[E-rundbrief] Info 1438 - US-policy sabotages UN-Nuclear Nonproliferation Conference

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 1438 - Joseph Gerson (USA): Obama Administration 
Sabotages Nuclear Nonproliferation Conference.

Bad Ischl, 28.5.2015

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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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