[E-rundbrief] Info 1756 - 50th Anniversary of the Non-Proliferation Treaty

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief Info 1756 - Alice Slater (USA): On the 50th Anniversary of 
the Non-Proliferation Treaty: An Exercise in Bad Faith.

Bad Ischl, 2.7.2018

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

================================================

 
https://www.pressenza.com/2018/06/on-the-50th-anniversary-of-the-non-proliferation-treaty-an-exercise-in-bad-faith/

    On the 50th Anniversary of the Non-Proliferation Treaty: An 
Exercise in Bad Faith

    by Alice Slater

    On July 1, the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will 
turn 50 years old.   In that agreement, five nuclear weapons states-- 
the US, Russia, UK, France, and China—promised, a half a century ago, 
to make “good faith efforts” to give up their nuclear weapons, while 
non-nuclear weapons states promised not to acquire them.   Every 
country in the world agreed to join the treaty except for India, 
Pakistan, and Israel which then went on to develop their own nuclear 
arsenals.   To sweeten the pot, the NPT’s Faustian bargain promised 
the non-nuclear weapons states an “inalienable right” to so-called 
“peaceful” nuclear power.   Every nuclear power reactor is a potential 
bomb factory since its operation produces radioactive waste which can 
be enriched into bomb-grade fuel for nuclear bombs.  North Korea 
developed its promised “peaceful” nuclear technology and then walked 
out of the treaty and made nuclear bombs.  And it was feared that Iran 
was on its way to enriching their “peaceful” nuclear  waste to make 
nuclear weapons as well, which is why Obama negotiated the  “Iran 
deal” which provided more stringent inspections of Iran’s enrichment 
activity, now under assault by the US with the election of Donald Trump.



    Despite the passage of 50 years since the NPT states promised 
“good faith” efforts to disarm, and the required Review and Extension 
conference 25 years ago, which since then has instituted substantive 
review conferences every five years as a condition for having extended 
the NPT indefinitely rather than letting it lapse in 1995, there are 
still about 15,000 nuclear weapons on our planet.  All but some 1,000 
of them are in the US and Russia which keep nearly 2,000 weapons on 
hair-trigger alert, poised and ready to fire on each other’s cities in 
a matter of minutes.   Only this month, the Trump administration upped 
the ante on a plan developed by Obama’s war machine to spend one 
trillion dollars over the next ten years on two new nuclear bomb 
factories, new weapons, and nuclear-firing planes, missiles and 
submarines.  Trump’s new proposal for a massive Pentagon budget of 
$716 billion, an increase of $82 billion, was passed in the House and 
now in the Senate by 85 Republicans and Democrats alike, with only 10 
Senators voting against it!  When it comes  to gross and violent 
military spending, bi-partisanship is the modus operandi!   And the 
most radical aspect of the budget is a massive expansion of the US 
nuclear arsenal, ending a 15 year prohibition on developing “more 
usable” low-yield nuclear warheads that can be delivered by submarine 
as well as by air-launched cruise missiles.  “More usable” in this 
case, are bombs that are at least as destructive as the atom bombs 
that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since the subsequently 
developed hydrogen bombs in the US arsenal are magnitudes more 
devastating and catastrophic.



    Putin, in his March, 2018 State of the Nation Address, also spoke 
of new nuclear- weapons bearing missiles being developed by Russia in 
response to the US having pulled out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic 
Missile Treaty and then planting missiles in eastern Europe.     He 
noted that:



    Back in 2000, the US announced its withdrawal from the 
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Russia was categorically against this. 
We saw the Soviet-US ABM Treaty signed in 1972 as the cornerstone of 
the international security system. Under this treaty, the parties had 
the right to deploy ballistic missile defence systems only in one of 
its regions. Russia deployed these systems around Moscow, and the US 
around its Grand Forks land-based ICBM base.

    Together with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the ABM Treaty 
not only created an atmosphere of trust but also prevented either 
party from recklessly using nuclear weapons, which would have 
endangered humankind, because the limited number of ballistic missile 
defence systems made the potential aggressor vulnerable to a response 
strike.

    We did our best to dissuade the Americans from withdrawing from 
the treaty. All in vain. The US pulled out of the treaty in 2002. Even 
after that we tried to develop constructive dialogue with the 
Americans. We proposed working together in this area to ease concerns 
and maintain the atmosphere of trust. At one point, I thought that a 
compromise was possible, but this was not to be. All our proposals, 
absolutely all of them, were rejected. And then we said that we would 
have to improve our modern strike systems to protect our security 
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/56957

    Ironically, this week the US Department of State, under the 
heading “Diplomacy in Action”, issued a joint statement with US 
Secretary of State Pompeo and the Russian and UK Foreign Ministers , 
extolling the NPT as the “essential foundation for international 
efforts to stem the looming threat—then and now—that nuclear weapons 
would proliferate across the globe…and has limited the risk that the 
vast devastation of nuclear war would be unleashed.” 
https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/06/283593.htm

    All this is occurring against the stunning new development of the 
negotiation and passage of a new Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear 
Weapons, the culmination of a ten year campaign by the International 
Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which succeeded in 
lobbying for  122 nations to sign this new treaty which prohibits 
nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, 
transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using or threatening to use 
nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their 
territory.  Just as the world has banned chemical and biological 
weapon, as well as landmines and cluster bombs, the new treaty to ban 
nuclear weapons closes the legal gap created by the NPT which only 
requires “good faith efforts” for nuclear disarmament, and doesn’t 
prohibit them.

    At the last NPT review in 2015, South Africa spoke eloquently 
about the state of nuclear apartheid created by the NPT where the 
nuclear “haves” hold the rest of the world hostage to their 
devastating nuclear threats which provided even more impetus for the 
successful negotiation of the ban treaty.     ICAN won the Nobel Peace 
Prize for their winning campaign and is now engaged in lobbying for 
ratification by the 50 states required by the ban treaty to enter into 
force.  To date, 58 nations have signed the treaty, with 10 national 
legislatures having weighed in to ratify it.   See, www.icanw.org 
None of the nine nuclear weapons states or the US nuclear alliance 
nations in NATO, as well as South Korea, Australia, and surprisingly, 
Japan, have signed the treaty and all of them boycotted the 
negotiations, except for the Netherlands because a grassroots campaign 
resulted in their Parliament voting to mandate attendance at the ban 
negotiations, even though they voted against the treaty.  Grassroots 
groups are organizing in the five NATO states that host US nuclear 
weapons—Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Turkey—to remove 
these weapons from US bases now that they are prohibited.

    There is a vibrant new divestment campaign, for use in the nuclear 
weapons states and their allies sheltering under the US nuclear 
umbrella, www.dontbankonthebomb.com   There is also a parliamentary 
pledge for legislators to sign who live in nuclear weapons states or 
allied states at http://www.icanw.org/projects/pledge/ calling on 
their governments to join the ban treaty.    In the US, there is a 
campaign to pass resolutions at city and state levels in favor of the 
new treaty at www.nuclearban.us  Many of these nuclear divestment 
campaigns are working in cooperation with the new Code Pink Divest 
from the War Campaign. 
https://www.codepink.org/divest_from_the_war_machine

    It remains to be seen whether the NPT will continue to have 
relevance in light of the evident lack of integrity by the parties who 
promised “good faith” efforts for nuclear disarmament, and instead are 
all modernizing and inventing new forms of nuclear terror.   The 
recent detente between the US and North Korea, with proposals to sign 
a peace treaty and formally end the Korean War, after a 65 year 
cease-fire since 1953,  and the proposed meeting between the two 
nuclear gargantuans, the US and Russia, together with the new nuclear 
ban treaty, may be an opportunity to shift gears and look forward to a 
world without nuclear weapons if we can overcome the corrupt forces 
that keep the military-industrial-academic-congressional complex in 
business, seemingly forever!

Alice Slater is the New York representative for the Nuclear Age Peace 
Foundation and serves on the Coordinating Committee of World Beyond War.



    Alice Slater

    446 E 86 St

    New York NY 10028

    212-744-2005

    646-238-9000(mobile)

    www.wagingpeace.org

    www.worldbeyondwar.org



    We may now care for each Earthian individual at a sustainable 
billionaire's level of affluence while living exclusively on less than 
1 percent of our planet's daily energy income from our cosmically 
designed nuclear reactor, the Sun, optimally located 92 million safe 
miles away from us.   Buckminster Fuller


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