A World without Nuclear Weapons

Dato' Dr Ronald S. McCoy
CoPresident, IPPNW

'A World without Nuclear Weapons' that was the topic of the SGM Peace Lecture held at the Tadika Seri Soka Auditorium on June 22, 1997. The speaker invited was Dato' Dr Ronald S. McCoy who is one of the three copresidents of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and chairman of Malaysian Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (MPPNW). Delivered to a hall packed with about 450 listeners, mostly youths, the lecture highlighted the immense destructiveness of nuclear weapons and the pressing need for total nuclear disarmament, Below is the full text of the peace lecture given by Dr McCoy and his answers to the questions raised by members of the audience.

Ladies and gentlemen:

I would first like to thank the organisers for inviting me to give this Peace Lecture. I think it is obvious that we have a lot in common -- in IPPNW, SGI and SGM.

IPPNW was formed in 1980 and was the brainchild of two cardiologists: one from the United States of America, Dr Bernard Lown, and the other from the Soviet Union, Dr Evgueni Chazov. They first met in 1966, developed a friendship and discovered they have a lot in common, one of which was a desire to see the elimination of nuclear weapons.

So, in December 1980, a group of doctors got together in Geneva and formed IPPNW with a membership of affiliates from twelve countries. IPPNW has since grown, with a membership of affiliates from eighty-four countries, representing 150,000 doctors worldwide. It is essentially a doctors' organisation, with a very simple philosophy: on one hand, doctors spend most of their time saving lives and promoting health, while on the other, we have the military and military weapons, the most destructive of which are nuclear weapons. We have learnt from the experience of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 that doctors cannot do anything meaningful for the survivors of a nuclear war, as hospitals will be destroyed and doctors and nurses injured or killed. So, to follow a sound principle of medicine, if we cannot do something about a disease, then we should prevent it. So, IPPNW's philosophy is to prevent nuclear war by eliminating nuclear weapons.

Of course, we realise that this is a very difficult and very complex problem, and we do not pretend that it is something we can achieve easily or quickly. IPPNW has been in existence since 1980 and we are still a very long way away from a world without nuclear weapons.

Mind you, we may not succeed in the end, but we cannot not try to eliminate nuclear weapons. We have made some headway and we have now had the support of sixty retired generals and admirals from seventeen countries who have declared publicly that nuclear weapons should be abolished, now that the Cold War is over.

Burns Man burned by thermal radiation approximately one kilometer from the blast centre.

In 1946, an attempt was made, with the formation of the United Nations, to eliminate nuclear weapons when the USA did propose that nuclear weapons be banned. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union, which did not have the technology at that time, rejected the proposal. Then followed the Cold War and the struggle between the communist bloc and the so-called Western democracies. During the fifty years of the Cold War, we saw a nuclear arms race that has now left us with about 45,000 nuclear warheads, ninety-five per cent of which belong to the USA and Russia.

Changing Mindsets

Envisioning a nuclear weapon free world is an attempt to reconcile the desirable aim of nuclear disarmament with the realities of a disorderly international political system of competing nation states that are prone to conflict. As long as we have conflict and as long as we resolve conflict by going to war, then nuclear weapons will have a certain place in world affairs.

During the Cold War, strategists and defence analysts differed from peace and disarmament activists in their assessment of the nature of international politics and the desirability and feasibility of nuclear disarmament.

The conventional wisdom of the strategic community was that nuclear deterrence and nuclear weapons had a fundamental role in international security and that nuclear disarmament was unthinkable and an idealistic goal in a world of recurring conflict between nation states. They saw nuclear disarmament as utopian and incompatible with power politics, whereas peace activists took the view that cooperation between states is possible and that international security is best served by nuclear disarmament.

But the end of the Cold War has presented the world with an unprecedented opportunity to confront the unthinkable and to rid itself of a class of weapons that threaten humanity and its habitat. This view is now widely shared by the strategic community and even by retired generals and admirals, although it must be acknowledged that the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is still alive and well in some quarters. This is the mindset that we must try to change. We must aim to work with and change the thinking of young people, because it is much more difficult to change the mindsets of older people. That is why SGI and SGM have a very important part to play in the process of changing the negative mindsets of people in today's world.

Fictional Utopias

Nuclear weapons descended on a disorderly world at war in 1945 -- a world of imperfect people, imperfect nations, and imperfect relations between states. The immense destructiveness of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery made defence against nuclear attack impossible. It only takes a few minutes from the launch of a nuclear weapon to its arrival in the enemy's territory, and once launched it cannot be recalled. This transformed military and strategic thinking on both sides and there was a shift from the idea of defence to deterrence. Nuclear deterrence was based on the fear of total annihilation and mutual destruction. In other words, to have nuclear weapons and not to use them, but to threaten to use them and therefore to deter the enemy from attacking you with nuclear weapons.

In the early 1980s, the Harvard Nuclear Study Group, a mainstream prestigious group of six Harvard academics, most of whom had served under various US government administrations, in their book, Living With Nuclear Weapons, expressed the view: "Humanity has no alternative but to hold this threat at bay and to learn to live with politics, to live in the world we know: a world of nuclear weapons, international rivalries, recurring conflicts, and at least some risk of nuclear crises. The challenge we face is not to escape to a fictional utopia where such problems do not exist. It is to learn to live with nuclear weapons in ways that are successfully safer and in which the freedoms won by men and women are kept secure and can grow." The Harvard Group also dismissed the idea that nuclear weapons would one day disappear as 'atomic escapism'. So, the concept of nuclear deterrence was formed in the USA. It was essentially a Western concept, as there is no Russian word for deterrence.

During the Cold War, world leaders generally did not believe that total nuclear disarmament was a serious proposition, with two notable exceptions -- President Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan.

Gorbachev was the man who reversed Cold War thinking and made it possible for the world to think about the possibility of eliminating nuclear weapons. When he came to power in 1985, he called for the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. In October that same year, Reagan talked about 'zero nuclear weapons' for the first time at the summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland. Unfortunately, Gorbachev could not accept that, as the US were planning a strategic defence known as 'Star Wars'.(footnote 1)

Scarring Thick scar tissue, or keloids, remain after radiation burns have healed.

James Schlesinger, a former Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Secretary of Defence and Secretary for Energy, made this comment about the Reykjavik summit: "Given the imprint of nuclear capabilities on our minds, to seek total nuclear disarmament is to seek a goal as risky as it is impractical."

However, he did add the qualification: "Nuclear arsenals are going to be with us as long as there are sovereign states with conflicting ideologies." Presumably, he meant that the elimination of nuclear weapons would be possible in a world of liberal democracies.

Confronting the Unthinkable

These influential opinions have strengthened the military and nuclear establishment and have permeated mainstream thinking in the United States where they remain embedded in some mindsets even today. This is a measure of the formidable wall of public opinion that needs to be breached and the immense difficulties that are faced in weaning the politics of the Western nuclear powers and their allies from a dependency on nuclear weapons.

Yet, history has shown that it is not naive to confront mainstream thinking because the unthinkable has happened on numerous occasions, such as the end of slavery, colonisation and apartheid; the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union; the breaching of the Berlin Wall; the formation of the European Union.

There are already signs that the 1990s are experiencing fundamental changes in international politics, although advocates of nuclear deterrence still claim that nuclear weapons kept the peace for almost five decades and are ready to continue to do the same. The claim about peace, however, never seems to take into account the 120 proxy wars that were waged in client Third World countries, killing twenty million people.

Balancing Risks

For most people, the security issue is one of balancing risks, although risk assessment in international politics is sometimes difficult to get right. No one can claim that nuclear deterrence has 'worked'. All one can say is it did not fail for forty-five years, although mankind came very close to a nuclear catastrophe in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. It was sheer luck and not good management that averted a disaster.

The Americans were preparing to invade Cuba if the Soviet ships carrying nuclear weapons reached Cuba. They did not realise that the Soviet Union had nuclear missiles in Cuba targeting the US and that they would be launched if Cuba was attacked. Fortunately, Khrushchev backed off and turned the ships around. We came very close to a nuclear war in 1962.

During the fifty years of the Cold War, there were also several near misses from computer breakdowns and false alarms about nuclear missile launches. On three occasions, US aircraft carrying nuclear weapons crash-landed on American soil. On one occasion, the trigger mechanism on a nuclear weapon was set off but fortunately it stopped short of the final stage that would have detonated a nuclear explosion.

The greatest risk today is the risk of nuclear proliferation or the spread of nuclear weapons to other states. As long as a handful of states possess nuclear weapons for their own security and deny those same weapons to other states for their own security, attempts will be made to break that monopoly. It is universally agreed that any increase in the number of nuclear weapon states will necessarily make the world more perilous.

In addition, a new dimension to the nuclear threat has emerged -- the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons or fissile material by terrorist or sub-state groups, as a result of unstable conditions in Russia. In the absence of tight controls, the development of an already significant illegal trade in fissile material in Russia will make it easier for terrorists to obtain enough fissile material to fabricate a crude nuclear device. The perpetuation of a nuclear weapons culture and the availability of expertise from unemployed nuclear scientists will also increase the risk. Terrorists cannot be deterred, for the logic of deterrence fails when one side does not have an easily identifiable or vital asset that the other side can target and deter.

Whatever the final judgment on nuclear deterrence during the Cold War, the argument for deterrence in the post-Cold War period is largely circular. Today, nuclear deterrence flows from an assumption of the continued existence of nuclear weapons. The need for nuclear weapons, as weapons of last resort, would therefore disappear if nuclear weapons were eliminated.

Incremental Nuclear Disarmament

But nuclear disarmament is a very long process, and is very complex. And we ourselves do not expect to rid ourselves of nuclear weapons in the next five or ten years. If we make up our minds today that we would get rid of nuclear weapons, it could take something like thirty years to get rid of nuclear weapons.

The Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva is at present in such a predicament. Disputes about the merits of negotiating a fissile material's cut-off treaty and/or a ban on landmines and a competing ad hoc committee on nuclear disarmament are further complicated by India's linkage to total nuclear disarmament within a time-frame as a precondition for beginning negotiations. This is a manifestation of a global systemic disorder, with its symptoms of mistrust and hegemony, that militates against disarmament and peace.

However, some disarmament initiatives have succeeded in the last decade, such as the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) I and II agreements, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and the adoption of the Malaysian resolution in the United Nations General Assembly that calls for negotiations leading to a Nuclear Weapons Convention to start in 1997. Nuclear disarmament has also been boosted by the advisory opinion of the World Court on the illegality of nuclear weapons, the report of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, and the statement by sixty generals and admirals from seventeen countries calling for abolition.

The global landscape has also improved since Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine voluntarily relinquished their nuclear weapons and became nuclear weapon free countries. With the signing of the Pelindaba Treaty and the Bangkok Treaty last year, nuclear weapon free zones were established in Africa and South-east Asia, making the whole of the southern hemisphere nuclear weapon free.

Nuclear disarmament is essentially a global endeavour and responsibility, shared primary by the declared nuclear weapon states (the United States, Russia, France, Britain and China) and the threshold states (India, Pakistan and Israel)(footnote 2). The main impetus, however, must come from the United States and Russia, who together possess 95 per cent of the world's arsenals.

The INF Treaty and Start I and II Agreements

Although nuclear arsenals are shrinking, this must be seen realistically as a partial reduction in excessive numbers of warheads rather than an irreversible trend towards the total elimination of nuclear arsenals.

The INF Treaty made it possible for the US and Russia to eliminate all intermediate-range nuclear missiles, while START I has been ratified and implementation is ahead of schedule.

Despite the heavy financial burden on the strained Russian budget and the difficulties with ratification in the Russian Duma, made worse by provocative NATO expansion plans, the START II agreement, when fully implemented, will reduce Russian and US strategic warheads by almost two-thirds to a level of 3,000-3,500 each by the year 2003. At the recent Helsinki summit, implementation of START II was extended to the year 2007.

However, it should be noted that START II only provides for the destruction of delivery systems, not nuclear warheads. This will therefore permit the US and Russia to keep warheads in reserve storage, making it possible for them to reverse the process and fashion new nuclear weapons at a later date.

Both the US and Russia have realised that, under current political conditions, their strategic requirements could be amply met at lower levels. It was therefore agreed at the Helsinki summit on March 20-21, 1997, that negotiations on a START III agreement, which would reduce strategic nuclear warheads to 2,000-2,500 each by the end of the year 2007, would begin as soon as START II was ratified by Russia.

Comprehensive Test and Treaty (CTBT)

After 2,046 nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere, underground and underwater, a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was signed in the UN General Assembly in September 1996 by a vote of 158 to 3 (India, Bhutan and Libya), with 5 abstentions (Cuba, Lebanon, Mauritius, Syria and Tanzania). Forty years too late and seriously flawed, the CTBT will at least ensure that the environment will never again be damaged or polluted by nuclear test explosions. However, the question that has to be asked is: How comprehensive is comprehensive? The CTBT bans nuclear test explosions but not non-fission nuclear tests, such as subcritical tests and computer simulation tests in weapons laboratories.

Over the next decade, the US plans to invest US$40 billion in the deceptively named Science-based Stockpile Stewardship and Management programme. It plans to conduct six sub-critical tests at its Nevada Test Site and to maintain, modify, design and produce new nuclear weapons which will expand US nuclear weapon capabilities well into the 21st century, demonstrating the continuing commitment of the US to retaining nuclear weapons as core instruments of national policy. In other words, the nuclear arms race continues today in weapons laboratories, despite the CTBT. Such activities are bound to have a negative impact on CTBT ratification and other non-proliferation and disarmament goals.

Some important steps forward were made in 1996 in the area of nuclear weapons. One of them was the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty banning tests and other detonations of nuclear weapons.

The Politics of Abolition

So, what are the prospects of achieving a nuclear weapon free world when states are locked in political conflict over ideology, religion, ethnicity, concepts of human rights and democracy, in an atmosphere of mistrust and dubious threat perception, fuelled by the acquisition of arms, both conventional and weapons of mass destruction?

In the debate on abolition and the legitimacy of security without nuclear weapons, it must be recognised that nuclear disarmament cannot be achieved in isolation. One also has to address the politics of international security, based on nuclear deterrence as it exists within a dynamic international system of competing sovereign states.

Before abolition can take place, there would have to be prior political accommodation between antagonistic countries, including accommodation on the transitional stage to zero nuclear weapons. The main fears will be the risk of cheating and breakout and that abolition would pave the way for other weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical and biological weapons, as well as a conventional arms race. There would have to be confidence that all countries would be equally unwilling to hide or make nuclear weapons in secret and that a verification regime would succeed in detecting and deterring would-be pro-liferators.

Such a consensus would appear to be impossible between antagonistic countries and unlikely between those which are suspicious of one another. But benign forms of international politics are possible and need not be mere products of utopian thinking. There are already encouraging developments in some regions, that are leading to the obsolescence of major war as an institution of international relations. In regions, such as Western Europe, North America and Scandinavia, there is the potential for a culture of non-violent conflict resolution, in which relations are conducted in an environment where war is generally not only unacceptable but also unthinkable. The Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN), with its policy of 'constructive engagement', is another example. As confidence in a culture of peace grows and war-free regions develop, there will be increasing support for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Essentially, nuclear disarmament will require a consensus among the nuclear weapon countries and the threshold countries, and particularly an unequivocal commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons by the five nuclear powers, an important point made by the Canberra Commission.

The spread of such non-violent 'security communities' across the world is possible in the long term, although crucial problems remain, such as those posed by different regions developing at different rates, the debt crisis and widespread social injustice which generate poverty, excessive military budgets and the arms trade, unsustainable, ecologically unsound economic development, the violation of human rights, and the erosion of democratic institutions in developing countries.

While the world is discovering whether a global culture of non-violent conflict resolution is possible or not, it is hoped that nuclear disarmament will proceed incrementally, as it has in the last few years.

The difficulty in determining and creating favourable political conditions for a commitment to abolition should not prevent further steps from being taken to advance nuclear disarmament, such as taking nuclear forces off alert, removal of warheads from delivery vehicles, ending deployment of non-strategic nuclear weapons, deeper cuts in US and Russian nuclear arsenals, agreement of reciprocal no first use undertakings, a fissile materials cut-off treaty, faithful implementation of the NPT, developing an effective verification system, expanding nuclear weapon free zones, eliminating other weapons of mass destruction, and controlling ballistic missile systems and conventional arms.

But the final goal of zero nuclear weapons will remain unachievable until the five nuclear weapon countries make an irrevocable commitment to zero and agree to start work immediately and in good faith on the practical steps and negotiations required for its achievement, as recommended by the Canberra Commission.

A time-bound framework to eliminate nuclear weapons was not part of the Canberra Commission report, because the majority of Commissioners were of the view that it would be counter-productive as it would give the nuclear weapon states a ready excuse to dismiss the report as being impractical and unrealistic.

The insistence of a time-bound framework by NGOs and the non-nuclear weapon states is almost certainly an expression of their mistrust of the nuclear powers who have for more than twenty-five years dishonoured their pledge in Article VI of the NPT to eliminate nuclear weapons. That mistrust would diminish as soon as there was a commitment to abolition by the nuclear powers, particularly by the United States.

IPPNW and other like-minded NGOs must therefore continue their important roles of research, education and advocacy in their Abolition 2000 campaign to mobilise and influence political leaders and the general public in both nuclear and non-nuclear states.

By raising public consciousness through an informed public debate and generating a groundswell of public opinion, IPPNW would reinforce the disarmament process by convincing decision makers that the elimination of nuclear weapons is necessary, feasible and verifiable.

Getting to Zero

Getting to zero will require a negotiating process that will involve all nuclear weapon countries, any remaining undeclared weapon countries and threshold countries.

By continuing bilateral reductions, as set out in the START agreements, the US and Russia could bring the numbers down to about 1,000-1,500 warheads each without risking instability, provided strategies for nuclear forces were shifted towards a 'defensive deterrence' stance and posture, accompanied by a substantial improvement in the political climate.

When further reductions reach levels around 500 warheads each, it would be an appropriate time for the United Kingdom, France and China to join in multilateral negotiations. The most fundamental requirement for a transition to small nuclear forces would be political and military transparency in the international system and high levels of international trust as an inherent part of a new international security order.

As reductions reach levels of about 100 weapons, strategically these remaining nuclear arsenals would serve as a kind of 'existential nuclear hedge' against unknown and unpredictable events, such as attempts at cheating and break-out. Nuclear proliferation in any form at this stage would be more destabilizing than at present. To obviate the problem of proliferation, stringent limitations and safeguards on nuclear technologies and facilities would be necessary.

It is as well to remember that, while it can be argued that the' continued possession of nuclear weapons predisposes to nuclear proliferation, the reverse argument holds that nuclear disarmament will not take place if nuclear proliferation is not safeguarded through implementation of the NPT and verification arrangements on all key facilities capable of producing fissile materials for explosive purposes, reinforced by global surveillance and on-site inspections.

The final step in approaching zero nuclear weapons will raise a number of very difficult considerations and will require a leap of faith. The total elimination of nuclear weapons will require the destruction of all warheads and delivery systems and the storage and accounting of all fissile materials from dismantled weapons under strict international safeguards.

Conclusion

Nuclear deterrence has become embedded as more than a security strategy. It is a whole way of thinking about security, based on a series of interrelated assumptions about the nature of world politics and the architecture of world order, the characteristics of international relations after World War II, the primary sources of threat, and the falsely assumed utility of nuclear weapons for maintaining international security.

NATO expansion is a good example of the healthy state of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence and the continuance of Cold War thinking, as well as narrow American domestic political interests, recreating the adversarial East-West relationship of the Cold War. In many ways, it is a reflection that a comprehensive re-evaluation of the new security environment and a creative rethinking of a new world order have not taken place.

Assuming that all the technical criteria are met for a complete global elimination of nuclear weapons, that there is protection against the retention of a clandestine capacity for reintroducing nuclear weapons, and that we have achieved our goal of zero, what will we do after zero? Is there a possibility that new weapons of mass destruction will be invented in a post-nuclear age?

Not all states will have the financial or technological capacity of the US to build forces around these revolutionary technologies. For these countries, today's nuclear weapons may therefore become more attractive as weapons to equalise or offset the superior military forces of the United States. This could undermine the nuclear disarmament process now in progress.

There is a real danger that new technologies and information systems may soon revolutionise the conventional battlefield if the unholy alliance of militarism and science is allowed to flourish and develop in a world gripped by the values of the market-place and impoverished by weakening ethical and humanitarian principles, a socially unjust world in which hegemony ensures access to limited resources in order to maintain the unsustainable consumption and lifestyles of the few.

Now that the confrontation of the Cold War is over, all countries must examine and debate their military and-security assumptions and ask what really threatens their security emerging dictatorships or national and regional tensions resulting from social inequalities?

We live in a world of limited natural and vital resources and yet, we witness the wasting of these resources through debilitating military budgets and the unhealthy, unsustainable consumption of 80 per cent of resources by 20 per cent of the world population.

An estimated US$8 trillion ($8,000,000,000,000) has been spent on nuclear weapons since 1945. Despite a decline in the past five years, world military expenditures in 1995 amounted to more than US$1.4 million per minute. One hour's global military spending would suffice to immunise the 3.5 million children destined to die annually from preventable infectious disease. Every three days, 120,000 children die unnecessarily, equalling the toll of casualties following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Are we to go on tolerating a Hiroshima-like catastrophe every three days?

How can we educate people to link military expenditure and unsustainable consumption with global socio-economic problems and sensitise them to reject militarism and uncaring greed that create the conditions for human conflict and war? How can we arouse moral outrage sufficiently to confront and change the mindsets of the entrenched bureaucracies and the powerful, influential military-industrial and scientific lobbies that subvert technology and science?

Despite social and scientific advances in education and health, the 20th century stands out for its levels of violence and war-related deaths, the large majority of whom have been civilians. The death and destruction of modern war owe much to government-sponsored research and development in weapons technology. In the United States, 60 per cent of government research is military oriented; in the European Union, it is 20 per cent.

The Hippocratic Oath binds physicians to first do no harm. Is it not morally and ethically obligatory for scientists, in their pursuit of scientific knowledge, also to do no harm to their fellow human beings? Should we not pursue this further in the International Court of Justice, as we did with the World Court Project, and attempt to make the rule of international law applicable to and enforceable in international affairs?

The design and production of new weapons and military strategies for 'defence' are largely irrelevant to the instabilities and tensions that threaten security in today's inequitable world. Civil society will need to embrace a holistic vision of world order and give greater attention to the constraints and nature of the existing international system and the forces of power politics that govern relations between states – a system that has evolved over centuries, when war, although causing great suffering, did not have civilisation-threatening consequences. For some time now, there has been a growing realisation that this global systemic disorder will have to be addressed as well, as part of the campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. For instance, reformation of the United Nations. In this age of instant mass communication and globalization, is it also not time to envision a system of global ethics, human rights and human responsibilities, to create a balance between the needs and rights of the individual and those of the community, within nations and between nations?

Conflict in human affairs cannot be abolished, but we can and must find ways to resolve conflict by non-military means, through peaceful negotiation and preventive diplomacy. In the long-term and in the interests of humanity, we must therefore take the path that leads to the prevention of war, and go beyond security without nuclear weapons to security without war.

These are some of the visions and actions for peace.

(1) A weapon research programme began by the US in 1984, to develop high-tech methods of attacking missiles launched from Earth or space.
(2) Threshold countries are those countries that have or are capable of having nuclear weapons. At present those three threshold countries are, namely, India, Pakistan and Israel.

[Courtesy August 1997 Cosmic]