[E-rundbrief] Info 1438 - US-policy sabotages UN-Nuclear Nonproliferation Conference
Matthias Reichl
info at begegnungszentrum.at
Do Mai 28 12:42:21 CEST 2015
E-Rundbrief - Info 1438 - Joseph Gerson (USA): Obama Administration
Sabotages Nuclear Nonproliferation Conference.
Bad Ischl, 28.5.2015
Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
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Obama Administration Sabotages Nuclear Nonproliferation Conference
By Joseph Gerson, Truthout | Op-Ed
Wednesday, 27 May 2015 00:00
I mean you must take living so seriously that, even when you are
seventy, you must plant olive trees, not because you think they will
be left to your children, because you don't believe in death although
you are afraid of it because, I mean, life weighs heavier.
- Nazim Hikmet, "On Living"
So much for President Obama's commitment to a nuclear-weapons-free world.
With its decision on May 22 to block the adoption of the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Review Conference's consensus statement, the Obama
administration gave the human species another hefty push toward
nuclear catastrophe, shaking the foundations of the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
Why the sabotage? Well, for one thing, the draft text had the temerity
to call for the convening of a conference within six months to prepare
the way for a Middle East
nuclear-weapons-and-weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone. It called
for all parties to the NPT Review - read especially the United States
- to fulfill previous Review Conferences' promises to begin the
process of creating the zone.
Dangers
Though it doesn't currently garner much media coverage, the danger of
nuclear war is anything but an innocuous abstraction. Each of the
nuclear powers is currently modernizing its nuclear arsenal and
delivery systems. (US plans call for spending $1 trillion over the
next 30 years for these nuclear weapons.) With NATO's expansion to
Russia's borders, and Russia's responses in Ukraine and across Europe,
we have entered a new era of confrontation between nuclear
superpowers, which between them possess more than 90 percent of the
world's 16,400 nuclear weapons - weapons that have been exercised in
posturing during the Ukraine war.
The situation isn't much better in Asia and the Pacific. China's
second-leading official newspaper, Global Times, said in a May 25
editorial that "war was inevitable" between China and the United
States unless Washington stopped demanding that Beijing halt the
building of artificial islands in a disputed waterway (the South
China/Western Philippine Sea). Those islands may be designed to host
naval bases for China's nuclear-armed submarines, in order to overcome
the possibility of the US and Japan blockading China's mainland ports.
Plus, at a time when the US is deepening its military alliances and
deploying first-strike-related "missile defenses" along China's
periphery, China has begun installing multiple warheads on its nuclear
missiles.
Further afield, recent scientific studies tell us that even a "small"
nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan could lead to global
famine and the deaths of 2 billion people. We must also take into
account the staggering record of nuclear weapons accidents and
miscalculations - and what that record portends for our future on this
planet.
Given these global tensions, along with the nuclear powers' resistance
to engaging in "good faith" negotiations for the complete elimination
of the P5's (1) nuclear arsenals as required by Article VI of the
45-year-old Nonproliferation Treaty, hopes for this year's NPT Review
Conference were not high. The nuclear powers had boycotted the United
Nations' Open Ended Working Group, failed to fulfill more than 1.5 of
the 13 steps agreed at the 2000 NPT Review Conference, and the US had
insulted the majority of the world's nations during the UN High Level
Meeting on Disarmament when it warned them to leave fulfillment of the
64 action items to Washington. In addition, Moscow sneeringly boasted
that under China's leadership they were nearing completion of a
glossary of terms.
Worse, the near-complete failure of this year's Review Conference
further undermines the credibility of the seminal treaty, leaving the
world without even a minimal agreement about how to reduce, let along
eliminate, the risk of nuclear annihilation.
In the months leading to the Review Conference, many diplomats and
analysts feared that the failure of the United States to co-convene
the Middle East Nuclear Weapons and Weapons of Mass Destruction Free
Zone conference in 2012 could lead to the failure of the Review
Conference and the dangers that could follow. Efforts to create the
zone, which would include Iran, Israel and the Arab states, date to
the deal that indefinitely extended the NPT in 1995 - and which was
reiterated in the 2000 and 2010 Review Conferences. The US failure to
bring Israel to the table led a growing number of the world's nations
to question whether US commitments are worth the paper they are
written on, with the UN high representative for disarmament affairs
wondering who could have reasonably expected the US to deliver Israel
in a presidential election year.
Unfortunately, the critics were right. The US could not be taken at
its diplomatic word. And in her speech in the closing session of the
Review Conference, Rose Gottemoeller asserted that previous
commitments to convene the Middle East zone conference had now expired.
Just as the US has repeatedly run interference for Israel as it
disregards the UN Security Council resolutions that ended the 1967 war
and persists with its illegal colonization, our government once again
"had Israel's back" in that country's campaign to remain the Middle
East's sole nuclear power. Rather than accept its military ally
Egypt's demand that the Middle East nuclear weapons and WMD conference
be held within 180 days of the Review Conference, the US scuttled that
conference.
Contradictions
The contradictions are, of course, rife. The US warns that "all
options are on the table" in relation to Iran's nuclear "threat" - a
position recently reiterated by President Obama in an interview with
Jeffrey Goldberg for The Atlantic - while protecting Israel's nuclear
arsenal. A Middle East nuclear-weapons-and-WMD-free zone would remove
any threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon, yet there is growing talk in
the Arab world about a need to "match" Iran's civilian nuclear
program. We must also recognize that if Israel lives in a "dangerous
neighborhood," as its leaders have frequently claimed, so do Iran and
the Arab states.
One doesn't have to endorse Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's dictatorship
to agree with the Egyptian ambassador's statement in the closing
session of the Review Conference that, "By blocking consensus, we are
depriving the world, but especially the Middle East, of even one
chance of a better future, away from the horrors and the humanitarian
consequences of nuclear weapons."
Functionally, in blocking the final document, the US also may have
been doing heavy diplomatic lifting for Russia, China, France and
Britain, each of which opposed many of the specifics in the draft
consensus statement. If the US hadn't blocked the statement to protect
Israel, might others P5 nations or their allies have prevented
consensus? That's unknown, but there is no doubt that as the head of
Russia's delegation put it, it was a "shame that such an opportunity
for dialogue had turned out to be missed, perhaps for a long time to
come." I put those words in italics to emphasize just how significant
the failure of the Review Conference is. Much - including nuclear war
- can happen in a "long time."
Silver Linings?
As the saying goes, it is darkest before the dawn. Of necessity, we
look for silver linings that illuminate life-affirming paths.
The first of these sources of hope is the growing divide between the
vast majority of non-nuclear weapons states and the nuclear powers. By
the time the Review Conference ended, more than 100 governments had
signed the Humanitarian Pledge initiated by Austria and growing from
three international conferences on the human consequences of nuclear
war, the last of which engaged 158 states. The pledge, which is a long
way from a treaty, commits its signers "to cooperate with all relevant
stakeholders, states, international organizations, the Red Cross and
Red Crescent Movement, parliamentarians and civil society, in efforts
to stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons in light of
their unacceptable humanitarian consequences and associated risks."
The challenge, of course, is to build from this nonbinding statement
to the diplomatic and popular pressure necessary to force the nuclear
powers to finally fulfill their Article VI NPT commitments and the
related International Court of Justice's advisory opinion on the use
and threatened use of nuclear weapons.
A second source of hope grows from the international mobilization that
brought thousands of activists to New York on the eve of the NPT
Review, along with its Global Peace Wave of events in more than 50
countries. In addition to its street protest and the 8 million
petition signatures calling for nuclear weapons abolition that were
delivered to the president of the Review Conference and the UN high
commissioner for disarmament affairs, the Peace and Planet network
took important steps toward shattering movement silos.
Recognizing the limitations of single-issue movements and taking power
analyses seriously, it has begun building alliances with peace,
justice and environmental organizations to build more
issue-integrated, and thus broader and more powerful, movements. These
types of coalitional movements are capable of actually challenging the
deeply entrenched systems that serve as the foundations of policies -
including but not limited to nuclear weapons - that reinforce the
power, profits and influence of the privileged few.
Here again, we have to navigate contradictions. Ridding the world of
nuclear weapons is an urgent imperative, but building the integrated
movements needed to achieve it will require patience, wisdom and time.
In the United States, this means building trust and making common
cause with climate change activists, with the Black Lives Matter
movement, with Move the Money campaigns, and certainly with those
working for a just Israel-Palestine peace and an end to Washington's
endless Middle East wars. The anti-nuclear movement's next steps will
be seen at the US Social Forum in Philadelphia this June, with
commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
atomic bombings in August and global wave actions in the run up to
September's International Peace Day and the International Day for the
Complete Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.
It's no accident that the vast majority of the US threats to initiate
nuclear war have been made during wars and crises in the global South.
As this century moves forward, the majority of the world's nations
will no longer accept a discriminatory hierarchy of nuclear terror.
Footnote
1. The P5 are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council,
each of which is a nuclear weapons state: the United States, Russia,
Britain, France and China.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
JOSEPH GERSON
Joseph Gerson is director of the American Friends Service Committee's
peace and economic justice program and co-convener of Peace and Planet.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31010-obama-administration-sabotages-nuclear-nonproliferation-conference
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