to foreign relations. One New Zealand government website describes the situation as follows:

Nuclear weapons played a major part in the United States’ military arrangements, and the possible use of nuclear weapons or nuclear-powered vessels was implicit in any United States response to an attack on New Zealand.1

Despite long-term objections to nuclear testing in the region, expressed from the 1960s onwards, the ANZUS agreement meant concessions on the part of the New Zealand government with respect to US nuclear weapons, military and naval operations and related issues.

By the early 1980s and following a determined campaign by nuclear disarmers, majority opinion in New Zealand was set firmly against the presence of US nuclear arms and nuclear powered ships in the country. The opposition Labour Party entered the 1984 election with the clear aim of introducing a ‘Nuclear Free New Zealand Bill’, campaigning throughout the election against nuclear weapons and propulsion but not against ANZUS itself.

Labour swept to victory and the new Prime Minister, David Lange, made clear that the electoral promise of a Nuclear Free NZ would be acted upon. The new government faced immediate problems. The US policy of ‘neither confirm nor deny’ with respect to nuclear weapons put a significant question mark over the future of ANZUS, which allowed for the presence of US Navy vessels in New Zealand harbours. How could the country be both nuclear free and tied to US military operations?

Lange’s attempts to renegotiate ANZUS were met with hostility. Writing of the reaction some years later, Lange pointed out that:

Far from developing an irresponsible national policy on the subject, as most of our Western allies found it expedient to insinuate, New Zealand was in fact acting in a rational and calculated way, in the name of the traditional concept of strengthening national security. We were, simply, safer without nuclear weapons in our defence than with them ... [T]he policy as expressed in law stands as a statement of the political will to eliminate nuclear weapons and a rejection of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence.2

Robert Green describes the international reaction to New Zealand’s move towards nuclear free status:

With the US fearing that the ‘Kiwi disease’ might spread to other allies such as Japan, Australia, the Philipines and Denmark, New Zealand was demoted from US ally to ‘friend’; military co-operation under ANZUS was curtailed; the US and UK threatened trade; and New Zealand officials were ostracised from the Western group in the UN. Yet the government held firm, bolstered by massive mobilisation of public support by the peace movement in New Zealand and the US ...3

These moves against New Zealand by the US and allies would be more than your average political leader would be capable of withstanding. It is to David Lange’s enormous credit that he stuck to the policy. It is also to his enormous credit that he respected and acted in tandem with the majority opinion of his own party, the international peace movements and, vitally, the majority of New Zealanders. Politicians who are willing to stand up to the US are an all-too-uncommon species.

In 1985 the US attempted to stage a provocation against Lange’s government, in an attempt to test resolve. The previously cited government website takes up the story:

Following confidential discussions over the selection of an acceptable ship, in late 1984 the United States requested that the ageing guided-missile destroyer USS Buchanan visit New Zealand. The Americans hoped that a perception that it was not nuclear-armed would be enough for it to slip under the political radar, and believed they had Lange’s agreement. But on 4 February 1985 the government said no. ‘Near-uncertainty was not now enough for us,’ Lange later explained. ‘Whatever the truth of its armaments, its arrival in New Zealand would be seen as a surrender by the government.’ In response, Washington severed visible intelligence and military ties with New Zealand and downgraded political and diplomatic exchanges.4

The US Secretary of State at the time quickly confirmed that the security arrangements of ANZUS would no longer be maintained. This was the effective end of the Treaty. By 1987 New Zealand passed the ‘New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987’, legislation that is still in place and legislation accepted as the ‘norm’. The country signed and ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the current prime minister is an important voice for nuclear disarmament.

What are the lessons of New Zealand’s approach to nuclear disarmament for those in Europe who wish to achieve the same? There are surely thousands of lessons and we should aim to absorb, learn and act on them but the following examples seem clear enough:

1. Military and ‘security’ agreements with the United States like ANZUS and NATO have nuclear weapons at their core. The US expects total adherence to the nuclear dogma in exchange for ‘security’ assurances. It is unlikely that Europe will become nuclear free as long as European states adhere to NATO.

2. Independent, courageous and consistent political support is essential. More than that, this support must endure when political power is attained. Positive sentiments should not be taken at face value. Enduring commitment is key.

3. The peace movements play an essential role in sparking, building and sustaining both political and wider public support for nuclear disarmament. Without strong, coordinated peace movements our aim of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in Europe will not arise.

If more European states are to sign up to the TPNW, if the ‘nuclear-sharing’ states are to send the nuclear weapons back to the US and if we are to make progress towards a nuclear-free zone, then the points above will serve us well.

Notes

1. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/nuclear-free-nz

2. Quoted from Green, Robert (2018) Security without Nuclear Deterrence, Spokesman, Nottingham

3. Ibid

4. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/nuclear-free-nz

Europe’s turn

From END Info 26 DOWNLOAD

Angelika Claußen, Germany

Speech made by Angelika Claußen, IPPNW Chairperson and European Vice-President at Büchel military base, 05.09.2021.

From a peace and security policy perspective, the year 2021 has been particularly marked by two events in particular:

1. The entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in January 2021 and

2. The defeat of the USA as a world power in Afghanistan.

The entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is a huge success story for the worldwide peace movement! The peace movement is a real success story. We, global civil society, in alliance with the countries of the global South and courageous, outstanding politicians from countries in Europe, from Austria and from Ireland, have achieved a nuclear ban. We expected resistance from the nuclear weapons states, as the TPNW is diametrically opposed to their interests!

Now it's Europe's turn! Nuclear sharing must end in Europe: in Germany, in Belgium, in the Netherlands and in Italy. We can also achieve this goal together if we are clever in our approach.

The first step is to call NATO's nuclear dogma, the dogma of nuclear deterrence, into question.

And this is where the second major event comes into play: the defeat of the world power USA in Afghanistan. It is now crystal clear that military-based security policy is extremely destructive. The military and the arms race, whether nuclear or non-nuclear, are completely unsuitable as means to meet the humanity’s challenges in times of climate crisis. The military itself is a climate killer.

Instead, we need a civil security and peace policy that implements the important steps towards a socio-ecological transformation in cooperation with other countries. Détente and cooperative security policies require drastic disarmament steps for climate justice.

The European peace movement is therefore putting nuclear disarmament in NATO on the agenda. Why does NATO need to use nuclear weapons at all?

Now is the time for nuclear sharing countries to take concrete steps together. “Nuclear free Europe” is the name of our joint campaign to create a dialogue between the peace movement and politicians on what a roadmap to end nuclear sharing in Europe could look like.

We are in the process of building our network in Western and Eastern Europe including Russia. Many NGOs and some willing politicians from European nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states are involved; ICAN, IPPNW, the IPB and the trade unions are also members.

Our deadline for ending nuclear sharing is in five years. That is the time that the START treaty between the US and Russia has been extended. Talks have begun between experts from the two states with the aim of reducing military-related nuclear risks. But this is not enough for us.

Let's build the campaign for a nuclear weapons-free Europe together in all of our countries! A campaign for a new policy of détente in Europe that explicitly includes Russia.

Let us jointly expand the cooperative relations that have long since begun in the area of climate policy to the area of security and peace! Let us look to our strengths, to our successes.

A world free of nuclear weapons, stemming the climate crisis including climate justice and our right to life and health - all these goals belong together! That is what we are working for together here in Büchel!

Human chain against nuclear arms in Büchel

From END Info 26 DOWNLOAD

Ludo De Brabander, Belgium

On Sunday 5 September, the European month of action against nuclear weapons in Europe kicked off in Büchel, Germany. 800 peace activists formed a human chain to protest against the US nuclear bombs stationed at the Fliegerhorst air base as part of NATO's nuclear sharing arrangements.

The action took place just weeks before the September 26 federal elections to call on Germany to join the UN nuclear weapons ban (TPNW), which has been in force since January 22, 2021. The peace movement has been campaigning against nuclear arms at the air base for 25 years. The human chain was organized by the campaign “Büchel is everywhere! Nuclear Weapon Free Now".

“The deadlock in nuclear disarmament must finally be broken. The incoming federal government can no longer ignore the nuclear weapons ban that came into effect in January and must finally join the treaty! The current government's arguments against this historic treaty are poor. That does not alter the fact that billions are being invested in nuclear armament," said Marion Küpker, spokeswoman for the campaign. "Despite railway strikes and the deteriorating corona situation, we were able to send out a strong message with 800 participants," Küpker continues.

At around 1 p.m., a mile-long human chain was formed. To respect corona distances, the protesters used peace ribbons and banners. The participants also included activists from other European countries. Several speeches were held afterwards. To emphasize the European dimension, there were also speakers from Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy.

“The European peace movement is working together to end NATO’s nuclear sharing. There is a need for a policy of détente, which means the extension of international cooperation on climate to security and peace,” said Angelika Claußen, President of IPPNW Europe and Co-President of IPPNW Germany. Her organization, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its efforts to highlight the medical and environmental consequences of nuclear war.

Büchel Air Base is the last remaining US nuclear weapons site in Germany (Pershing II and Cruise Missiles were also deployed in Germany in the 1980s). As in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey, the current nuclear bombs will soon be replaced by B61-12 nuclear bombs with a variable explosive power and a greater precision due to the digital guidance system. Germany has committed itself to expanding and modernizing the airbase, an investment for which EUR 256 million has been earmarked. In addition, it is also planned that new jets will be purchased to transport these nuclear bombs, which will cost billions. The German peace movement speaks of a 'ridiculous expenditure'. Representative opinion polls show that a large majority of the population wants the withdrawal of nuclear weapons (see page 13).

In the coming weeks, actions are also planned in Volkel (Netherlands, on September 25), Great Britain (in a dozen places on September 26) and in Italy. In Belgium, the Belgian Coalition against Nuclear Weapons calls on you to participate in the 'Bikes not Bombs' cycling tour on Sunday 26 September. That day has been declared by the UN as the International Day for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.

Published at https://vrede.be/

Den Nuklearismus herausfordern: Das Atomwaffenverbot

Richard Falk

(Übersetzt von Joachim Wernicke, Berlin)

First published in English in The Spokesman 148: Challenging Nuclearism edited by Tony Simpson and Tom Unterrainer. See link for more information.

Am 7. Juli 2017 stimmten 122 UN-Länder dafür, den Text eines vorgeschlagenen internatio-nalen Vertrags mit dem Titel „Entwurf eines Vertrags über das Verbot von Atomnwaffen“ (Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, TPNW) zu genehmigen. Der Vertrag konnte ab September offiziell unterzeichnet werden, wird jedoch erst zu einem verbindlichen Rechtsinstrument, und zwar gemäß seinen eigenen Bestimmungen am 21. Januar 2021, 90 Tage, nachdem das 50. Land beim UN-Generalsekretär seine Bestätigung hinterlegt hat, dass es den Vertrag gemäß seinen verfassungsrechtlichen Anforderungen ratifiziert hat.

Dies ist eine große Errungenschaft, nicht zuletzt, weil sich alle kleineren Atomwaffenstaaten weigerten, am Verhandlungsprozess teilzunehmen, und die Vereinigten Staaten, Frankreich und das Vereinigte Königreich eine formelle Erklärung abgaben, in der sie den Vertrag anprangerten und sich weigerten, bei der Durchführung ihrer Außenpolitik ihre Abhängigkeit von Atomwaffen abzuändern.

In einem wichtigen Sinne ist es unglaublich, dass es nach den Angriffen auf Hiroshima und Nagasaki 76 Jahre gedauert hat, bis dieses bedingungslose Verbot jeglicher Verwendung von oder Drohung mit Atomwaffen erlassen wurde [Artikel 1 Buchstabe e], im Rahmen eines multilateralen Vertrags, der unter der Schirmherrschaft der Vereinten Nationen ausgehandelt wurde. Die Kernverpflichtung von Staaten, die sich dafür entscheiden, Vertragspartei zu werden, ist sehr weitreichend. Der Vertrag verbietet jegliche Verbindung mit Atomwaffen, sei es durch Besitz, Einsatz, Prüfung, Weitergabe, Lagerung oder Herstellung [Artikel 1 Buchstabe a].

Der TPNW ist über das reine Verbot hinaus von Bedeutung. Er kann und sollte interpretiert werden als frontale Ablehnung des geopolitischen Ansatzes zum Nuklearismus und der Behauptung, die Beibehaltung und Entwicklung von Atomwaffen sei eine nachgewiesene Notwendigkeit für die globale Sicherheit, angesichts der Art und Weise, wie die internatio-nale Gesellschaft organisiert ist.

Es ist eine gesunde Entwicklung, dass der TPNW Ungeduld und Misstrauen gegenüber den ausgefeilten geopolitischen Rationalisierungen des nuklearen Status quo zeigt. Sie haben die grundlegenden Einwände vieler Regierungen gegen den Nuklearismus und die anti-nuklearen Ansichten ignoriert, die die öffentliche Meinung der Welt seit langem beherrschen, und sie haben Aktivisten der Zivilgesellschaft animiert. Die alten Zusicherungen der Atom-waffenstaaten, sich zur nuklearen Abrüstung zu verpflichten, sobald ein günstiger Moment eintrifft, verlieren zunehmend an Glaubwürdigkeit, da die Atomwaffenstaaten, mit den Vereinigten Staaten vorneweg, weiterhin enorme Investitionen in die Modernisierung und Weiterentwicklung ihrer Atomarsenale tätigen. Die USA schlagen sogar vor, Atomwaffen im Weltraum zu stationieren, trotz der Risiken und Kosten.

Trotz dieses berechtigten Erfolgserlebnisses muss zugegeben werden, dass es eine fast fatale Schwäche gibt, oder bestenfalls ein klaffendes Loch in diesem neu gegossenen Netz der gesetzlichen Verbote, das durch den TPNW-Prozess geschaffen wurde. Es stimmt, 122 Unterschriften und noch mehr das formelle Inkrafttreten des Vertrags untermauern die Behauptung, dass die internationale Gemeinschaft mit einer so bedeutenden Haltung die Ablehnung von Atomwaffen für alle Zwecke verbindlich signalisiert hat, und dies formalisierte das Verbot gegenteiliger Handlungen. Der enorme Wermutstropfen in diesem Heilmittel ergibt sich aus der Weigerung jeder der neun Atomwaffenstaaten, sich dem TPNW-Prozess auch nur in dem legitimierenden Umfang anzuschließen, an der Verhandlungskonferenz teilzunehmen mit der Möglichkeit, ihre Einwände zu äußern und das Ergebnis zu beeinflussen. Auch die meisten der wichtigsten Verbündeten dieser Staaten, die Teil des globalen Sicherheitsnetzwerks von Staaten sind, die sich direkt und indirekt auf Atomwaffen verlassen, boykottierten den gesamten Prozess. Es ist auch entmutigend anzuerkennen, dass mehrere Länder, die sich in der Vergangenheit mit großer Leidenschaft gegen Atomwaffen eingesetzt hatten, wie Indien, Japan und China, auffällig abwesend waren und ebenfalls das Verbot ablehnten. Diese Haltung der unverstellten Opposition gegen dieses von den Vereinten Nationen geförderte Unternehmen zur Delegitimierung des Nuklearismus, das gleichzeitig die Ansichten einer Minderheit von Regierungen widerspiegelt, muss äußerst ernst genommen werden. Es umfasst alle fünf ständigen Mitglieder des Sicherheits-rats, die über eigene ausgeklügelte Atomwaffenprogramme verfügen, und so wichtige internationale Akteure wie Deutschland und Japan, die seit langem unter dem Atomschirm der USA Zuflucht suchen.

Das NATO-Dreieck aus Frankreich, Großbritannien und den Vereinigten Staaten, drei der fünf Vetomächte im Sicherheitsrat, verärgert über dessen Unfähigkeit, das gesamte TPNW-Projekt zu verhindern, ging 2017 so weit, eine gemeinsame Denunziationserklärung abzugeben, deren Ton ihren trotzigen Anspruch offenbarte, der jeden Zweifel an der dauerhaften Absicht einer nuklearisierten Weltordnung beseitigte: „Wir beabsichtigen nicht, ihn [den TPNW] zu unterzeichnen, zu ratifizieren oder ihm jemals beizutreten. Daher wird sich an den rechtlichen Verpflichtungen unserer Länder in Bezug auf Atomwaffen nichts ändern.“

Der Hauptteil der Erklärung behauptete, dass die globale Sicherheit von der Aufrechter-haltung des nuklearen Status quo abhänge, der durch den Nichtverbreitungsvertrag (NVV) von 1968 gestärkt werde und durch die Behauptung, dass es „die Politik der nuklearen Abschreckung“ gewesen sei, die „wesentlich war für die Aufrechterhaltung des Friedens in Europa und Nordasien über 70 Jahre lang.“ Es ist wichtig, die geografischen Grenzen zu beachten, die mit den behaupteten friedenserhaltenden Vorteilen von Atomwaffen verbunden sind, die die hässliche Realität ignorieren, dass während dieser Zeit verheerende Kriegsführung außerhalb der befürchteten gegenseitigen Zerstörung der Kernländer der geopolitischer Rivalen, einer zentralen gemeinsamen Verdrängung der beiden nuklearen Supermächte während des gesamten Kalten Krieges. Während dieser Jahrzehnte der Rivalität wurden die gewalttätigen Dimensionen der geopolitischen Rivalität effektiv in die nicht-westlichen Regionen der Welt ausgelagert, was für viele gefährdete Völker im gesamten globalen Süden massives Leid und weit verbreitete Verwüstung verursachte. Eine solche Schlussfolgerung legt nahe, dass selbst wenn wir den Anspruch auf Atomwaffen als lobenswert für die Vermeidung eines großen Krieges akzeptieren würden, insbesondere eines nuklearen Dritten Weltkriegs, diese „Errungenschaft“ auf Kosten des Lebens von Millionen, wahrscheinlich zig Millionen Zivilisten in nicht-westlichen Gesellschaften erreicht wurde. Darüber hinaus war die Leistung ein kolossal verantwortungsloses Spiel mit der menschlichen Zukunft, erreicht ebenso durch Glück als auch der Rationalität, die Theorie und Praxis der Abschreckung zugeschrieben werden.

Der TPNW selbst stellt den westfälischen Rahmen des Staatszentrismus nicht selbst in Frage, indem er einen Rahmen globaler Rechtmäßigkeit vorgibt, der unter der Autorität der „internationalen Gemeinschaft“ oder der UNO als maßgeblicher Vertreterin der Völker der Welt erlassen wird. Seine Bestimmungen sind sorgfältig formuliert, indem sie Verpflichtun-gen nur in Bezug auf „Staaten“ auferlegen, d.h. Regierungen, die die vorgeschriebene Ratifikation hinterlegt haben und damit formell dem Vertrag beigetreten sind. Selbst Artikel 4, der hypothetisch darlegt, wie Atomwaffenstaaten sich von allen Verbindungen mit den Waffen trennen sollten, beschränkt seine Ansprüche auf Vertragsstaaten und bietet keinerlei Anleitung im Falle einer vermuteten oder behaupteten Nichteinhaltung. In Artikel 5 wird auf die Verpflichtung zur Sicherstellung der Einhaltung durch die Verfahren der „nationalen Umsetzung“ verwiesen.

Der Vertrag strebt zwar eine schließliche Universalität an, durch den Beitritt aller Staaten im Laufe der Zeit, aber zwischenzeitlich sind die auferlegten Verpflichtungen von minimaler materieller Relevanz über die Übereinstimmung der nichtnuklearen Parteien hinaus, nicht die Stationierung oder andere Verbindungen mit den Waffen zu akzeptieren. Es ist für eine andere Gelegenheit, aber ich glaube, dass nach dem gegenwärtigen Völkergewohnheits-recht, dem neu entstehenden Weltrecht und dem immerwährenden Prinzip des Naturrechts ein starkes Argument vorgebracht werden kann, dass die Verbote im TPNW universell bindend sind, unabhängig davon, ob ein Staat beschließt oder nicht, Vertragspartei zu werden.

Als unnötiger weiterer Schritt zur Bekräftigung des Etatismus und insbesondere der „nationalen Souveränität“ als Grundlage der Weltordnung gibt Artikel 17 den Parteien des TPNW ein Rücktrittsrecht. Alles, was Vertragsstaaten dazu tun müssen, ist die Kündigung mit einer Erklärung über „außergewöhnliche Umstände“, die „die höchsten Interessen ihres Landes gefährdet“ haben. Der Austritt wird zwölf Monate nach Übermittlung der Mitteilung und Erklärung wirksam. Der Vertrag enthält kein Verfahren, mit dem die Behauptung „außergewöhnlicher Umstände“ als unangemessen oder bösgläubig angefochten werden kann. Es ist eine Anerkennung, dass selbst für diese nicht-nuklearen Staaten, die sich an den Vertrag halten, nichts an Recht, Moral oder menschliches Wohlergehen Vorrang hat vor der Ausübung souveräner Rechte.

Artikel 17 wird in absehbarer Zeit wahrscheinlich nicht in Anspruch genommen werden. Diese Bestimmung erinnert uns an die starke Restabneigung selbst von Anti-Atom-Regierungen, globalen und menschlichen Interessen Vorrang vor nationalen Interessen zu geben. Die Rückzugsoption ist auch deshalb wichtig, weil sie bestätigt, dass die nationale Sicherheit weiterhin Vorrang vor dem Völkerrecht hat, sogar in Bezug auf völkermörderische Massenvernichtungswaffen. Als solche sind die von den Parteien des TPNW eingegange-nen Verpflichtungen auf eine Weise umkehrbar, die in den multilateralen Übereinkommen nicht enthalten ist, die Völkermord, Apartheid und Folter verbieten, oder in jus-cogens-Bereichen.

Ist es angesichts dieser Unzulänglichkeiten dennoch vernünftig, dass Atomwaffen-Abolitionisten durch die Vorlage eines solchen Vertrags einen großen Sieg für sich beanspruchen? Bedenkt man, dass die Atomwaffenstaaten und ihre Verbündeten den Prozess allesamt abgelehnt haben und auch diejenigen im Kreis des beabsichtigten gesetzlichen Verbots sich ein Rücktrittsrecht vorbehalten, dürfte der TPNW von Zynikern als reines Wunschdenken und sogar von einigen Engagierten abgetan werden Anti-Atomkraft-Anhänger eher als Anlass für den Schierlingsbecher als für das Glas Champagner.

Die Kluft zwischen den Atomwaffenstaaten und dem Rest der Welt war noch nie so stark, und es gibt keine Anzeichen auf beiden Seiten der Kluft, die geringste Anstrengung zu unternehmen, um eine gemeinsame Basis zu finden, und vielleicht gibt es keine. Ab sofort ist es eine Distanz zwischen zwei Formen der Asymmetrie. Die Atomstaaten genießen ein Übergewicht an Hard Power, während die Anti-Atomstaaten die Oberhand haben, wenn es um Soft Power geht, einschließlich solider Wurzeln in "materieller Demokratie", "Weltrecht", "Naturrecht" und "Globaler Ethik". '.

Die Hard-Power-Lösung für den Nuklearismus war im Wesentlichen reflexiv, das heißt, sie stützte sich auf den Nuklearismus, wie er von den führenden Atomwaffenstaaten geprägt wurde. In der Praxis bedeutete dies eine gewisse Zurückhaltung auf dem Schlachtfeld und in Krisensituationen (es gibt zweifelsohne ein existenzielles Atomtabu, obwohl es niemals ernsthaft erprobt wurde) und vor allem eine delegitimierende einseitige Umsetzung des Regimes des Nichtverbreitungsvertrags [NVV]. Diese Einseitigkeit manifestiert sich in zweierlei Hinsicht:

(1) diskriminierende Verwaltung der zugrunde liegenden Nichtver-breitungsnorm, am vorbehaltlosesten im Fall Israels; ebenso die exzessive Durchsetzung der Nichtverbrei-tungsnorm über die Grenzen des NVV selbst oder der UN-Charta hinaus, wie im Irak (2003), und derzeit durch Androhung von militärischen Angriffen gegen Nordkorea und den Iran. Jede solche Anwendung militärischer Gewalt wäre nicht defensiv und rechtswidrig, sofern sie nicht durch eine Resolution des Sicherheitsrats genehmigt wird, die von allen fünf ständigen Mitgliedern und mindestens vier anderen Staaten unterstützt wird, was glück-licherweise unwahrscheinlich bleibt [UN-Charta, Artikel 27(3)]. Wahrscheinlicher ist der Rückgriff auf einseitigen Zwang, der von den Ländern geführt wird, die die berüchtigte gemeinsame Erklärung zur Abwertung des TPNW abgegeben haben, wie dies für die USA und Großbritannien in Bezug auf den Krieg gegen den Irak der Fall war, prinzipiell rationa-lisiert als Anti-Proliferations-Unternehmen, was sich als ziemlich grober Vorwand für einen Angriffskrieg mit anderen Zielen herausstellte, wobei er  „Schock- und Ehrfurcht“-Taktiken zur Schau stellte.

(2) Das Versagen, die den Atomwaffenstaaten auferlegten Verpflichtungen zu respektieren, nach Treu und Glauben eine Vereinbarung auszuhandeln, diese Waffen mit verifizierten und umsichtigen Mitteln zu beseitigen und darüber hinaus eine allgemeine und vollständige Abrüstung anzustreben. Fast 50 Jahre nach Inkrafttreten des NVV im Jahr 1970 hätte offensichtlich sein müssen, dass Atomwaffenstaaten ihre materiellen Verpflichtungen aus dem Vertrag verletzt haben, was 1996 durch ein Gutachten des Internationalen Gerichtshofs (IGH) bestätigt wurde, die eine einstimmige Aufforderung zur Umsetzung dieser rechtlichen Verpflichtungen gemäß Artikel VI einschlossen. Diese Schlussfolgerung aus Taten und Worten ziehend, ist für alle, die Augen haben um zu sehen, klar, dass sich die Atomwaffenstaaten als eine Gruppe für Abschreckung plus Gegen-Weitererbreitung entschieden haben, als ihr permanentes Sicherheitsregime.

Ein Beitrag des TPNW besteht darin, der Welt das entscheidende Bewusstsein dieser 122 Länder zu vermitteln, das durch die weltweite öffentliche Meinung verstärkt wird, dass der Abschreckungs-/NVV-Ansatz für globalen Frieden und Sicherheit weder umsichtig noch legitim noch ein glaubwürdiger Weg ist, der im Laufe der Zeit zum Ende des Nuklearismus führt.

An seiner Stelle bietet der TPNW einen eigenen zweistufigen Ansatz – erstens eine bedingungslose Stigmatisierung des Einsatzes oder der Androhung von Atomwaffen, gefolgt von einem Verhandlungsprozeß, der die nukleare Abrüstung sucht. Obwohl sich der TPNW über die Entmilitarisierung der Geopolitik und die konventionelle Abrüstung schweigt, wird weithin angenommen, dass spätere Phasen der Denuklearisierung nicht umgesetzt würden, es sei denn, sie beinhalteten eine ehrgeizige Verkleinerung des Kriegssystems. Der TPNW schweigt auch über die Relevanz von Fähigkeiten zur Atomenergie, die mit der Zeit zwangsläufig eine Waffenoption mit sich bringen, angesichts des weit verbreiteten aktuellen technologischen Know-hows. Auch die Relevanz der Kernenergietechnik müsste in einem gewissen Stadium der nuklearen Abrüstung angesprochen werden.

Sollten wir, nachdem wir diese großen Mängel der Vertragsabdeckung und -ausrichtung aufgezeigt haben, diese Einschränkungen beiseite legen und an den Feierlichkeiten und erneuerten Hoffnungen der Aktivisten der Zivilgesellschaft teilhaben, die Welt von Atomwaffen zu befreien? Mein geschätzter Freund und Kollege David Krieger, der sein Leben der Aufrechterhaltung des Brennens der Flamme der Unzufriedenheit über Atomwaffen gewidmet hat und der der langjährige und Gründungspräsident der Nuclear Age Peace Foundation ist, schließt seine fundierte Kritik an den Gemeinsamen Erklärungen der NATO-Führer mit diesem ermutigenden Gedanken:

„Trotz des Widerstands der USA, Großbritanniens und Frankreichs markiert der Atomteststoppvertrag den Anfang vom Ende des Atomzeitalters.“ [Krieger, „U.S., UK and France Denounce the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty“]. Ich bin mir da überhaupt nicht sicher, obwohl Kriegers Aussage die eindringliche Ungewissheit offen lässt, wie lange es dauern könnte, von diesem „Anfang“ zum gewünschten „Ende“ zu gelangen. Ist es, wie einige selbsternannte „nukleare Realisten“ gerne betonen, nicht mehr als ein Endziel, was eine höfliche Codierung für die völlige Ablehnung der nuklearen Abrüstungsoption ist, als „utopisch“ oder „unerreichbar“?

Wir sollten uns bewusst sein, dass es seit 1945 viele frühere „Anfänge vom Ende“ gab, die uns dem Ziel der Beseitigung der Geißel des Nuklearismus vom Angesicht der Erde nicht näher gebracht haben. Es ist eine lange und etwas willkürliche Liste, einschließlich der unmittelbaren entsetzten Reaktionen der Staats- und Regierungschefs der Welt auf die Atombombenangriffe am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs, und was diese Angriffe über die Zukunft der Kriegsführung aussagten, die massiven Kampagnen des zivilen Ungehorsams gegen Atomwaffen, dies erregte in einigen Atomwaffenstaaten kurzzeitig die Aufmerksamkeit der Massen; vorgelegte Abrüstungsvorschläge der Vereinigten Staaten und der Sowjetunion in den 1960er Jahren; die Resolution 1653 (XVI) der Generalversammlung der Vereinten Nationen, die 1961 die Drohung oder den Einsatz von Atomwaffen nach der UN-Charta für bedingungslos rechtswidrig erklärte und jeden Täter als eines Verbrechens gegen die Menschlichkeit schuldig ansah; die Kubakrise von 1962, die viele bei der plötzlichen Erkenntnis erschreckte, dass eine Koexistenz mit Atomwaffen nicht tolerierbar war; das mehrheitliche Beratende Gutachten des Internationalen Gerichtshofs von 1996 als Reaktion auf die förmliche Anfrage der Generalversammlung zur Legalität von Atomwaffen, das die Möglichkeit der Legalität des Einsatzes auf den eng begrenzten Umstand der Reaktion auf unmittelbare Bedrohungen des Überlebens eines souveränen Staates beschränkt; die scheinbare Nähe zu historischen Abrüstungsvereinbarungen, die Ronald Reagan und Michail Gorbatschow 1986 bei einem Gipfeltreffen in Reykjavik, Island, vereinbart hatten; die außergewöhnliche Öffnung durch das Ende des Kalten Krieges und den Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion, die den Weltführern den bestmöglichen „Anfang vom Ende“ bot, und doch geschah nichts; und schließlich die Prager Rede von Barack Obama im Jahr 2009 (die von Jimmy Carter 1977 Gefühle widerspiegeln, ebenfalls zu Beginn seiner Präsidentschaft weniger dramatisch ausgedrückt), in der er mit großem Beifall engagierte Bemühungen befürwortete, die Abschaffung von Atomwaffen wenn nicht zu seinen Lebzeiten, so doch zumindest so schnell wie möglich voranzutreiben; es war ein Anfang, gut genug für einen Friedensnobelpreis, aber dann ein weiteres Scheitern, vermutlich entmutigt durch den Gegendruck des gewaltigen Nuklearwaffen-Establishments.

Jede dieser Gelegenheiten weckte kurz die Hoffnungen der Menschheit auf eine Zukunft, die von der Bedrohung durch einen Atomkrieg und der damit verbundenen Katastrophe befreit war, und doch gab es, wenn überhaupt, nur wenige Anzeichen für einen Fortschritt von jedem dieser Anfänge, die so hoffnungsvoll in Richtung des Zieles begrüßt wurden. Bald überwältigten Desillusionierung, Verleugnung und Ablenkung die Hoffnungen, die durch diese früheren Initiativen geweckt waren, und die Atmosphäre der Hoffnung wurde in jedem Fall ersetzt durch eine Aura atomarer Selbstgefälligkeit, geprägt von Gleichgültigkeit, Ignoranz und Verleugnung. Es ist wichtig anzuerkennen, dass die nationalen bürokratischen und ideologischen Strukturen, die den Nuklearismus unterstützen, äußerst widerstandsfähig sind und sich als geschickt erwiesen haben, die flüchtige Politik periodischer Aufregungen des Anti-Atom-Aktivismus auszusitzen und zu überlisten.

Und nach etlichen Jahren wird nun wieder ein Neuanfang ausgerufen. Wir müssen mehr Energie aufbringen und aufrechterhalten als in der Vergangenheit, wenn wir das Schicksal früherer Neuanfänge in Bezug auf das TPNW vermeiden wollen, das ohne zivilgesellschaft-liche Militanz und Beharrlichkeit in jeder Phase nicht vorangekommen wäre. Die Heraus-forderung besteht jetzt darin, die nächsten Schritte zu erkennen und dann zu gehen und nicht den Präzedenzfällen der Vergangenheit zu folgen, die auf die Feier eines scheinbar vielversprechenden Anfangs folgten, mit einem falschen Vertrauen auf die Mächtigen, die die Situation zu bewältigen und entsprechend zu handeln. In der Vergangenheit wurden die früheren Anfänge bald begraben, akute Bedenken tauchten schließlich wieder auf und ein weiterer Neuanfang wurde mit Fanfaren angekündigt, während die früheren gescheiterten Anfänge aus dem kollektiven Gedächtnis gelöscht wurden.

Hier können wir zumindest der Gemeinsamen Erklärung führender NATO-Verbündeter dafür danken, dass sie ein klares Signal an die Zivilgesellschaft gesendet haben, und den 122 Regierungen, die dem TPNW-Text zugestimmt haben, dass sie es wirklich ernst meinen mit der Beendigung des Nuklearismus, sie müssen den politischen Kampf weiterführen, weiteren Schwung gewinnen und versuchen, Kipp-Punkte zu erreichen, an denen diese Anfänge vom Ende beginnen, genug Zugkraft zu gewinnen, um ein echtes politisches Projekt zu werden, und nicht nur ein weiterer harmloser Tagtraum von gut gemeinten, bald vergessenen leeren Gesten.

Ab sofort ist der TPNW ein Vertragstext, der höflich das Ende des Nuklearismus vorschreibt, aber um diesen Text in ein wirksames Kontrollregime umzuwandeln, werden tiefgreifende Verpflichtungen, Opfer und Beharrlichkeit erforderlich sein, die schließlich das Unmögliche erreichen und an die Bewegungen erinnern, die so tief verwurzelte Übel beendeten wie Sklaverei, Apartheid und Kolonialismus, aber erst nach langen Kämpfen.

Can Nuclear-Free Zones be Enforceable?

From END Info 25 | July/August 2021 | download pdf

The following text is taken from Think Globally, Act Locally: The United Nations and the Peace Movements (Spokesman, 1988).

The Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of Argentina alleged in July 1982 that the United Kingdom was in breach of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America. This Treaty had been agreed in 1967, at Tlatelolco in Mexico, and was the first Treaty to establish a nuclear-free zone in a widely populated area. Previously, areas which had been declared to be free of nuclear weapons had included the Antarctic, Outer Space, and the Seabed. But Latin America was the first populated continent to forbid nuclear weapons anywhere in its region. A recent report by the United Nations summarises the provisions of this agreement:

“The basic obligation of the parties to the Treaty, defined in article 1, is to use exclusively for peaceful purposes the nuclear material and facilities under their jurisdiction, and to prohibit and prevent in their respective territories the very presence of nuclear weapons for any purpose and under any circumstances.

Parties to the Treaty also undertake to refrain from engaging in, encouraging or authorising, directly or indirectly, or in any way participating in the testing, use, manufacture, production, possession or control of any nuclear weapon”.1

The Treaty of Tlatelolco has given rise to an Enforcement Committee, charged with the task of considering any violations or alleged violations.

“OPANAL was set up in June 1969. Its control system includes safeguards to be negotiated with IAEA with respect to all the nuclear activities of the parties”.2

When Argentina appeared before this Committee, it was seconded by Panama.

The status of Argentina in relation to the Treaty is itself a little ambiguous. The Argentines had signed the Treaty in 1967, but they had not actually ratified it subsequently, which would have been necessary if it were to be fully applied. However, the Treaty covers to whole area of Latin America, together with extensive areas in the surrounding oceans. Article 4 defines its scope:

“Article 4. Zone of application

1. The zone of application of this Treaty is the whole of the territories for which the Treaty is in force.

2. Upon fulfilment of the requirements of article 28, paragraph 1, the zone of application of this Treaty shall also be that which is situated in the western hemisphere within the following limits (except the continental part of the territory of the United States of America and its territorial waters): starting at a point located at 35° north latitude. 75° west longitude: from this point directly southward to a point at 30° north latitude. 75° west longitude: from there, directly eastward to a point at 30° north latitude. 50° west longitude: from there, along a loxodromic line to a point at 5° north latitude. 20° west longitude: from there, directly southward to a point at 60° south latitude. 20° west longitude: from there, directly westward to a point at 60° south latitude. 115° west longitude: from there, directly northward to a point at 0 latitude. 115° west longitude: from there, along a loxodromic line to a point at 35° north latitude. 150° west longitude: from there, directly eastward to a point at 35° north latitude. 75° west longitude”.3

Britain had long previously endorsed the Treaty, by signing, in December 1967, the two protocols which were open to nuclear powers outside the region. These were “deposited” with the Government of Mexico two years later, thus activating all the procedures of the Treaty. One of the protocols involved states holding colonial territories in the area, and the other, nuclear states. They were devised in order to permit both colonial and nuclear powers to underwrite the non-nuclear status of the whole continent. But the British Government filed declarations reserving its position on certain matters within the province of the Treaty, which placed limits on its compliance.

“When signing and ratifying Additional Protocol I and Additional Protocol II, the United Kingdom made the following declarations of understanding:

In connection with Article 3 of the Treaty, defining the term ‘territory’ as including the territorial sea, airspace and any other space over which the state exercises sovereignty in accordance with ‘its own legislation’, the UK does not regard its signing or ratification of the Additional Protocols as implying recognition of any legislation which does not, in its view, comply with the relevant rules of international law.

The Treaty does not permit the parties to carry out explosions of nuclear devices for peaceful purposes unless and until advances in technology have made possible the development of devices for such explosions which are not capable of being used for weapon purposes.

The signing and ratification by the UK could not be regarded as affecting in any way the legal status of any territory for the international relations of which the UK is responsible, lying within the limits of the geographical zone established by the Treaty.

Should a party to the Treaty carry out any act of aggression with the support of a nuclear weapon state, the UK would be free to reconsider the extent to which it could be regarded as committed by the provisions of Additional Protocol II.

In addition, the UK declared that its undertaking under Article 3 of Additional Protocol II not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against the parties to the Treaty extends also to territories in respect of which the undertaking under Article 1 of Additional Protocol I becomes effective”.4

The Argentine complaint of 1982 concerned the despatch of nuclear-powered submarines to the Falkland waters. It was, of course, a nuclear-powered submarine, the Conqueror, which sank the Argentine cruiser Belgrano, an event which marked off the irreversible deterioration of this conflict into all-out war. It is a nice question whether the arrival of nuclear submarines in South American waters was in fact a breach of the Treaty. As we have seen, Article One insists that nuclear material and installations in the region are solely employed for peaceful purposes. It is arguable that a nuclear submarine engaged · in·- military action is not employing nuclear energy peacefully, even if it is not actually carrying nuclear explosives. Nonetheless, a “nuclear-weapon” in the meaning of the Treaty, is a device which can release nuclear energy “in an uncontrolled manner”. Article Five lays down this criterion. It explicitly exempts propulsion mechanisms from the definition of “weaponry”. No doubt because the Treaty is so specific, the Enforcement organisation did not feel able to take effective action on the original complaint. However, the Committee might have felt differently, had it been able to verify a report which appeared in the New Statesman two years later. This claimed to have hard evidence that a Polaris submarine had been sent to the South Atlantic.

“One well-placed political source has already revealed to Tam Dalyell that a Polaris submarine was sent to the South Atlantic. Dalyell was informed that the submarine went as far south as Ascension; the likely target for a threatened or demonstration nuclear attack was said to be Cordoba, northern Argentina. The nuclear threat might have been used if any of the task force’s capital ships - one of the carriers, or the troop ship Canberra - had been destroyed in a missile attack. The Polaris deployment was said to have been ordered in the wake of the sinking of HMS Sheffield, after ministers had to confront the possibility that Argentine air superiority and Exocet missiles could mean the military defeat of the British task force, and the rapid political extinction of the Thatcher government.

The New Statesman has been able to confirm that a Polaris submarine was indeed deployed to this position. Details of the deployment are given in a series of highly classified telegrams sent to the British Embassy in Washington”.5

Polaris, of course, is armed with what are undeniably nuclear weapons. If the New Statesman were able to authenticate their claim, then their evidence should certainly have been of interest to OPANAL, because, however distant Polaris remained from the Falkland zone, once it was redeployed in connection with the British task force, its weapons must have been trained against targets in the Treaty area.

Such claims may be difficult to substantiate. But they are not the only issues which should be considered by Tlatelolco’s enforcement committee. Other ships than submarines steamed South during the Falklands/Malvinas war. It remains a crucial question to determine how many of these were nuclear armed. One important witness was Lieut. David Tinker, who died during the conflict. His moving letters to his family were published in 1982, and this is what they said:

“One of our jobs out here is to transfer stores around between ships and yesterday I walked into the hangar and found a nuclear bomb there. I suppose if the USA and USSR have got 7,000 each, the chance of walking into one must be increased, but nevertheless I was rather surprised, and wondered if it was worth sheltering in the hangar any more. Of course, it turned out to be a drill round, full of concrete, that Fort Austin, now eventually going home, was taking back to England. I don’t really know why we brought any down here. Loosing one off really would evaporate support for us by the EEC and Third World. Anyway, at least this lump of concrete is going back.” 6

Tinker is not at all alone in offering this testimony. It is apparently standard practice to issue such drill rounds to ships which may be called upon to deploy real ones. But how widely distributed were real sea-born nuclear armaments, particularly depth charges, and were any of them sent southwards? There were various press reports that British ships routinely deploy nuclear depth charges while they are on patrol. The Times, on 3rd November 1982, made a categorical statement that some of these were taken South.

“Frigates had nuclear weapons

Some British ships in the South Atlantic during the Falklands campaign were carrying nuclear anti-submarine weapons (our

Defence Correspondent writes):

Whitehall sources said that some of the frigates which went to the Falklands had been involved in exercises in the Mediterranean, and would have been routinely carrying anti-submarine nuclear bombs. Because they were diverted directly to the South Atlantic there would have been no opportunity to offload the weapons.

There would certainly have been no intention to use them in the South Atlantic, and ships which sailed from Britain would not have taken any nuclear weapons with them.

These bombs or depth charges are designed to be dropped from helicopters against deep lying submarines, and they explode beneath the sea’s surface.

The fact that anti-submarine vessels carry nuclear depth charges has been an open secret for some time. It was being said yesterday that until the weapons were “armed” they were safe, and that the arming or fusing mechanisms were stored in separate parts of the ships from the bombs themselves.

It is likely that the Prime Minister will be closely questioned on this issue. Mrs Margaret Thatcher will also be questioned about the fact that the 16,000-ton supply ship, Fort Austin, was diverted to the South Atlantic, sailing from Gibraltar on March 29”.

Other sources have assumed that the redirection of British naval forces towards the South left them with no opportunity to divest themselves of nuclear depth charges before they went off to fight the Argentinians.

HMS Sheffield, which was sunk, took down, it was claimed, an entire cargo of such nuclear depth charges. A preliminary account of this appeared in the Latin America Weekly Report, on 12th November 1982:

“Another diplomatic storm is blowing up from the South Atlantic following claims that the British task force was carrying nuclear weapons during the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, in violation of the Tlatelolco treaty. The British government is refusing to respond to these accusations, claiming that any disclosures about its deployment of nuclear arms would run counter to national security interest.

According to defence experts in London, many of the British frigates and destroyers diverted to the area at the beginning of April would have been carrying tactical nuclear weapons designed for anti-submarine warfare. Nuclear depth charges are routinely carried by British warships on operations patrol in such areas as the North Atlantic, they say, and a large part of the fleet had no opportunity to offload any lethal weaponry before sailing for the South Atlantic.

A former naval secretary in the Thatcher government, Keith Speed, has cast doubt on the theory that the task force would have discharged its nuclear weapons at Ascension Island. Interviewed by BBC television this week, he said that he would have been surprised had the British force not carried nuclear arms to the Falklands.

Other defence sources say that the first effort was made to take the weapons out of the area after the sinking of the General Belgrano and the beginning of the ‘shooting war’. This task was undertaken by an auxiliary support vessel, the Fort Austin which was close to HMS Sheffield when the destroyer was crippled by an Exocet missile.

It has been claimed that the Sheffield still had nuclear depth charges on board when it was hit, and that the British force spent the next three days attempting to remove them. The ship went down with a number still on board. These had to be recovered by naval divers.

The Fort Austin, meanwhile, is at the centre of another mystery surrounding the conflict. It has been established that the supply vessel sailed for the South Atlantic on 28 March, several days before the British Prime Minister claims she had any knowledge of the impending Argentine invasion of the islands”.

Further allegations of the same kind have been made by Tam Dalyell:

“ ... on March 29, ships and RFA vessels on Exercise Springtrain were ordered south ... a number of those vessels carried nuclear weapons.

... some of the ships left Portsmouth in early April carrying nuclear weapons. ... there was a row of gargantuan proportions about this in parts of Whitehall, as a result of which some, though not all, of the nuclear weapons were offloaded from the ships when they were at sea, before they got to the western approaches ... the Stenor Inspector and the Stenor Seasearch have been trying to retrieve nuclear devices from the tombs of HMS Sheffield and HMS Coventry.

... there is also the problem of lost nuclear depth charges from two lost Sea King mark 4 and two lost Sea King mark 5 helicopters

... the hon. Member for Ashford (Mr Speed), the former Navy Minister, who lost his post, opined on News Night that he would be most surprised if the fleet were not carrying nuclear weapons”.7

This account was also supported by an extensive account in the New Statesman which said:

“The Navy has its own, relatively small stock of nuclear depth bombs. For some time after the Falklands War, they were not allowed to take them to sea. Ministers had belatedly discovered that the admirals had sent three quarters of the total British naval nuclear stockpile towards the South Atlantic battle zone.

In peacetime, nuclear depth bombs are only allowed on board attack carriers (like HMS Hennes and HMS Invincible) and certain anti-submarine frigates. As all of the available ships in these classes set off for the Falklands in 1982, the ‘War Cabinet’ - the Oversea and Defence committee (South Atlantic) - were warned that most of the Navy’s nuclear weapons would soon cross the equator”.8

This was not the only claim in the Statesman piece, to which we shall return shortly.

At this point in the argument, what can be said about the case of the Sheffield? The HMS Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile on May 4th. “She caught fire, and the crew abandoned ship”, reported The Times next morning.

“A massive pall of smoke appeared on the horizon as Sea King helicopters ferried casualties back to the flagship carrier HMS Hennes. The Sheffield, about 15 miles away, was completely blotted out by the smoke which formed a solid column from the sea to the clouds.

As fire raged in the Sheffield a call was put out for hoses and pumping equipment to be dropped by helicopter. A frigate went alongside to help tackle the fires but three hours later it was decided to give the order to abandon ship because of the danger of a possible explosion of the Sheffields own Sea Dart missiles ... The Sheffield was still drifting and on fire last night. She is thought to be the first British warship to be lost in battle since the Second World War (Henry Stanhope writes)”.

In fact, at the time Sheffield sank, she was not “drifting” but under tow, as Mr Frank Allaun elicited from Mr Blaker in a parliamentary question on 23rd July 1982:

“Mr Frank Allaun asked the Secretary of State for Defence how HMS Sheffield was sunk; and if he will make a statement.

Mr Blaker: HMS Sheffield sank under tow in heavy weather because sea water entered the hole in her side caused by the

Argentine missile which struck her. To clarify any possible misunderstanding, I can state that there has never been any incident involving a British nuclear weapon leading to its loss or to the dispersal of radioactive contamination”.

Was Mr Blaker admitting that the ship carried nuclear weapons which were not “lost” during the dying agony while the wreck was under tow? And why was the ship under tow after the order had been given to “abandon ship” for fear of exploding missiles? What, furthermore, of Mr Dalyell’s charge that some of the weapons which sank with their ship were nuclear ones, for which the Stenor ships were later chartered to fish? These were the subject of another parliamentary question from Mr Frank Allaun, on 18th October 1982.

“Mr Frank Allaun asked the Secretary of State for Defence why two oil-fired underwater recovery vessels have been chartered to deal with HMS Sheffield.

Mr Blaker: No underwater recovery vessels have been chartered to deal with HMS Sheffield.

Mr Frank Allaun asked the Secretary of State for Defence, further to his reply to the hon. Member for Salford, East on 23 July, Official Report, c.340, if HMS Sheffield carried nuclear weapons.

Mr Blaker: It would not be in the interests of national security to depart from the long-standing practice, observed by successive Governments, neither to confirm nor deny the presence or absence of nuclear weapons in particular locations at given times”.

Here we may see one of the great principles of Government equivocation at work: never lie if you can help it, but don’t hasten to tell the truth. The Stenor ships were not “underwater recovery vessels”, although at least one of them, the Seaspread, did carry a diving bell, as we were to learn on 1st September 1983 when Petty Officer Michael Harrison received the Queen’s Gallantry Medal, as The Times told us, for “possibly the most dangerous task ever undertaken by a Royal Navy diving team”.

“The medal was won while divers were recovering classified documents and equipment from ships sunk during the Falklands campaign last year. The nature of the material recovered has not been specified but it is thought to have included top secret code books and cryptographic equipment.

The citation says that ‘though working in extremely unpleasant, hazardous and dark conditions, and despite becoming entangled on two separate occasions with hanging debris, Harrison persevered with the task, putting himself at grave personal risk’.

The action was in depths of more than 300 feet, and was carried out by a team of 27 naval divers.

The operation was conducted from a chartered vessel, the 7,000 ton Stena Seaspread. It involved using a diving bell to carry the divers down.

The divers left the diving bell but remained connected to it, while searching for the documents and equipment in the sunken ships.

It is believed that much of the activity centred on Coventry which sank north of the Falklands.

The recovery of the material has been regarded as a sensitive matter by the Royal Navy, not only because it was highly classified, but also because ships lost off the Falklands have been designated war graves”.

Subsequently some doubt has been expressed about the role of the Stenor ships. Basing himself, no doubt, on this report, Duncan Campbell claimed in the New Statesman report to which we have already referred that they were in fact sent to retrieve cryptographic equipment and code books, not nuclear weapons.

“There were thus no tactical nuclear weapons on board the surface ships sent south to the Falklands. The deep-diving vessel sent to recover ‘equipment’ from the sunken wreck of HMS Coventry -widely suspected at the time to have been an attempt to recover lost nuclear weapons - was in fact attempting to retrieve top secret cryptographic equipment and codebooks which the destroyer’s captain had not had time to destroy. Type 42 destroyers, like Coventry, do not carry nuclear weapons in peacetime”.9

Perhaps this may be true of the diving recovery work on the wreck of the Coventry: but are we expected to believe this of the Sheffield, which was under tow when it went down?

If they were not incinerated, why could the code books and machines not have been retrieved during these operations?

As Mr Dalyell asked at the time, it would be interesting to establish

“whether our security services let our American allies know in advance that we British were taking nuclear weapons into their hemisphere against protocol 1 of the Treaty of Tlatelolco of which ~both Britain and the Americans are signatories. The related question is, what do we now say as British people to the non-aligned nations which, meeting in Delhi, asked us to remove nuclear weapons from land and sea areas around the Falklands? It is all very well to say that we would never have used nuclear weapons. That seems to be the received wisdom. However, can we be quite sure? Let us suppose, heaven help us, that Invincible, Hennes or Canberra, hit by a torpedo which actually exploded, had gone down with a loss of life comparable to the sinking of the Belgrano. There might have been an irresistable demand, in a losing situation, to go ahead - as was, indeed, discussed in certain quarters - to bomb granaries and airports in Argentina. Those who have nuclear weapons in desperate situations may be tempted not to be too choosy about how they use them. The whole operation was a hideous gamble, with no long-term prize for this country”.10

On June 3rd 1983, I wrote to the Secretary-General of the United Nations on some of these questions:11

Mr Javier Perez de Cuellar, Secretary-General, United Nations New York, USA

Dear Secretary General,

For some time now British public opinion has been disturbed by questions about the conduct of the Falklands War, and in particular by a serious controversy about the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser Belgrano.

The charges against Mrs Thatcher have been tersely summarised in an ‘information sheet’ (number 11) published by Ecoropa under the title Falklands War: The Disturbing Truth. There are two main counts in this indictment:

1. The cruiser Belgrano was sunk ‘so as to make peace impossible’ even while an agreement for Argentine withdrawal from the islands was reaching its final stages.

2. That nuclear weapons were taken to the South Atlantic.

These matters are very grave and they surely merit a special enquiry in Britain. I shall certainly give all support to the demand for this enquiry if I am elected to the House of Commons on June 9th.

But these matters do not only affect the people of the United Kingdom. Both raise profound international questions.

The first charge, of sabotaging peace talks by sinking the Belgrano, amounts to an accusation that Mrs Thatcher or her agents breached the Nuremburg Principles of 1946, which provide the most authoritative summary of the decisions of the post-war War Crimes Tribunal. This Tribunal received unanimous endorsement for its findings at the General Assembly of the United Nations (see Resolution 95-i). The precise infraction alleged against Mrs Thatcher or her agents is covered in Principle VI as a ‘crime against peace’, qualified in Article a(i) as ‘planning, preparation, initiation or waging a war ... in violation of international ... agreements or assurances’. It will be remembered that UN Resolution 502 demanded ‘immediate cessation of hostilities’ and withdrawal of Argentine forces, and called for a ‘diplomatic solution’ respecting the UN Charter.

The second charge of sending nuclear weapons into the war zone, alleges a direct breach of the terms of the Treaty of Tlatelolco, under which Britain recognises the status of Latin America as a nuclear-free zone.

Can you advise us about how these issues could be properly investigated? We are particularly concerned about the enforcement of the Treaty of Tlatelolco, since we have been active in encouraging the proposal to create a nuclear-free zone in Europe. Clearly, the possible breach of the Latin American nuclear-free zone raises major questions. Disregard of nuclear-free zone arrangements would, if it were to go unopposed, totally negate the intentions of the UN Special Session on Disarmament, which commended such zones as an important confidence building measure.

At the same time, the legal implications of the sinking of the Belgrano are also deeply serious. There would be no ‘crime against peace’ if there had been no UN Resolution 502, and if diplomatic approaches had been spurned on all or either sides. The armed forces on both sides were in no position to know about the extent of diplomatic progress. It is unlikely that the diplomats could expect to have detailed knowledge about military dispositions. Only at the point where decisions could be taken, weighing together both diplomatic and military issues, is there any possibility of a ‘crime against peace’. For this reason, it seems to me that the United Nations is the only relevant body to investigate this issue.

With great respect,

Yours sincerely,

Ken Coates

On 26th August 1983, I received a reply from Mr Richard Wathen:

Dear Mr Coates,

I should like to refer to your letter of 3 June 1983, addressed to the Secretary General concerning matters pertaining to the conduct of the Falklands War.

We have carefully analysed the two issues you have raised in your letter which are of undoubted importance. The alleged introduction of nuclear weapons into the South Atlantic Zone has been the object of a resolution by the General Conference of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America (we are attaching a copy in Spanish, the only language available at this time). This Organisation might in fact be competent also to initiate an investigation on this matter.

As far as the United Nations is concerned, any investigation would have to follow the adoption of a resolution by one of the two political organs of the Organisation already seized of the question of the Falklands (Malvinas), namely the General Assembly or the Security Council. Such resolution would have to be sponsored by one or more member states.

Yours sincerely,

Richard W. Wathen, Principal Officer,

Department of Political Affairs,

Trusteeship and Decolonisation.

ORGANISATION FOR THE PROHIBITION OF NUCLEAR ARMS IN LATIN AMERICA

GENERAL CONFERENCE

Eighth (Ordinary) Period of Sessions

Item 18 on the Agenda

KINGSTON, JAMAICA: 16-19 May 1983

CG/RES.170 (VIII) 18 May 1983

Resolution l 70(VIII) - Reports of the introduction of nuclear arms by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the zone and areas of the Islas Malvinas, Georgias Del Sur and Sandwich Del Sur.

The General Conference,

Considering that the governments signatory to the Treaty of Tlatelolco have categorically expressed their determination that

nuclear energy be used in Latin America exclusively for peaceful purposes and, to this end, reaffirmed their sovereign decision to establish a military de-nuclearised zone in order to keep their territories free, forever, of nuclear armaments:

Considering that the Argentinian Republic has denounced at various international gatherings the presence of nuclear weaponry aboard vessels of the British naval forces which operated in areas within the geographical zone designated by Paragraph 2 of Article 4 of the Treaty in connection with the conflict in the Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands) and the South Georgias and South Sandwich Islands, pointing out in the light of this event the significance of countries in possession of nuclear weapons engaging in operations in which nuclear energy is put to non-peaceful uses:

Considering that spokesmen for the government of the United Kingdom have on several occasions declared that it would be inconvenient, for reasons of national security, to abandon the established practice, observed by successive governments, of neither confirming nor denying the presence or absence of nuclear weapons at a specific place and a given time;

Considering that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has made the declaration which appears in the document S/Inf. 261 of 11 May 1983;

Having regard to the fact that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Nuclear Arms in Latin America (OPANAL) has a duty to supervise compliance with the obligations laid down by the Treaty of Tlatelolco;

Reaffaming the need for a balance of responsibilities and obligations affecting states which possess nuclear arms and those which do not possess them;

Resolves:

1. To note with concern the complaint formulated by the Argentinian Republic concerning the introduction of nuclear arms, by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, into areas included in the geographical zone designated in Paragraph 2 of Article 4 of the Treaty of Tlatelolco.

2 To take note of the declaration by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to which the fourth Considering paragraph of this Resolution refers, and which states in its leading paragraphs: “The Government of the United Kingdom has scrupulously complied with its obligations under Additional Protocol I to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Arms in Latin America and has not deployed nuclear weapons in areas for which, de jure or de facto, it is internationally responsible and which are located within the limits of the geographical zone established in the said Treaty. Moreover, the Government has scrupulously complied with its obligations under Additional Protocol II to the Treaty and has not deployed nuclear weapons in areas where the Treaty is in force”.

3. To take note of the important presentations and declarations formulated by the Delegations of Argentina and the United Kingdom at this General Conference.

4. To express its concern at the fact that in areas within the geographical zone designated by Paragraph 2 of Article 4 of the Treaty, submarines powered by nuclear energy should have been employed in warlike actions.

5. To exhort all States in respect of which the Treaty and its Additional Protocols are not in force, to take the necessary steps in accordance with Article 28 to complete the process of military de-nuclearisation in the relevant zone defined by Paragraph 2 of Article 4 of the Treaty itself.

6. To reaffirm the commitment of all States linked by the Treaty of Tlatelolco and its Additional Protocols, to refrain from carrying out all actions which might endanger the status of military denuclearisation of Latin America and to recommend that the Council of the Organisation closely supervise its strict enforcement.

7. To communicate to the General Assembly of the United Nations in its 38th Period of Sessions, and to the Disarmament Committee, the text of the present Resolution, together with the declarations made on the subject in the course of this Conference.

(Approved in the Forty-ninth Session, held on 19 May 1983).

Translated from the Spanish by Mike Mullan.

In order to understand the significance of the British Government’s statement summarised in the second point of this Resolution, we need to remind ourselves of the two distinct commitments which arise, not only under Protocol I, to which Tam Dalyell referred in his complaint, but also under Protocol II of the Treaty. Protocol I implies the exclusi

Common Security 2022

From END Info 25 | July/August 2021 | download pdf

In the face of climate change, unbalanced globalisation, crumbling disarmament treaties, the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the decline of democracy – no single country can address the challenges of the modern world.

A new high-level global commission has been formed to tackle the risks to the contemporary world using the framework of Common Security.

The concept of Common Security emerged from the conclusion of a commission in 1982 led by the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. After 40 years, the time has come to reframe security and reimagine our world again. No single country can address the challenges of the modern world. The only true security is Common Security.

The new commission will present a far-reaching report for Common Security 2022 that will form a blueprint for survival in the face of extreme challenges: climate change, unbalanced globalisation, crumbling disarmament treaties, the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the decline of democracy.

In the next year, a number of flagship events will gather knowledge and perspectives with the aim of the commission publishing its report in April 2022.

The project is coordinated by the Olof Palme International Center, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Peace Bureau.

Learn more about the New Global Commission at https://commonsecurity.org/

* * * *

“International Security must rest on a commitment to joint survival rather than a threat of mutual destruction.”

These words, from 40 years ago, serve as a stark reminder that the survival of humanity is not a forgone conclusion. The continuation of human existence in the twenty-first century, on a planet of nearly eight billion people, is a colossal global mission. It is an endeavour that relies on a commitment to cooperation not annihilation.

In 1982, the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, led by the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, published the report, Common Security: A Programme for Disarmament. At this time, Cold War tensions and the frightening prospect of nuclear war dominated the international agenda. The report laid bare the horrendous consequences of nuclear conflict, and exposed the fallacy that nuclear deterrence provides security. A nuclear war cannot be won, but would be disastrous for all parties involved. The Commission developed the concept of common security: the idea that cooperation can provide the security that humans crave, where military competition and nuclear deterrence have failed. That ultimately, nations and populations can only feel safe when their counterparts feel safe.

When Olof Palme convened his commission, the world knew that it stood on the brink of catastrophic nuclear war. It is less well-known that scientists have now set the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight for humanity. The world faces the existential threats of nuclear war and climate change. This is on top of a toxic mix of inequality, populism, extremism, nationalism, gender and racial violence, and a shrinking democratic space. The cost of militarism stands in stark contrast to the shortage of money to tackle other challenges. Now is the time to reconsider whether common security can help bring us back from the brink once again.

The challenges of our interdependent global society demand collaboration and partnership, not isolation and distrust. But the path to cooperation and peace needs to be updated for the twenty-first century, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. By identifying the new challenges facing humanity, a contemporary blueprint for survival can be established.

In the introduction to the 1982 report, Palme expressed doubt that disarmament would happen if it must wait for governments to act:

“It will only come about as the expression of the political will of people in many parts of the world. Its precondition is simply a constructive interplay between the people and those directly responsible for taking the momentous decisions about armaments and for conducting the complicated negotiations that must precede disarmament.”

The need for people to be the catalyst for change is more relevant than ever. Popular will and public action have spearheaded movements for change in the twenty-first century. Now is the time to draw on people power to bring about disarmament and peace.

The Common Security 2022 project will host nine flagship panel discussions over the coming year. Each conversation will focus on a different theme related to global peace and security. These online public debates will provide the basis for a new far-reaching report, to be published in 2022.

Peace and the new geopolitical realities

In the twenty-first century the threat of nuclear war remains undiminished. Massive investments in faster, more lethal nuclear weapons, coupled with significant nuclear tensions between nations, create a dangerous cocktail for conflict. But the global campaign for nuclear disarmament has lost its profile and public fear of nuclear war appears muted. Urgent issues for discussion include the failure of disarmament talks, frustrations over the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the role of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, test bans, and nuclear free zones.

Although significant geopolitical realignments have occurred since 1982, strategic competition and power struggles between nations continue unabated. Borders shift, superpowers fluctuate, and alliances wax and wane; but conflict and violence remain a constant. According to the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, the number of full-scale wars increased from 15 to 21 between 2019 and 2020.

The Palme Commission focused on Europe as the battleground for any conflict, with minimal attention paid to other regions. But the Global Peace Index 2020 identified Europe as the most peaceful region in the world, with the Middle East and North Africa at the other end of the spectrum. In an increasingly multipolar world, an urgent reassessment of global politics and conflicts is needed. As regional conflicts and emergencies spill over into the global arena, populations and nations cannot expect to isolate themselves from the rest of the world in order to live securely. Key to discussions should be the situation in Central Africa, West Asia (Iran and its neighbours), Israel and Palestine, the South China Sea, and the Korean Peninsula.

The Palme Commission sought to empower the UN for the purposes of peace. Today, the UN’s role in peacekeeping and peacebuilding is one of the most visible examples of international cooperation. But we need to explore what other forms of multilateralism should be encouraged or developed.

Emerging threats and opportunities

Technological advancement over the past 40 years has resulted in a plethora of new threats and challenges for modern society. Computerised warfare, cyber security, drones, the use of artificial intelligence, and the dangerous development of chemical and biological weapons are some of the emerging issues. The Palme Commission cautioned against the militarisation of space, as a dangerous expansion of martial competition. This prediction appears prescient, with space becoming an increasingly contested environment. Clarification of international laws and a renewed emphasis on disarmament are issues that should be considered.

The interplay between peace and the climate emergency is crucial to future security. Climate-related risks have far-reaching implications for the health and existence of humanity and the planet. Although climate migration is fuelling tension, the activism and determination of the climate change movement has united populations and nations. The momentum for climate cooperation offers a unique opportunity for rallying collective action in the pursuit of global peace.

Economic and social inequality

The Palme Commission warned that economic inequality, poverty and deprivation were major threats to security, and that “peace and prosperity are two sides of the same coin.”40 years later, rising income inequality has been blamed for increasingly polarised politics, and the ascendance of populism and nationalism. With political conflict often spiralling into violence and war, a conversation is needed about whether greater equality could be a recipe for peace.

Gender equality in the quest for peace and security was a relatively unexplored topic by the Palme Commission. However statistics show that when women are at the negotiating table, peace agreements are more likely to last 15 years or longer. But conversely, only 22% of peace agreements in 2019 contained gender equality provisions. The role of women in peace and security needs further scrutiny, and practical proposals developed.

The economic and social burden of military spending was a central focus of the Palme Commission. The fear that military expenditure diverts funds from social and environmental investment continues to be a concern. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, world military spending in 2020 rose to almost $2 trillion, a 2.6% increase in real terms from 2019. As the world struggles with the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, questions around military spending are highly pertinent. Recovery from the pandemic could be assisted by investment in peace and development, rather than war and deterrence.

The way forward

“We see the need for a new beginning in the peaceful struggle against war and destruction.”

The Palme Commission’s desire to replace the idea of nuclear deterrence with a positive approach to security still stands. A means to making people and governments feel safe without the threat of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear deterrence, military force, and violence. Common security as an alternative path to nuclear competition.

The threat of war and its consequences have not diminished over the years. But political will, people power, and responsible policies can lead to change. There is still time to be innovative and ambitious in reframing security and reimagining our world. Common Security 2022 is an opportunity to assess the contemporary global security landscape, identify current challenges and hazards, stimulate a public policy debate, and ultimately establish new paths to sustainable peace.

Too Late to Shake NATO Awake?

From END Info 25 | July/August 2021 | download pdf

Sean Howard

t’s Stockholm, 14 December, 1992, and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev has begun to address over 50 of his counterparts at a summit meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), an institution widely considered instrumental in helping end the Cold War. Just two years after the November 1990 CSCE ‘Charter of Paris for a New Europe’ had boldly declared that the continent was “liberating itself from the legacy of the past,” Kozyrev is worried the chance to build a ‘Common European Home’ is being lost, a ‘peace dividend’ squandered by American-led NATO triumphalism. So, in diplomatic desperation, he decides: no time like the present, to pay a visit from the future…

“Great Russia,” Kozyrev growls, is back, determined to protect its own western flank, defending its Slavic brethren (and suddenly vulnerable Russian minorities) from a NATO wave threatening to wash through the former Warsaw Pact to the shore of the Baltics, or even Ukraine. Given the Alliance’s pursuit of “essentially unchanged” goals – military supremacy and strategic dominance – a counter-Alliance is once again needed; and so, as a “state capable of looking after itself and its friends…using all available means, including military,” Russia will require all “the former Soviet Republics” to “immediately join a new federation or confederation”.

As Trudy Rubin wrote in The Baltimore Sun, what the Foreign Minister “didn’t say, but what every diplomat was all too well aware of, was that Russia still possesses 11,000-plus nuclear weapons.” No wonder, when he “left the room,” most “diplomats stood stunned,” while US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger “rushed after him, demanding, ‘What is going on?’” A long hour later, he found out, when Kozyrev returned the podium to declare: Neither President Yeltsin nor I will ever agree to what I read out in my previous speech. I did it so that you should all be aware of the real threats on our road to a post-Communist Europe.

Widely dismissed as a joke or hoax, it was instead, veteran New York Times columnist William Safire insisted “a historic performance” by “the young man,” a “slap in the face…to say, ‘Wake up! Stop being so damnably complacent! To avert a return to a divided world, help us now’” – a rude awakening, admittedly, but one to which “the West’s diplomats should reply: ‘Thanks, we needed that.’”

The ‘sleep’, alas, was not broken. As the nightmarish ‘Back to the Future’ decade of the 1990s unfolded, NATO’s war-wagons rolled east, against the urgent, bipartisan advice of many senior retired US politicians, diplomats and officials. As a 1997 Open Letter to President Clinton, signed by 40 national security establishment luminaries, argued, while Moscow “does not now pose a threat to its western neighbors,” expanding the Alliance – a move “opposed across the entire political spectrum” in Russia – would be certain only to “undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West,” and “bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.”

On 1 January 1995, two years after Kosyrev’s performative prophecy, the CSCE became the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a change ostensibly intended to institutionalize and advance the pan-European agenda, embracing what the Budapest Declaration of December 1994 called ‘Genuine Partnership in a New Era.’ The day the declaration was signed, however, President Yeltsin foresaw the dawn of a ‘Cold Peace’ unless Washington changed its ‘victory march’ tune, abandoning the “dangerous delusion” that “the destinies of continents and of the world community in general can somehow be managed from one single capital.” While “we hear explanations,” Yeltsin scoffed, that NATO expansion “is allegedly the expansion of stability, just in case there are undesirable developments in Russia,” the real “objective is to bring NATO up to Russia’s borders,” in breach of multiple, unequivocal ‘security assurances’ offered to the Soviet Union in 1990-91 that the Alliance would expand “not an inch eastward”.

Writing in the American journal Foreign Policy in 1995, the year before he was replaced in a sharp hardline shift, Kozyrev justified his Stockholm ‘stunt,’ arguing that “although the ideas I presented were far from the most extreme held by Yeltsin’s opponents, they threw my Western counterparts into virtual panic: for a few moments they had a realistic glimpse of the kind of Russia they would have to deal with” if “Western politicians, again Americans in particular” continued to “substitute a strategy of rapid expansion of NATO” for “its fundamental transformation” into a defensive, denuclearized alliance seeking “partnership” with, not absorption of, “Eastern Europe, including Russia.”

On the sidelines of the 1994 Budapest Summit, Russia, the US, the UK, and Ukraine demonstrated the potential of disarmament diplomacy to positively shape the post-Cold War world, signing the ‘Budapest Memorandum’ confirming Ukraine’s relinquishment of Soviet nuclear weapons left on its territory, in return for security guarantees of non-interference in its internal affairs. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was a gross violation of these commitments, but also a graphic illustration of “the kind of Russia” the West had by then to deal with, an ultranationalist autocracy embittered by a near-doubling of NATO from 16 states to 28, a surge swallowing most of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The total is now 30, with Bosnia and Herzegovina next in line and the former Soviet Republics of Georgia and Ukraine ‘aspiring’ to join, the latter with political encouragement and practical support (e.g. weapons and training) from Washington. The prospect of Ukrainian accession was at the root of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, designed in part to prevent the absorption of Sebastopol, for centuries the home port of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, into a ‘Western’ Alliance not only enjoying conventional superiority but still claiming its Cold War ‘right’ (outnumbered by the Red Army) to strike first with nuclear weapons. Moscow, too, has claimed that same ‘right’ since the mid-1990s, when Yeltsin renounced the doctrine of ‘No First-Use’ inherited from the last Soviet leader – and champion of a nuclear-weapon-free world – Mikhail Gorbachev.

And not only would both sides strike first to prevent or deter nuclear use; both would ‘go nuclear’ to deter or defeat non-nuclear attacks – conventional, chemical, biological, even cyber. As Admiral Charles Richard, head of US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), stated bluntly during a recent event at the Brookings Institution: “Nuclear is not separate from conventional”; hence the ‘need’, according to Air Force Magazine’s summary of his remarks, for a “new nuclear and conventional integration policy” – new not just for the US, but NATO.

On June 14, NATO leaders will meet at the Alliance’s new, $1.45 billion (!) HQ in Brussels to discuss what Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg all-knowingly defines as “the challenges of today and tomorrow,” a self-serving short list – “Russia’s aggressive actions, the threat of terrorism, cyber attacks, emerging and disruptive technologies, the security impact of climate change, and the rise of China” – inexcusably excluding the danger of nuclear war, or indeed the detrimental impact of astronomical military spending (almost $2 trillion in 2020, the Year of COVID!) on, for example, pandemic preparedness…

Leaders will also be charged with reviewing a report, NATO 2030: United for a New Era, published in November 2020 by a ‘Reflection Group’ appointed by Stoltenberg in the turbulent wake of President Trump’s description of NATO as “obsolete,” and French President Macron’s diagnosis of strategic “brain death.”The Reflection Group, however (10 pro-NATO “independent experts”) was tasked not to reason ‘why’ – to finally answer the basic questions posed by Kozyrev in 1995: “What is the raison d’être of NATO today?” and “Who is its real enemy?” – but rather explore ‘how’ Alliance “unity, solidarity, and cohesion,” given and taken as a self-evident good, can be increased. For what is too good for a “strategic anchor in uncertain times,” drawing on its “success in the Cold War” to keep at bay not only the Russian ‘Bear’ but now the Chinese ‘Dragon’ (added to the list of NATO adversaries in 2019 at the xenophobic behest of the Trump Administration)?

And to combat, maybe literally, both Russia and China will certainly require – as the report takes pains to stress – a hellish amount of firepower (conventional and nuclear), correspondingly massive ‘investments, and the pursuit of “dominance” in every “arena” opened by emerging and disruptive technologies (EDTs), e.g., “big data, Artificial Intelligence, autonomous capabilities, space, cloud technologies, hypersonic and new missile technologies, quantum technologies and biotechnologies, and human augmentation/enhancement.”

A “strategic surge” in all these areas is necessary, we are told, to maintain NATO’s “edge” and “ability to win on the battlefield.” But the jewel in the Alliance’s crown remains its spectrum of nuclear capabilities: the long-range, thermonuclear weapons of the US, UK, and France (thousands of warheads, each capable of killing millions) and around a hundred American short-range, ‘dial-a-yield’ bombs (each capable of killing many thousands), ‘hosted’ at air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. In recent years, and particularly since Coronavirus lockdowns literally brought home the importance of ‘human’ rather than ‘national’ security, the popularity in NATO states of nuclear weapons in general, and ‘nuclear sharing’ in particular, has steeply declined, a fall also explained by the ‘new light’ cast on the issue by a fast-rising star, the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition on Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the ‘Ban Treaty’ NATO continues to regard with a cool, porcelain disdain at odds with public sentiment.

In Canada, for example, 74% of 1,007 respondents to a Nanos poll conducted in late March ‘supported’ (55%) or ‘somewhat supported’ (19%) Canada signing and ratifying the Ban. (Quebec – 82% – and Atlantic Canada – 74% –were the most enthusiastic regions, the Prairies – 65% – the least.) Almost the same number, 73%, agreed or somewhat agreed that Canada should join “even if, as a member of NATO, it might come under pressure from the United States not to do so.” And in a striking indication of the Treaty’s stigmatizing impact, 71% declared they “would withdraw money from any investment or financial institution…investing funds in anything related to the development, manufacturing or deployment of nuclear weapons.”

The NATO 2030 Report dutifully rides to the rescue of the status quo, insisting not only that “nuclear-sharing arrangements” are a “critical element” of NATO’s “security guarantees,” but that the “political value of this commitment is as important as the military value it brings”. But what does this mean, except that ‘nukes’ – acting as a kind of atomic adhesive, or Superweapon superglue – are needed as much to prevent internal division as deter external threat? Isn’t that rather a high price to pay, absurd risk to run, for “unity?”

Counting the many blessing of the Bomb is essential, the Report argues, to “counter hostile efforts to undermine” the Alliance’s “vital policy” of nuclear dependence. The ‘hostility’ presumably emanates from the Nobel Peace-Prize winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and other Ban Treaty supporters, an ‘emerging and disruptive’ threat – first the Bear, then the Dragon, now the Dove! – NATO needs to counter by insisting the TPNW “will never contribute to practical disarmament, nor will it affect international law.” In January this year, however, with its 50th ratification, the Treaty became international law, fully-binding on its growing membership. And if that membership, to date, includes none of the nuclear-armed nine (China, France, Israel, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, UK, US) or their 32 pro-Bomb allies, its contribution to disarmament may yet prove decisive if it can generate new perspectives, inspire deep debates – and inform new policies – within NATO and beyond.

The Canadian Government recently insisted that the Ban Treaty’s “provisions are inconsistent with Canada’s collective defensive obligations as a member of NATO.” This is a favourite means of ‘cementing’ the Alliance’s pro-Bomb façade: but is it true? The famous ‘collective defense’ provision (Article V) of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty states only that an attack against one is an attack against all, not how such aggression should be deterred or responded to. As Canadian activist Ray Acheson details in her superb contribution to Peace Research Perspectives on NATO 2030, “a look at how NATO came to identify as a nuclear weapon alliance indicates, rather than ‘compromise’ achieved through ‘statecraft’, the process was more like obedience reached through intimidation.”

To keep hopes of disarmament alive, saner NATO states like Denmark and Canada insisted that the Alliance’s first Strategic Concept (1950) did not embrace or endorse collective nuclear defense. After years of Anglo-American bullying and arm-twisting, the second Strategic Concept (1957) did – a fateful surrender greatly increasing, as Canada complained, the chances “of the atomic sword being unsheathed.”

False narratives – and histories – can generate false consciousness, constraining or eliminating options for change; and such fabrication, as peace researcher Michael Brzoska writes in ‘Bending History, Risking the Future,’ is the dangerous hallmark of the new ‘study’:

Foremost among the events the report does not mention are Russian opposition to the extension of NATO to the East, the illegality of the Western wars in Kosovo and Iraq, and Western contributions to the dismemberments of arms control arrangements.

As a result, Brzoska worries, the report “bodes ill for the future,” strengthening “the view, already accepted in many NATO countries, of a Western world, with NATO as its ‘strategic anchor,’ that has been innocently drawn into the quagmires created by evil others.”

As an exercise in ‘reflection,’ in fact, NATO 2030 rather resembles the narcissistic architecture of the new Headquarters, a 250,000 square-meter complex (comparable in size to UN HQ!) of “shiny glass and steel interlocking buildings,” housing 4,000 staff, with “glazing equivalent to 10 football pitches, sleek, airport terminal-like halls” and an “amphitheatre-like…decision-making chamber”: a high-tech temple with a “central IT brain” – and 60,000 sensors – which I heard a former disarmament diplomat describe as a “glass mausoleum.”

Sixty thousand sensors – and no clue about peace.

What a joke!

First published on the ‘Cape Breton Observer’ website.

NATO meets, peace movements respond

From END Info 25 | July/August 2021 | download pdf

Recently, in reporting on the diversion of the Belorussian aircraft, an ITV News (UK) commentator said that NATO was ‘seen as the world’s policeman’. So let us unpick that phrase. Firstly, ‘the world’s’ and therefore global.

From the time at the end of the Cold War when NATO began to expand its membership to include the former Soviet states up to the Russian border, to in more recent years making agreements with countries around the Pacific and even venturing into Latin America, NATO has been expanding. And any shred of the concept of the North Atlantic area has been lost. But it isn’t really global in the sense it doesn’t include Russia or China. Those two countries are now considered ‘enemies’. And one might as well translate ‘global’ as US, as it has always dominated NATO’s policies.

Then there is the word, ‘policeman’. There are in the world some vicious police forces working on behalf of oppressive governments, but I don’t know of one which is nuclear armed, with a policy of using those weapons first. NATO is a military alliance not a police force, armed with nuclear weapons, including the so-called UK (in reality, the USA’s) nuclear armed Trident submarines which are ‘integrated’ into NATO.

In the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty, which the UK signed, nuclear armed states were committed to reducing their nuclear arsenal, in ‘good faith’. In defiance of the treaty and international law, Boris Johnson has stated that his government would raise the cap on the warheads on the missiles on the Trident submarines, to increase from 180 to 260. In effect re-arming not disarming and thus it is with NATO.

You don’t need to be an apologist for the regimes in Russia or China to see how provocative NATO’s actions are. As recently as 1st June, the French Mouvement de la Paix, reported seeing four US B-52 bombers flying over Paris escorted by two French Dassault Rafale aircraft, as part of a NATO show of force.

Defender 21 is one of the largest NATO led military exercises in Europe in decades across 30 training areas. In response Russia deployed troops to its western border. Also, this year will see a reinforcement of the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force in Portugal, Romania, Steadfast Defender 21 Bulgaria and Hungary.

Stopp NATO, from Norway, warns of increased tensions in the high north and nuclear threats in the Arctic. Coming to the UK in September will be Dynamic Marine 21 which will test NATO’s Response Force Maritime component and Joint Warrior 21, preparing participants to operate as a joint task force. And these are only a few of the military exercises taking place this year.

But Stop NATO 2021 declared that there is no place for NATO in the world of peace and social justice we want to build and invited us all to discuss the alternatives at a counter summit.

A series of virtual meetings took place starting on Sunday 13th June. These meetings covered a wide array of issues and attracted participants from across the world. In addition to the virtual aspect of the conference, there were gatherings and demonstrations on the streets of Brussels itself, maintaining a tradition of protest at these events. See https://www.no-to-nato.org/

Steps towards nuclear disarmament

From END Info 25 | July/August 2021 | download pdf

The German Federal Foreign Office released the following statement on 5 July 2021:

Today, Foreign Minister Maas is meeting the Swedish and Spanish Foreign Ministers in Madrid in order to call for joint steps towards nuclear disarmament prior to the Review Conference of the Non‑Proliferation Treaty.

Today’s meeting in Madrid is the fourth meeting of the foreign ministers of the Stockholm Initiative. Already in February 2020, representatives of 16 countries convened in Berlin to agree concrete proposals on nuclear disarmament.

Using positive momentum

In January this year, another meeting took place in Amman. Since then, after several setbacks in previous years, such as the end of the INF Treaty in 2019, there have been some recent positive developments.

At the beginning of the year, the United States and Russia were able to agree on an extension of the New START Treaty, which limits the strategic launchers and warheads of both countries. A meeting between US President Biden and Russia’s President Putin in Geneva on 16 June confirmed the intention of both sides to conduct further talks on arms control.

In light of new technological developments, the revival of disarmament diplomacy is urgently needed in order to pre-empt the potential risk of a new arms race. Before the meeting, Foreign Minister Maas, together with his Spanish colleague Arancha González Laya and his Swedish colleague Ann Linde, issued the following statement on this topic:

More than ever, we need to see progress. Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation agreements have been continually eroded in recent years. New tensions and distrust between the global powers have thwarted further reductions in nuclear weaponry.“

Proposals for the nuclear-weapon states

The Stockholm Initiative makes proposals so that the nuclear-weapon states can take further steps towards disarmament, as set down in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The 16 states of the Stockholm Initiative, all of them non-nuclear-weapon states from all continents, submitted 22 specific proposals in advance of the Review Conference. In this way, the Non‑Proliferation Treaty could be strengthened not least through the following stepping stones:

Continue to reduce nuclear arsenals.

Ensure the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Reduce the role of nuclear weapons in strategies and doctrines.

Minimise the risk of conflict and accidental use of nuclear weapons.

Develop credible and robust nuclear disarmament verification capacities.

Unblock negotiations on a treaty prohibiting fissile material production for military purposes.

Among the 22 specific proposals not listed in the German Foreign Office press release are:

Nuclear-Weapon States, collectively or individually, to tighten Negative Security Assurances, including in the context of Treaties establishing Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones.

And:

All States to support the establishment of Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones in all regions of the world on the basis of arrangements freely arrived at among States of the region concerned, including the establishment of Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in accordance with the 1995 resolution on the Middle East, in relation to which we feel encouraged by the first session of the conference held in 2019 and continuous efforts in this regard.

Further, the three Foreign Ministers released the following statement, published in the German newspaper, Rheinische Post:

The Stockholm Initiative: A renewed

commitment to Nuclear Disarmament

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” On 16 June, President Biden and President Putin re-affirmed this fundamental truth, famously coined by their pre­decessors, Reagan and Gorbachev, at the last peak of the cold war. Back then, this sentence marked the beginning of a US-Soviet arms-control engagement beneficial to all humankind. Today, it instils new hope that the world can get back on the path of nuclear disarmament.

We need progress more than ever. Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation agreements have crumbled in recent years. Renewed tensions and mistrust between global powers have undercut further reduction of nuclear arsenals in the past years. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, one of the basic instruments for arms control, was terminated in 2019. Technological advance increases complexity, creates new risks and may even fuel a new arms race. And regional proliferation challenges, such as Iran and North Korea, continue to demand our full engagement.

Against this background, the Stockholm Initiative for Nuclear Disarmament, composed of 16 states from all continents, aims to revitalize diplomacy, strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty and make progress on the path of disarmament. In the interest of humanity, we must ensure that nuclear weapons will never be used again.

In a series of Ministerial meetings in Stockholm, Berlin, Amman, and now Madrid, we have developed more than 20 actionable proposals to reinforce the NPT and the implementation of its disarmament goals ahead of its upcoming Review Conference. The extension of the New START earlier this year, the prospect of new talks between Russia and the US on the future of arms control and risk reduction measures, and a new commitment to restraint at the highest political level, as expressed last month in Geneva by the US and Russian presidents, are good news. These ideas figured among the “stepping stones” that our initiative had proposed.

As much as we welcome these positive developments, we encourage nuclear-weapon States to take further decisive steps towards disarmament. These may include reducing the role of nuclear weapons in policies and doctrines, minimising the risk of conflict and of accidental nuclear weapon use, further reducing stockpiles, and contributing to next-generation arms control arrange­ments. We must, once and for all, put an end to nuclear testing by bringing into force the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, unblock negotiations on a treaty prohibiting the production of fissile material for military purposes, and develop robust and credible nuclear disarmament verification capacities. In other words: we should learn from history and thereby build for the future. As part of this, we will strengthen our interaction with affected communities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and our engagement with the younger generation. We will also strive for the full and equal participation of women in decision-making processes in the field of nuclear disarmament, as well as for the full integration of gender perspectives.

That is why we, the countries of the Stockholm Initiative, will meet today in Madrid to reaffirm our resolute commitment to advancing nuclear disarmament and take next steps to that effect.

At our last meeting in Amman, the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, told us: “Individually, you represent different regions. Together, you represent a collective commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons”. We call on other States to join us in this endeavour.

Signed by: Heiko Maas, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Germany, Arancha González Laya, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain, and Ann Linde, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Sweden

The work of the Stockholm Initiative indicates a renewed mood to reinvigorate the debates around nuclear weapons and to take concrete steps towards disarmament. These indications at the governmental level find some resonance at the level of political activism and of the ‘person on the street’. The Trump administration did a great deal of work to reveal the acute dangers posed by nuclear weapons and the threat of their use. Credit where credit is due. It is now time for the nuclear-armed and non-nuclear states to throw off the Trump legacy in a deep and meaningful way. Yes, this will mean mapping out credible steps towards nuclear disarmament but it will also mean taking a stand that might prove unpopular.

So whilst Foreign Minister Maas should be congratulated for his work, we should remind him that Germany is home to US nuclear weapons under NATO sharing agreements. Is he happy with this arrangement? It is important that the NPT Review Conference is used as a staging post to take the argument to those who wilfully ignore the provisions of the Treaty, but why no mention of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which is supported by the overwhelming majority of humanity and the governments that seek to represent them?

Any steps towards nuclear disarmament are welcome, but the shuffling steps of a toddler must develop into an adult stride.

No new ‘land-based’ nuclear weapons in Europe Now get rid of the other nukes

From END Info 25 | July/August 2021 | download pdf

‘Defense News’ (defensenews.com), reported in early June that “NATO allies are poised to formally oppose the alliance deploying ground-based nuclear missiles in Europe, following U.S. President Joe Biden’s meeting with fellow heads of state”. Confirmation of this stance is contained in paragraph 26 of the Brussels Summit Communiqué, issued by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Brussels 14 June 2021, which reads:

26. We reaffirm our commitment to respond in a measured, balanced, coordinated, and timely way to Russia’s growing and evolving array of conventional and nuclear-capable missiles, which is increasing in scale and complexity and which poses significant risks from all strategic directions to security and stability across the Euro-Atlantic area. We will continue to implement a coherent and balanced package of political and military measures to achieve Alliance objectives, including strengthened integrated air and missile defence; advanced defensive and offensive conventional capabilities; steps to keep NATO’s nuclear deterrent safe, secure, and effective; efforts to support and strengthen arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation; intelligence; and exercises. We have no intention to deploy land-based nuclear missiles in Europe.

Such a declaration is to be welcomed, for all the obvious reasons. It had been feared that one consequence of Trump’s sabotage of the INF Treaty would be stationing of such weapons on the European landmass once again. Such a prospect has now been ruled out.

This commitment, welcome as it is, is not the end of the matter. For instance, in a linguistic sense having “no intention” to do something is not at all the same as a declaration that you “will never” do such a thing. When it comes to questions of weapons of mass destruction, particularly in the context of a continuing sharpening of tensions, precision of language or a lack thereof has consequences.

Take the US Aegis Ashore missile system which is currently stationed in Romania and is due for deployment in Poland from 2022. According to a paper submitted to the Defence Committee of the British House of Commons on ‘Consequences for UK Defence of INF Withdrawal’ (Katarzyna Kubiak, see also The Spokesman 142: European Nuclear Disarmament), the missiles used in the Aegis system can be fairly straightforwardly adapted, by a change of fuel tank and payload, into an intermediate-range nuclear missile. If leaders have “no intention” of deploying such weapons in Europe, then perhaps there should be a clear commitment that the Aegis-based missiles will never be adapted.

What of sea-based nuclear missiles in European waters? As Joachim Wernicke has pointed out in these pages on previous occasions, a new generation of US sea-based, nuclear-capable missiles are in development. Will US ships be permitted to carry such weapons in the territorial waters of European states? Will US ships armed with such weapons be permitted to dock in European ports? If so, then what does having “no intention to deploy land-based nuclear missiles in Europe” amount to?

What of the US nuclear weapons already in Europe? (see page 4 for a map of their locations) Do these weapons relate to a commitment to “keep NATO’s nuclear deterrent safe, secure, and effective”? The presence of US nuclear weapons, along with the French and UK arsenals, makes Europe a more dangerous and not a safer place to live. Real security will depend on their removal and a nuclear-weapons-free Europe.

(Re) Imagine Our World: voices for peace

From END Info 25 | July/August 2021 | download pdf

Tom Unterrainer

This is an expanded version of a talk given to US peace activists on 12 June 2021.

The movements for peace, social and racial justice in the United States have set an example for the world. This is as true of the movements of the past as it is today. European activists and their organisations continue to be inspired by activism in the US, just as we carefully follow and analyse the political direction of the US government.

The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and our founder have a long association with the US. The British government imprisoned Russell for his active opposition to the First World War. He was fired by Trinity College, Cambridge, as a result and found that post-war England offered a less-than-hospitable environment for him. Meanwhile, appreciation for his efforts and opportunities for work arrived from the US. Although opposition to his work eventually manifested itself, Russell’s time in America was an important episode in his life. He continued to follow political developments – including the movements against the American war against the Vietnamese people – and worked closely with American activists until the end of his long life.

So it is a privilege to be with you today and to be speaking to a largely American audience.

You will no doubt have seen images of the beauty and splendour of the Cornish coastline, in the South West of England, over recent days. The images will have shown sun-drenched beaches, blue sea and skies. The place looks prosperous and idyllic. Much of the Cornish coast is all of these things. However, if you travel just a few minutes inland a different Cornwall is revealed. A place of widespread insecurity, joblessness, low wages and poverty. As of 2011, Cornwall’s measure of wealth was just 64% of the European per capita average making it not only one of the poorest regions of England but of Europe as a whole. This measure will not have improved following a decade or more of austerity measures in the British economy.

The arrival of the G7 leaders to this remote corner of the British Isles will not have done much to ameliorate these conditions. The contrast between the presence of leaders of the seven most powerful nations on the surface of this planet and the gross deficiencies in social justice evident a few miles inland is instructive.

What were the G7 leaders doing in Cornwall? Were they discussing a global ‘levelling up’ to lift the poorest and most insecure of us out of poverty? Or were they discussing something else?

With a new US President and multiple challenges facing the US dominated political order, this G7 summit can be understood as an effort to begin redrawing the map of Western influence and power. The aim is to ensure that the political footprint, economic fingerprints and military boot prints of the west continue to leave their mark.

The challenges to ensuring such a prospect range from the impact of Covid, the fractures in the economies of the G7 states and the reality that the political order is shifting from a unipolar to a multipolar configuration. One example of how the US President and UK Prime Minister plan to respond to such challenges can be found in the new version of the ‘Atlantic Charter’ signed by Biden and Johnson immediately before the G7 met.

The original Charter was agreed and signed by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on 14 August 1941. The Charter set out joint US/UK goals for the world after World War II. Even though the US had not yet entered the war, these two leaders saw fit to make plans for the post-war landscape. The agreement was made in the context of the US as the rising global power and Britain as an imperial power – with substantial colonies around the world.

The New Atlantic Charter has been signed in quite different circumstances where a global power other than the US in on the rise and where the UK is a politically isolated, nuclear-armed island which retains a significant financial centre and which has lumbered itself with an unpredictable and thoroughly unpleasant Prime Minister.

The New Atlantic Charter is made up of eight brief points, the first of which resolves “to defend the principles, values, and institutions of democracy and open societies, which drive our national strength and our alliances.” The fifth point affirms “our shared responsibility for maintaining our collective security and international stability and resilience against the full spectrum of modern threats”.

It is well known that there have been tensions between Biden and Johnson on both the personal and political level. It is clear that between the two, Biden is the more rational and ‘mainstream’ character. Whatever the tensions, they have been put to one side because the issues at stake for both Biden and Johnson transcend personalities: they concern the imperatives of global politics.

The new US administration has yet to put its strategy with respect to defence, security and nuclear weaponry ‘on paper’, but comments from Biden himself and his Secretary of State indicate that Russia and China will be offered no respite. Conversely, Prime Minister Johnson has put his name to an ‘Integrated Review’ [see END Info 23 & 24 for extensive coverage]. Johnson’s ‘Integrated Review’ is clear that Russia and China are considered ‘strategic competitors’ to UK/Western interests and proposes containment. Not only that, but the nuclear doctrine contained within the ‘Integrated Review’ includes a reversal on warhead numbers and raises a significant question mark over the circumstances under which the UK would consider a nuclear strike.

What is Biden’s assessment of the ‘Integrated Review’? Does he support the breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty announced in its pages? The agreement of the New Atlantic Charter would suggest that nothing within the ‘Integrated Review’ troubles him or his administration to a great extent. Donald Trump has gone, but ‘British Trump’ endures.

Under Trump, many of us spoke and wrote about the dangers of a ‘Global Tinderbox’: a configuration of risks, tensions and capabilities – both military and technological – that put the world in great danger. It seems that the ‘Global Tinderbox’ is still with us where one mistake, misstep or misunderstanding could boil over into a situation of existential risk. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and their Doomsday Clock, global risks from climate change to nuclear war are as sharply posed as they were under Trump. This is a world where tensions between the ‘West’, China and Russia continue to sharpen; where every nuclear armed state on the planet is not only renewing nuclear arsenals but developing new nuclear weapons; where the US and allies are still asserting themselves in an effort to maintain global influence and where ‘new technologies’ and the application of existing technologies to the battlefield accelerate the pace at which disaster could unfold.

If we are to find ways to de-escalate the risks, to move away from the ‘Global Tinderbox’, then we must not only talk of peace. We must identify the roadblocks to peace a develop a strategy to remove them. One example of this is the launch of the Nuke Free Europe network and their plans for a month of action (see pages 3-6). The network is calling for an end to nuclear sharing in Europe, a halt to the arms race and for European states to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Where the global powers have the G7, NATO and the rest the global peace movement have solidarity, internationalism and transnational cooperation. The Nuke Free Europe network is one example of many similar initiatives. All such initiatives will be coming together for the International Peace Bureau’s ‘World Congress’ in October this year. I hope to see many of you there in person, or online, to plan for a global, peaceful alternative.

* * * *

The Second World Peace Congress will bring together a wide variety of experts and advocates from all around the world. Speakers will come from all kinds of disciplines and backgrounds, including both high level representatives and grassroots level voices. It will equally involve diverse fields: peace organizations, feminist and civil rights groups, labor unions, environmentalists, educators, religious and spiritual leaders , development workers, human rights advocates, and more.

See the full programme at:

www.ipb2021.barcelona

The campaign to make Europe a nuclear-weapon-free zone

From END Info 25 | July/August 2021 | download pdf

Editorial Comments

This September will see peace activists and organisations from across Europe engage in a month of co-ordinated action to demand a ‘nuke free Europe’.

Protests will be staged in England, Scotland, France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Italy to call for the end of nuclear sharing, a halt to the modernization of nuclear weapons and for European states to sign up to and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

From the perspective of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, this month of action is the product of not just several years of recent work but of efforts over four decades. When Donald Trump announced his intention to sabotage the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a bilateral treaty between the US and Russia which banned intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe, the Russell Foundation produced and circulated a new ‘European Nuclear Disarmament’ statement, calling “on everyone concerned with peace and security to join in raising the alarm over the likely consequences of scrapping the INF Treaty and to work towards the creation of more Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zones, including Europe.”

The INF Treaty, signed in 1987, should be properly understood not simply as an agreement between the then-Soviet Union and the USA but as a product of sustained mobilising, thinking and doing within the European peace movements of the 1980s as well as a mark of profound changes underway in European and Soviet society.

The first ‘European Nuclear Disarmament’ Appeal was drafted by Ken Coates of the Russell Foundation, the historian E. P. Thompson and others in response to the original risks posed by intermediate-range nuclear weapons. The contact address for the original appeal were the offices of the Russell Foundation in Nottingham, England, where this bulletin is written and produced.

We are very proud of our history and of the things we have achieved. Unfortunately, there is much work for a small peace foundation and the very many disarmament, peace and related campaigns to do.

Trump has gone but the increasing tensions, risks, new technologies and the weapons of mass murder that sit at the centre of US, European and other militarisms endure.

Join us in September. Organise your own action. Distribute this bulletin. Get informed through our other publications. Get involved in your closest activist group and make links with the Nuke Free Europe network.

Israel’s Bomb: The First Victim

From END Info 24 | May/June 2021 DOWNLOAD HERE

Ken Coates

This text was first published as a chapter in Israel’s Bomb: The First Victim - The Case of Mordechai Vanunu (Spokesman Books, 1988). The book includes an introduction and concluding chapter by Vanunu, along with material from The Sunday Times investigation into the case and further analysis. The book was published to aid the work of the International Campaign for Mordechai Vanunu, of which the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation was a supporting organisation.

On the 6th July 1987, thirty-six British Members of Parliament wrote to the Norwegian Nobel Committee to nominate Mr. Mordechai Vanunu of Israel for the Nobel Peace Prize. Since Mr. Vanunu was currently held in prison in Jerusalem, this was an unusual nomination. What were the reasons for it?

“On the 5th October 1986” reports the proposal, “Mr. Vanunu published in the Sunday Times a detailed story about the Israeli Government’s nuclear bomb factory near Dimona in Southern Israel. In addition to a detailed description, Mr. Vanunu furnished the newspaper with photographs and diagrams, and his account of the plan was found to be ‘entirely authentic’ by a number of international experts who subsequently examined it.

The threat of nuclear proliferation into various hot spots around the world is one of the major perils confronting the international community. It takes prodigious courage for a private citizen to confront his own government on such a sensitive issue. Mr. Vanunu has paid a very heavy penalty. For revealing his knowledge, he was kidnapped in Rome, and secretly taken to Israel, where he has been locked in solitary confinement. Even his family have now been denied the right to visit him. Although be faces a death sentence, his trial is being conducted in secrecy.”

As the parliamentarians point out, there is reason for deep concern about the Israeli Government’s preparation of nuclear weapons. The decision is a provocation: if it were not challenged, on what basis could any impartial person reproach the Arab States if they were to follow suit? The nuclearization of conflict or potential conflict in one of the world’s hottest of “hot spots” can only be a terribly dangerous precedent.

But we should observe from the very outset of this discussion that Mr. Vanunu’s kidnap is itself an illegal act, which has no conceivable justification in international conventions. We cannot doubt that the Italian Government would have refused to extradite Mr. Vanunu for trial, on any of the evidence which is available. Vanunu’s revelations serve to defend the nonproliferation regime throughout the world, and are clearly a matter of conscience. Such disclosures have aroused disquiet in Italy and England, and any judge in either country would find them quite ineligible for criminal reprisals.

There can be no doubt that Vanunu is a courageous and deeply conscientious person, who has suffered from the most outrageous treatment by the Israeli authorities. We shall return to this question later.

Paranoia

First, however, we must concern ourselves with the substantive issues in this case. What caused the paranoid responses of the Israeli State in this matter? After all, it is not common for States to range across the territories of friendly countries, in order to bring about the abduction of political dissidents. Vanunu was spirited from London to Rome, where he was forcibly drugged, and chained-up for transportation to Tel Aviv. There does not appear to be any doubt that his departure from Italy was procured by illegal means, in violation of Italian laws and exit formalities. Such extreme measures put the normal conduct of inter-governmental relations under severe challenge. However we examine this affair, there can be no doubt of the culpability of the Israeli authorities. In order to understand this sequence of events, it is necessary to refer back to a succession of lsraeli policy statements on the issue which is really at stake: that of nuclear proliferation.

There is, of course, a long history of public statements by various Israeli spokesmen, on all the issues of nuclear non-proliferation policy. But for the purposes of this argument we have no need to retrace our steps further than the 7th June 1981, when the Osirak nuclear reactor was bombed by Israeli aeroplanes. In a statement purporting to justify this action, the Government of Israel pledged its continuing support for the principle of nonproliferation, for multilateral arms control agreements, and for UN decisions against nuclear proliferation. The statement, The Iraqi Threat - Why Israel had to Act, rehearsed a catalogue of diplomatic initiatives by Israel, in this sense:

“Israel ratified the partial Test Ban Treaty on 15th January 1964, and the Outer Space Treaty on 18th February 1977. On 10th June 1%8, Israel voted in favour of United Nations Resolution 2373 adopting the text of the NPT. It did so in the belief that this would enhance practical and satisfactory solutions for the prevention of nuclear weapons proliferation. In subsequent years, Israel has studied the NPT’s various aspects in reference to the conditions prevailing in the Middle East, and has concluded that the turbulent and constantly shifting conditions still prevailing in the region prevent the Treaty’s implementation in good faith on the part of many of the States in it.

A central assumption of the NPT is the existence of conditions of peace which do not exist today in the area. With the exception of Egypt, the Arab States do not recognize Israel’s right to exist, are continuously preparing themselves to destroy it, and are mostly specialist, were deeply shocked by photographs of a component machined in lithium deuteride. Both authorities believed that the devices shown in this and other photographs provided did not show “a simple atom bomb but a thermo-nuclear bomb”. As the Sunday Times itself concluded: “The verdict of ten senior and expert scientists approached by the Sunday Times is that Vanunu’s testimony cannot be faulted”.

If we accept this evidence, it is evident at once that Mr. Shamir’s statement at the United Nations General Assembly must have been quite untrue, even at the time he made it. If lsrael had already become “the first country in the Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons into the region”, the promise to refrain from this action in future can only be understood as a deliberate and particularly damaging dishonesty. There are many ways to mislead the General Assembly without telling actual lies: but on the 1st October 1981 it is quite evident that Mr. Shamir went far beyond any license which might conceivably be given to diplomatic evasion. His statement was absolute and categorical: he now owes the United Nations an explanation.

Calculated to undermine

Perhaps the Israeli spokesman is not the only diplomat to have offended in this way, grave though it is to do so. There is, however, a more serious question. On this and a large number of other occasions, as the Israeli Government statement points out, Israel has advocated the conclusion of a Treaty establishing a nuclear weapon free zone throughout the Middle East. To assure the United Nations that Israel “will not be the first” to introduce nuclear weapons, and to demand the creation of a nuclear-free zone, whilst all the time producing and storing a full-scale nuclear arsenal, is to present a package calculated to undermine not only the United Nations but also the very idea of nuclear-free zones. That such misleading declarations have been uttered “annually” hardly mitigates the offence. The Israeli Government itself continuously insists that it wishes to see the establishment of adequate guarantees in this field. As it argues in the text we have already cited: “Restraints of a technical or institutional nature alone can hardly protect the area from nuclear proliferation.” To appeal for the creation of a nuclear free-zone, whilst at the same time secretly building a major stockpile of nuclear weapons, is to furnish an unusually compelling kind of proof for this statement!

It remains true that of all the panoply of partial disarmament measures considered in the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament in 1978, one is preeminent. The agreement to create and enforce nuclear-free zones is among the more achievable objectives for States, and for their peoples, in many parts of the world. Not only in Latin America, but also in other zones such as the South Pacific, or the continent of Africa, the idea of constituting a nuclear-free zone has captured widespread popular support, and mobilized the support of many of the Governments in the areas concerned. In this connection, the experience of the campaign for European Nuclear Disarmament is that millions of Europeans have come to share the view that a nuclear-free zone in all Europe is both possible and desirable. Already there are intense practical negotiations in smaller sub-regions of the European continent, to begin to put in place some parts of what many hope will be a larger jigsaw, sanitising larger and larger areas. The particular merit of such proposals if that they provide a practical linkage between the activities of popular movements and the relevant governments, and they make a space in which a global public opinion can grow. Such an international public mobilisation is crucial to the maintenance of peace through a period of unprecedented crisis, both economic and political. As the popular pressure has begun to develop, the United Nations system has taken on a more material reality for millions of people, so that the vast demonstration which accompanied the opening of the Second Special Session could convince many of the real existence of a new potential in the world.

But the Vanunu case poses a most dire challenge to all this positive thinking. The creation of the Israeli bomb, and its analogue in South Africa, confronts us with a quite new, and very major problem of enforcement of non-nuclear commitments in the military field.

The first lesson of the Vanunu story is clear: that considerable agnosticism is required when evaluating the successive claims of governments which are poised upon the acquisition of nuclear weapons. In retrospect, we now see the French involvement in Israeli nuclear programmes, and in the initial provision of the Dimona reactor in a very clear and sinister light. It is not at all surprising that Israeli leaders can mislead the United Nations, when we remember how they responded to the enquiries of the United States Government about what was going on at Dimona in the early 1960s. “We are building a textile factory”, replied the Israelis. Now it is possible to see the meaning of various other key events in Israel’s military evolution: the French embargo on arms supplies; the pressures of the American administration for ratification of the Non-Proliferation Treaty; the later hiatus over the supply of Pershing missiles. There has evidently been some serious complicity in this act of nuclear provocation, and there are embarrassing questions to be answered in more than one of the world’s chancellories.

The first serious effort to find answers to these questions has been extensively reported in the Christian Science Monitor. The newspaper gives an account of a study by Gary Milhollin, which makes precise allegations of a violation of undertakings given to the Norwegian Government, when a quantity of heavy water was supplied in 1959.

Mordechai Vanunu has recorded that 88 pounds of plutonium are produced each year at Dimona, which quantity can be used to make something between eight and ten bombs annually. Heavy water is necessary to this process, and the Norwegian delivery amounted to 20 tons. It was obtained against firm pledges that it would only be used for peaceful purposes. It was agreed that the Norwegian authorities could maintain rights of control and inspection over the uses to which the water was put. But Milhollin has established that, up to the moment of Vanunu’s revelations, no attempt was made from Oslo to monitor the observance of these pledges.

Heavy water

After the Sunday Times publication of the real situation at Dimona, the Norwegian Government requested Israel to allow an appropriate inspection of the uses of the heavy water. It proposed that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) should be invited to investigate and report. In September, the Israelis refused any such inspection. At the talks in question, the Israelis conceded that the heavy water was being used at Dimona, and that Plutonium was being produced with it. Per Paust, the spokesman of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, has been reported as saying that the Israeli’s maintain that any IAEA report would be biased, and continue to insist that they have breached none of their obligations to Norway.

It seems that the rights of the Norwegian authorities, under international law, are comprehensive. Whether or not it can be proved that the heavy water from Norway was abused for military work, the Norwegians are entitled to the inspection for which they have asked. If tests establish that plutonium has been produced, then the Norwegians have the right to see the product, and if weapons have been manufactured they have the right to insist upon them being dismantled. Mr. Paust also believes that the water could be recalled, although no-one is quite sure how much other heavy water, from other sources, may have been supplied to Israel. What is known is that the Americans have furnished Israel with 3.9 tons, and that additional supplies have come from France. “French” heavy water originates either from the USA or Norway, and is theoretically subject to the same controls agreed between Norway and Israel. Therefore the French had no right to re-export it to Israel without permission, and any “French” heavy water used for military purposes could be recalled, not only by the French Government, but also by the American or Norwegian Governments.

Milhollin’s estimate is that Dimona uses 36 tons of heavy water. The American water has been under control since it was moved from Dimona, and the IAEA has inspected it. But it has not been tested to elucidate whether, while it was at Dimona, it was employed in Plutonium refinement. American experts did visit Dimona annually from 1963 to 1969, but they conducted none of the relevant tests, either.

If the Norwegian authorities persist in their enquiries, as they undoubtedly should, then it is evident that similar enquiries should be initiated by the French and American Governments. The IAEA should also be pressed to be more curious than it hitherto has been. All these questions are absolutely urgent, if the non-proliferation regime is to retain any credibility whatever.

But it is equally imperative to re-examine a whole history of nuclear co-operation between Israel and South Africa, with the same open-mindedness.

The nuclear test which took place in the South Atlantic on 22nd September 1979 was monitored by a United States satellite. The explosion, which gave off a characteristic double flash, took place at a height of eight kilometres, which is commensurate with the performance of the GS Howitzer, which has been manufactured in South Africa since the United States supplied Pretoria with a range of modern artillery delivery systems. The Americans have also supplied the South Africans with 300,000 shell casings, adequate to deliver a two to three kiloton nuclear device.

It has been confirmed that forces of the South African fleet were present in the South Atlantic in the area of the explosion at the time that it took place. And further, it is credibly alleged that the 1979 explosion was a joint Israeli-South African achievement, as necessary to the Israelis for verifying their technology as it was to the South Africans for threatening their neighbours. That the United Nations were persuaded to record a verdict of “not proven” about this explosion tells us a good deal about the respect of some of its experts for the rules of evidence.

Israel-South Africa

However, new evidence continually appears, and it would be instructive to reopen this enquiry in order to evaluate it. Since we now know that the allegations of Fuad Jabber, or the judgements, from a different perspective, of Robert E. Harkavy, were founded on realistic assumptions, it becomes necessary to evaluate the contemporary analyses of Israeli-South African cooperation, all over again.

Valuable evidence for such a new investigation has been presented by Jane Hunter in her most disturbing work on Israeli Foreign Policy.

“In 1965, after South Africa brought its Safari safeguarded reactor on line, Israeli scientists began advising South Africa on their Safari 2 research reactor. In 1968, Professor Ernst Bergmann, the ‘father’ of Israel’s nuclear program, went to South Africa and spoke strongly in favour of bilateral co-operation on the development of nuclear technology.

According to the authors of a novelized treatment of Israel’s nuclear program - barred from publication by the Israeli censor - as early as 1966, South Africa had invited Israel to use its land or ocean space for a nuclear weapons test. Led at that time by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Israel declined the invitation. However, according to the Israeli authors, whose sources included Shimon Peres, an enthusiastic intimate of the Israeli nuclear program, and Knesset Member Eliyah Speizer, during his April 1976 visit to Israel Premier Vorster again extended the invitation to Israel to conduct a nuclear test.

It is commonly held that Israel wanted a test venue far from the Middle East in order to uphold its longtime position that it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the region. This ‘position’, hinging on some arcane reading of the word ‘introduce’, is as meaningless as the endlessly heard term ‘peace process’.

The following year, a Soviet satellite picked up unmistakable signs of preparation for a nuclear test in the Kalahari Desert. Fearing that such a test ‘might trigger an ominous escalation of the nuclear arms race,’ the U.S., Britain, France and West Germany joined the USSR in pressuring South Africa to abort the test. As to the bomb that was to be tested, “‘I know some intelligence people who are convinced with damn near certainty that it was an Israeli nuclear device’, said a high-ranking Washington official.“

At three o’clock in the morning on September 22, 1979, Israel and South Africa conducted a nuclear weapons test where the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans merge. A newly recalibrated U.S. Vela intelligence satellite recorded the characteristic double flash of light. It was a small blast, designed to leave very little evidence. The CIA told the National Security Council that a two or three kiloton bomb had been exploded in ‘a joint South African-Israeli test’. A Navy official revealed that U.S. spy planes over the test area had been waved away by South African Navy ships and forced to land secretly in Australia. The CIA knew (and later told Congress) that South African ships were conducting secret maneuvers at the exact site of the test. The South African military attaché in Washington made the first ever request to the U.S. National Technical Information Service for a computer search on detection of nuclear explosions and orbits of the Vela satellite.

Almost immediately the Carter Administration convened a special panel to conduct an investigation of the incident. The panel heard reports from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA; and representatives of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Department of Energy and the State Department presented evidence to the panel supporting the occurrence of a nuclear explosion. Their findings were summarily dismissed by the Carter White House, which after a delay of seven months declared:

Although we cannot rule out the possibility that this (Vela) signal was of nuclear origin, the panel considers it more likely that the signal was one of the zoo events (reception of signals of unknown origin under anomalous circumstances), possibly a consequence of the impact of a small meteor on the satellite.

Moreover, as new information became available, it was simply ignored. In one critical instance, evidence of radiation observed in the thyroid glands of Australian sheep was discounted. The initial lack of this “smoking gun,” traces of radiation, suggested to a Los Alamos scientist that the low-yield weapon tested had been a neutron bomb. However, the Carter panel had used the absence of radiation as a prime excuse in its cover-up.

Many who had been involved with the investigation were aghast and wondered by the Carter White House was ‘equivocating’. Some within the government said that the Carter Administration was hiding behind the ‘zoo’ theory to avoid dealing with the political headaches that would accompany acknowledgement of the test. An affirmative report might have affected the ongoing negotiations over the creation of Zimbabwe in which South African co-operation was needed and upset the just negotiated Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt. Carter also had reasons to fear ‘complications in gathering Jewish votes during the upcoming Democratic Party primary campaign against Sen. Edward Kennedy.’

But beyond that, as a State Department official explained, coming clean on the test ‘would be a major turning point in our relations with South Africa and Israel if we determined conclusively that either had tested a nuclear bomb. It makes me terribly nervous just to think about it.’ Of course by deciding to ignore reality the Carter administration - and following in its footsteps, the Reagan administration,which went on record May 21, 1985 as upholding the Carter ‘verdict’ - destroyed the already tattered credibility of the nonproliferation posture of the U.S. There was no challenge forthcoming from Congress. Quite the contrary: in 1981 Representatives Stephen Solarz and Jonathan Bingham withdrew legislation they had introduced calling for a cutoff of U.S. aid to nations manufacturing nuclear weapons after they learned from the State Department “that such a requirement might well trigger a finding by the Administration that Israel has manufactured a bomb.” The U.S. government turned its back on the potential victims of Israeli and South African nuclear aggression and stuck its head in the sand like an ostrich.

Cover-up

Five years later, the Washington Office on Africa Educational Fund in cooperation with Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the World Campaign Against Military and Nuclear Collaboration with South Africa issued a report on the 1979 nuclear weapons test. Based on documents obtained from the government under the Freedom of Information Act, the report detailed scientific evidence not taken into account by the Carter panel. It demonstrated conclusively that a cover-up had been perpetrated by the Carter Administration. Written by Howard University Professor Ronald Walters, the report warned that the cover-up, ‘coupled with the Reagan Administration’s subsequent allowance of an increase in nuclear aid to South Africa has serious implications for international peace and security.’

The sponsors of the report urged that the investigation be reopened under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineers, and also called for a Congressional investigation and ‘the release to the public of all pertinent information.

Of course whether enquiries are reopened in the USA, or the United Nations, or not, many African States are deeply uneasy about these events. Unsurprisingly, the conclusions which they have drawn reflect considerable alarm. A number of African countries have quite reasonably concluded that they are prospective candidates for nuclear bombardment by South Africa. No Government in the front-line states can possibly ignore this threat. Persistent cross-border military activity by the apartheid regime is a permanent fact of political life in the southern part of the African continent.

But it is not only in the front-line states that alarm bells have been ringing. As Oye Ogunbadejo informs us:

“Nigeria, for example, sees itself as ... a potential target. Lagos has consistently argued that any improvements in South Africa’s military power and nuclear capability, with the assistance of the west, pose direct military threats to Nigeria, and make it an open target of long-range nuclear attack. Alhaji Shehu Shagari, as President, continued to emphasise the need for his country to catch up with South Africa in the nuclear field. For the time being, however, Nigeria’s efforts are geared, essentially, towards energy purposes.”

Yet, Ogunbadejo cites other prominent African spokesmen who are very impatient with the restrictions of nuclear capacity to the civilian sector. Thus, Ali Mazrui is reported as a strong critic of the Non-Proliferation Treaty:

“From a third world point of view, I don’t believe the Treaty is worth the paper it is written on. And if I were to become President of a third world country, I would not hesitate to withdraw from it. Imperialism in the nuclear age is the monopoly stage of nuclear technology.”

Mazrui foresees an alliance of black South Africa with Nigeria and Zaire, which would develop its own African ‘deterrent’.

“Africa under its triumvirate of diplomatic leaders partly endowed with nuclear credentials, will have begun to enter the main stream of global affairs. And the world as a whole, once it discovers the lunacy of its nuclear ways, will have learned an old lesson in a new context: the lesson that wild mushrooms are dangerous.”

Of course, the attitude of the Government of Free South Africa cannot yet be determined. Fortunately, for many years, progressive people throughout the African continent have given their support to the goal of a nuclear-free zone in the whole region. Kwame Nkrumah froze all French assets because of the tests in the Sahara desert during 1961. At the same time, Nigeria severed its diplomatic contact with France. The advent of the Non-proliferation Treaty was perhaps more keenly welcomed in Africa than in any other sector of the globe. Ogunbadejo believes that only a major initiative towards nuclear disarmament by the great powers can maintain this kind of wider global commitment.

“In the maintenance of future world order, the close co-operation and understanding between the superpowers and the other states with nuclear weapons is an essential precondition.”

In small things and big

The advent of the Gorbachev-Reagan summits, and the conclusion of a Treaty to dismantle intermediate nuclear forces, welcome though it is, nonetheless arrives after the eleventh hour, when we consider the savage implications of the problems of proliferation. Conventional theories of deterrence are deeply flawed, and nowhere more than in their standard presumption of a bipolar model of nuclear confrontation. In a crude way, several thousand warheads may, when confronted by several thousand other warheads, determine a certain kind of behaviour. No such determination may be presumed, however, once proliferation has extended to the ‘pariah’ states. In the hot spots which include and surround these states, there is sufficient turbulence to encourage the insane idea that nuclear weapons can be useful as means of actual warfare. What elsewhere would be normal restraints of public opinion are here conspicuously absent.

We have more than a little evidence that neither domestic nor international law controls the potential responses of such governments.

In small things, the Israeli Government kidnaps its opponents, and visits exemplary repression upon them. In large things, it misleads the United Nations and extends the threat of nuclear destruction to two of the most dangerous areas in the contemporary world.

It is hardly surprising that good people who are facing such threats may flinch in their commitment to oppose all or any reliance on nuclear weapons. Thus, Ogunbadejo tells us:

“Edem Kodjo, the last substantive Secretary-General of the Organization of African Unity, caused quite a stir at the 19th summit during June 1983 in Addis Ababa, when he militantly urged African Governments to match ‘South Africa’s nuclear mights’: ‘it is the duty of member states which are able to resolutely embark on the nuclear path to do so. “‘

Nuclear proliferation is the tragic reductio ad absurdem of deterrence theory. That old cynic, Harold Macmillan, cogently expressed the problem:

“If all this capacity for destruction is spread around the world in the hands of all kinds of different characters dictators, reactionaries, revolutionaries, madmen - then sooner or later, and certainly, I think by the end of the century, either by error or insanity, the great crime will be committed.”

The Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the idea of nuclear-free zones, can neither of them continue unaffected by the nuclearization of the military forces of Israel and South Africa. If there is still time to maintain the civilized commitment of Africa and the Arab world to non-nuclear defence policies, it must be evident that that time is rapidly speeding away. Mordechai Vanunu has removed the last veil which had been concealing this ugly situation.

Now, in order to survive, the Non-Proliferation regime must discover how to disarm Israel and South Africa of their nuclear bludgeons. A failure to confront this intransigent issue may not at once create the field full of dragon’s teeth which will eventually grow. Problems of resources and technology will ensure an uneven development of nuclear military potential. But here, we are talking about something more fundamental than budget allocations: at stake is the whole question of the political will for peace and disarmament, as well as the deep-rooted problem of social justice. If the rest of the world abandons the front-line states to South African intimidation, including nuclear intimidation all Africa will conclude that Ali Mazrui is right. If everyone outside the Middle East remains deaf to the process which is now reopening behind locked doors in Jerusalem, then the call for an Arab bomb will become irresistible. We are members of one another, and it is at critical moments like the present that it becomes necessary to demonstrate this fact.

So widespread is the international movement for peace, that the Third United Nations Special Session on Disarmament will see continued healthy pressures for the destruction of nuclear weapons, and the extension of ever wider nuclear-free territorial agreements. Yet, it seems to me, that all these events provide us with a powerful argument that disarmament can no longer be left to governments.

There are widespread debates about the need for reform of the United Nations system, and many new proposals are emerging from the different peace movements, as they experience the weaknesses and limitations of the inherited UN system. Even within the old system, however, many voices have been raised for the creation of a new information order, as a pre-condition for an enlightened and active world public opinion.

The confrontation between Israel and its neighbours, the plight of the Palestinian people, and the abscess of apartheid are both major parts of a global crisis of militarism. This is worsening as a result of economic crisis, contraction and collapse. If the Stock Exchange crash leads through trade wars to the explosion of the world’s debt bomb, then the present proliferation of nuclear weapons is a perfect formula for Armageddon. No-one can tell where conflict will spill over, once any of these sinister devices are detonated.

So urgent is this problem that nothing less than a worldwide popular movement is needed to meet it. It cannot be left to the immediate victims of these new nuclear threats, to protest and appeal in isolation. “Send ye not”, said our English poet John Donne, “to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee”.

* * *

In warning us of these perils, Mordechai Vanunu has earned our support and help. Writing from his confinement, he sent me this inspiring message:

“I hope you received my last letters to you. Last week I received the autobiography of Bertrand Russell. Thank you very much. In this very interesting book I find I share some things in common with the life of Russell. I am also governed by unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

I believe many people would like to do more for those who suffer without reason, like all the refugees in the world. I tried to help them when I was a student. This activity guides me to my next action.

Even now in these inhumane prison conditions, I feel good, because I believe I did my duty and followed my conscience.

I am happy to know that many people support and understand what I did, and my hope is that more people will do more things to stop nuclear proliferation throughout the world.

We are now in a great moment when the US and the USSR are signing an agreement to reduce nuclear weaponry in Europe. This is a good step in the right direction: to destroy all the nuclear weapons in the world.

I want to thank you for your action for peace, and for spreading news of my case to more people.”

I do not think that humanity will ignore or forget the plight of this good man. In organizing solidarity with him, we shall continually remind the world of the menace against which he warned.