International Meeting
2004 World Conference against A & H Bombs
Dr. Joseph Gerson
American Friends Service Committee
Nuclear Hypocrisies, Dangers & The Imperative
of Abolition
I want to begin by honoring Gensuikyo’s fundamentally important
and steadfast organizing for nuclear weapons abolition. Your leading
role in our collective struggle for human survival cannot be overstated
and needs to be honored. You have helped to ensure that the world
never forgets the true meanings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the
imperatives of preventing nuclear war and abolishing nuclear weapons.
Given what my country has wrought on Hiroshima, on Nagasaki, and
on much of the world is a humbling privilege to be invited to return
to the World Conference. I thank you for this opportunity to be
re-inspired by your movement, to be renewed by the Hiroshima spirit,
and to deepen our collaborations to achieve nuclear weapons abolition.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE CATASTROPHIC US WAR AGAINST IRAQ
I come before you with humility, not only because of “my” government’s
catastrophic nuclear weapons and nuclear war policies, but also
in the shadow as we all are of Washington’s catastrophic invasion
of Iraq and its wider global military crusade. These disastrous
wars, launched on blinding ideological foundations of national chauvinism,
idolatrous worship of military power, hypocrisy, an army of lies,
mind-boggling ineptitude, and at the cost of the lives of more than
ten thousand of innocent Iraqi civilians, uncounted thousands of
Iraqi soldiers, nearly a thousand U.S. and allied troops, and the
walking wounded on all sides. It has increased the dangers of terrorist
attacks and dangerously destabilized the Middle East. It has spurred
nations like Iran to develop deterrent forces - including possibly
nuclear weapons. And, it has solidified the understandable rage
of Islamic and other peoples against the United States and its subservient
allies.
The Bush regime has provided us all a lesson written indelibly
in blood and suffering that war is not the answer. Former Vice-President
Al Gore got it right for once when he said that the Iraq war “is
the worst strategic fiasco in the history of the United States.
It is an unfolding catastrophe without any comparison.”
Even as it builds permanent military bases across Iraq in order
to dominate the Middle East for decades to come, the Pentagon concedes
that military victory in Iraq is a chimera. Ironically, Israeli
intelligence has concluded that the only question is how much humiliation
(and I would add death and destruction) the U.S. chooses to suffer
and inflict before it withdraws in disgrace. Just as Nixon’s “Vietnamization”
strategy was doomed to fail three decades ago, so is the sham transfer
of sovereignty to a puppet government led by a former Baathist thug
turned acknowledged CIA agent which has no legitimacy.
What kind of sovereignty or legitimacy could any nation have while
occupied by 160,000 foreign troops? When its laws have been set
in stone by a foreign proconsul? When its economy has been privatized
and transformed to serve the occupier? Or when the occupier’s ambassador
wields the incomparable and corrupting economic power of controlling
the allocation of $18 billion for reconstruction of a devastated
society?
At best, the Bush war has made Iraq safe for fundamentalist Shiite
rule. At worst, the refusal of the Bush Administration to permit
Hans Blix and his U.N. inspectors to complete their U.N. mandated
task of scouring Iraq for possible nuclear and other weapons of
mass destruction, will lead Iraq to catastrophic civil war or leave
it as a sanctuary for embittered men and women who are recklessly
willing to use any means necessary to rid the Islamic world of any
Western influences, values and practices. State crimes and related
transgressions always have their unanticipated consequences.
The Iraq war, as we now know, was not about weapons of mass destruction,
terrorism, or the spread of democracy to Arab and Islamic nations.
It was about oil. Paul Wolfowitz, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of
Defense (read war) put it bluntly a year ago, “we had no choice
in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil….for reasons that have
a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the
issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction.”
Since the introduction of the internal combustion machine a century
ago, petroleum has been “The Prize” of empire. In 1944, with the
British and French empires suffering irreversible decline, and with
President Franklin Roosevelt embracing Arabian King Saud as a strategic
ally, the U.S. State Department reported that with its growing control
over Middle East oil, the U.S. had won “one of the greatest material
prizes in the history of warfare.” Since then, as Noam Chomsky has
observed, “Political Axiom Number One” of U.S. foreign and military
policy has been to ensure that neither Washington’s enemies “nor
its allies” gain independent access to Middle East oil. With control
over Europe and Japan’s - now also China’s and Korea’s - primary
sources of fuel, the U.S. has had its hand on the jugular vein of
global capitalism. In addition to controlling the lion’s share of
the world’s oil (and gas,) and with oil traded in Petrodollars instead
of Petro Euros or in Asian currencies, U.S. dominance over the world’s
oil supplies has also created artificial subsidies for U.S. financial
and industrial capital. As the former Director of the United Nations
“Oil for Food” program Hans Van Sponeck, explained six weeks ago
in Barcelona, “Saddam Hussein’s decision to shift form dollars to
euros in the Oil for Food program may well have sealed his fate.”
The two Bush wars against Iraq have sought to consolidate these
U.S. advantages in order to impose what Vice President Cheney has
called “the arrangement for the 21st century” that will guarantee
that the U.S. will remain the world’s dominant economic, military
and political power for decades to come. Bush the Elder called it
“The New World Order.”
The Iraq wars have not been only about Iraq. The recent war is also
about Saudi Arabia. As the rise of Al Qaeda and other challenges
to the Arabian monarchy illustrate, Saudi rule is becoming increasingly
brittle and thus vulnerable. This has raised fears in Washington
that the Saudis may go the way of the Shah of Iran and Marcos of
the Philippines, leaving other hands on the jugular vein of global
capitalism. U.S. control over Iraqi oil could, if necessary, serve
as a temporary alternative to Saudi oil. And, with Iraq’s strategic
location, Cheney and Rumsfeld plan for Iraq to serve as a new home
for the U.S. military bases needed to control the region as a whole.
U.S. wars, threats of nuclear attack, and subversion of Middle East
governments are not new. On at least nine occasions, beginning in
1946, Washington has prepared or threatened to initiate nuclear
war to ensure continuing dominance over the region’s resources.
The U.S. has subverted governments from the over throw of Mossadeq
in Iran in 1954 and its conspicuous buying of Lebanese elections
in 1958, to supporting brutal dictatorships like the Saudis and
Mubarak of Egypt. Perhaps the deadliest manifestation of this imperial
will was the decade-long siege of Iraq through sanctions, which
the United Nations tells us claimed a toll of more than a million
Iraqi civilians lives.
APOCALYPTIC DANGERS OF NUCLEAR HYPOCRISY
A little more than a decade ago Joseph Rotblat, the Nobel laureate,
sounded a simple and clear warning from this podium. “As long as
this nuclear cult exists, as long as the belief is sustained that
nuclear weapons bestow status, strength and security, the pressure
to join the club will be irresistible…In the long term, there are
only two alternatives: allow the possession of nuclear weapons to
all states that desire them, or deny them to all states by eliminating
nuclear weapons.”
The blatant hypocrisies of the nuclear powers - led by the United
States - are increasingly dangerous. Without determined, good faith
actions that will credibly lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons,
we will suffer accelerating nuclear weapons proliferation, the nearly
inevitable nuclear wars, attacks, human suffering, and environmental
catastrophe will follow. Iran and North Korea today. Countries as
disparate as Brazil and quite possibly Japan in the not-so-distant
future. The situation has become so dangerous that the usually understated
Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed
El Baradei has warned that we must ‘abandon the unworkable notion
that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue nuclear
weapons but morally acceptable for others to relay on them.” The
U.S. “search for a new class of nuclear weapons is a prime example
of this double standard, and, as El Baradei has said, ‘If such efforts
proceed, it is hard to understand how we can continue to ask the
nuclear have-nots to accept additional nonproliferation obligations
and to renounce any sensitive nuclear capability as being adverse
to their security.”
The hypocrisies, denials, and realities with which we live are staggering
for those who retain vestiges of moral clarity and consciousness.
Thus in June, when President Bush visited the Pope, ostensibly to
talk about peace but really to pose for an electron campaign photo,
a Reuters correspondent could not ignore that the President traveled
with his nuclear “football.” Readers of arcane reports in back pages
of our newspapers thus learned that the attache case with the codes
needed for the President to launch a nuclear war was in the next
room with a military attache when the president and the pope met
alone in the Pontiff’s study.
At about the same time, a lead article in the New York Times, reported
on commemorations marking the “D-Days of the Pacific” - the battles
leading to the end of the war against Japan. Reporting from Saipan,
the U.S. “newspaper of record” quoted “a former bomber pilot” 89-year
old retired Air Force Brig. General Paul W. Tibbets who complained
that “The world knew about Normandy right away” but still did not
appreciate U.S. victories and sacrifices in the Pacific. One had
to read deep into the article to find the uncritical information
that Tibbets “piloted the Enola Gay, a B-29, on its August 6, 1945
sortie to Hiroshima, the world’s first nuclear bomb attack.”
This year also saw the opening of a new exhibit featuring the Enola
Gay at the Smithsonian Museum just outside Washington. There, a
simple plaque explains that the plane was the bomber which dropped
the first atomic bomb on a city called Hiroshima which brought the
war against Japan to an end. There is no reference, no photographs,
no artifacts of the Hell inflicted on the Hiroshshima target. Nowhere
does one read that the criteria for the cities identified as possible
targets for the nuclear attacks had to have “vital war plant employing
a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers' homes.”
Denial and fantasy are essential to Full Spectrum Dominance and
to imperial fantasies. The Smithsonian’s celebration of the Enola
Gay is designed to help ensure that no one will remember what occurred
on August 6, 1945. Like Orwellian “Newspeak” and “memory holes,”
the new Enola Gay exhibit was been designed to eliminate memory
so that other nuclear wars can be fought.
The U.S. has become a nuclear state. For nearly six decades, preparations
for and threats to initiate nuclear war have served as a “cornerstone”
of U.S. foreign and military policies. And, every U.S. president
since Truman - with the possible exception of Jerry Ford - has prepared
and threatened to initiate nuclear war - most recently George W.
Bush shortly before he launched the invasion of Iraq. Since Nagasaki,
successive U.S. governments threatened and prepared to initiate
nuclear war: at least nine times to guarantee its Middle East hegemony
and control of that region's oil, at least four times during the
Vietnam War, as many as seven times against North Korea, and during
crises and confrontations in Latin America and Europe. During the
first Gulf War, Bush the Elder, Vice President Quayle, Secretary
of War Cheney, and British Prime Minister Major all threatened Iraq
with possible nuclear attack, and an estimated 700 nuclear weapons
were deployed to the war zone to back up those threats.
Many believe that nuclear war is more likely now then during the
Cold War. The U.S. still has nearly 15,000 nuclear warheads on alert,
deployed at U.S. bases across the U.S. and internationally, and
stockpiled for potential future use. As the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
editorialized, “Not since the resurgence of the Cold War in Ronald
Reagan’s first term has U.S. defense strategy placed such an emphasis
on nuclear weapons.” The Bush Administration's Nuclear Posture Review
reiterates a first strike nuclear war fighting doctrine and audaciously
named Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea, China and Russia as
targeted nations. Reinforcing these threats are the commitments
of leading - if faceless - Bush Administration figures like Linton
Brooks who speak of their “bias in favor of things that might be
useable.” This has fueled the Bush Administration’s campaign to
the “robust bunker buster”, a so-called mini-nuke that will be seventy
times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb if it is produced. Preparations
in Nevada for the resumption of nuclear weapons testing are being
accelerated and are expected by 2007 if Bush is re-elected. A new
post-modern nuclear pit facility is about to be built to produce
new nuclear weapons, and billions of dollars are being spent to
revitalize the nuclear weapons laboratories. Not surprisingly, this
also fuels global pressures for nuclear weapons proliferation.
Bush’s preparations for future nuclear wars are, of course, consistent
with the Bush I and Clinton military doctrines. Bush was not breaking
new ground when his National Security Strategy identified Washington’s
first priority as preventing the emergence of regional or global
rivals. New and most frightening in the current doctrine is the
declared policy of preventive unilateral attack to prevent the emergence
of such rivals. This is not limited to annoyances like Iraq, Iran
and North Korea, but it applies as well over the longer term to
capitalist rivals - the European Union and China - the latter of
which is seen as the most likely strategic competitor to the U.S.
in the decades to come. And the policy is clear that the priority
is not pre-emptive attacks against imminent threats posed by these
rivals, but simply the possible emergence of new rivals.
The danger is not limited to Republicans. For nearly six decades
Democrats and Republicans alike have maintained, modernized, augmented
and threatened to use the U.S. nuclear arsenal. When Howard Dean,
the hope of many so-called progressives within the Democratic Party
went out of his way six months ago to say that nuclear weapons “are
a fact of life,” he was attempting to demonstrate that he was part
of the mainstream. The Clinton Administration called nuclear weapons
the “cornerstone” of our foreign and military policy, and Clinton's
CIA Director, John Deutch was clear that the U.S. "never intended,
nor does it intend now, to implement Article VI" of the NPT.
Days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, with no sense of
irony, President Bush barked in his authoritarian way that “We will
not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes and terrorists to
threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” John Kerry
and a growing number of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives
can be praised for opposing funding for research and development
of new nuclear weapons, resumption of nuclear weapons testing, for
his commitment to enter bilateral talks with North Korea, and for
his articulated respect for international law and treaties. But,
he and the Democratic Party establishment share the Bush Administration’s
double standard when it comes to the dangers of nuclear weapons
proliferation and the commitment to U.S. nuclear superiority.
This spring John Kerry gave a series of well publicized speeches
to articulate and publicize his Kissingerian approach to “national
security issues.” He began by saying that “More than a century ago,
Teddy Roosevelt defined American leadership in foreign policy. He
said America should walk softly and carry a big stick.” Theodore
Roosevelt is best known as one of the leading figures of the late
19th century who envisioned the possibility of the United States
replacing Britain as the world’s dominant power, and who led the
U.S. in building the military and fighting the wars needed to do
it.
In Kerry’s first speech, he named four principle imperatives for
U.S. policy: 1) launching and leading “a new era of alliances for
the post-9/11 world”; 2) “modernize[ing] the world’s most powerful
military to meet the new threats”’ 3) “deploy all that is in the
American arsenal” including its economic, intelligence, diplomatic
and cultural power; and 4) reducing U.S. dependence on Mideast oil.
Days later, Kerry named the possibility of nuclear terrorism as
“the greatest threat we face today” and promised that “[a]s President,
my number one security goal will be to prevent the terrorists from
gaining weapons of mass murder, and ensure that hostile states disarm.”
His slogan was “no material, no bomb, no nuclear terrorism.”
Rather than lead by removing the primary causes of nuclear weapons
proliferation, continued U.S. preparations and threats to initiate
nuclear war and the imperial Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine, Kerry
outlined a four-step strategy: 1) safeguard all the world’s bomb-making
materials, with a primary emphasis on those in the nations of the
former Soviet Union; 2) ban the creation of new nuclear weapons
materials, “including production of plutonium and highly enriched-uranium;
3) adopt a more discrete nuclear weapons profile by reducing “excess
stocks” of U.S. nuclear weapons and materials and halting research
and development of a “new generation of bunker-busting nuclear bombs”
which “we don’t need”; and 4) halt the nuclear weapons programs
of Iran, North Korea and other countries, in part through strengthening
the enforcement powers of the IAEA and tightening controls to prevent
black markets sales of nuclear materials. Like Bush and Clinton
before him, there is no reference to fulfilling the United States’
Article VI NPT obligations. And, his answer to the ongoing catastrophe
in Iraq is to send in more U.S. troops while appealing to U.S. allies
to assist with burdensharing.
Kerry isn’t saying much about so-called “missile defenses,” but
it should be remembered that he and his advisors have long supported
their deployment as soon as the technology is proven reliable. While
differing with Republicans on the questions of timing of the deployment,
the Democratic Establishment has long supported “missile defenses”
as the leading edge of the wedge to monopolize the militarization
of space and to threaten China with the destruction of all of its
missile forces - delusionally seeking to take us back to the power
relations that prevailed in the wake of the Opium Wars a century
and a half ago.
These dangers are not abstract, and they are not confined to the
long-term. The Bush-Cheney decision to derail the Clinton-era peace
process with North Korea ratcheted up that potentially nuclear confrontation.
This, in turn, has encouraged North Korea’s leaders to accelerate
development and possible production of nuclear weapons. And, as
you well know, Pyongyang’s response to the U.S. threat has reinforced
the LDP’s continuing remilitarization of Japan, the campaign to
revise your treasured Peace Constitution, and has also opened the
way for some in the Japanese elite to argue that Japan may need
to develop a nuclear option.
To our good fortune, the nations of East Asia have thus far surrounded
and sufficiently isolated the Bush Administration so that it has
been forced to limit its threats to attack Pyongyang and to finally
present a preliminary proposal that provides a minimum of substance
to the six-party negotiating process. But, another way to read the
current situation is that the Bush Administration has simply bought
itself time to get through the Presidential elections. It may also
build on this, and finally negotiate a deal with Pyongyang in October
to show that Bush can do diplomacy as well as war in order to win
the election. After November, we could easily face sharply increased
tensions, including renewed threats of U.S. unilateral attacks against
North Korea. With his greater commitment to allies and multi-lateralism,
and his principle of launching war as the “last resort” rather than
fighting “wars of choice,” Kerry is not as confrontational. He has
offered to go beyond the Six Party talks, and to negotiate directly
with North Korea.
Because it has yet to become a nuclear weapons state with continuing
commitments to Political Axiom #1, Iran is another story. The situation
is not good. Mohammed El Baradei has reported that the Iranian government
has been less than forthright in fulfilling its commitments to the
IAEA. And Kerry and many Democrats are charging that Bush made a
mistake by focusing on non-nuclear Iraq while giving Teheran valuable
time and opportunities to accelerate its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
While the U.S. is hardly in a position to launch another invasion
in the Middle East, and while I do not want to go so far as to predict
it, it would not be surprising if the Bush Administration countered
by using the specter of a Iran’s nuclear program to frighten the
U.S. people or even to launch an Osirak-like attack on Iran’s nuclear
infrastructure in order to rally their support in his uphill battle
for re-election. Such first strikes are also conceivable in the
years ahead as part of what has become the bi-partisan U.S. “counterproliferation”
doctrine.
What can be done?
Most immediately we must continuing building the power and pressure
of what the New York Times calls “the world’s second superpower”:
international public opinion against the U.S. wars. At no time since
the Vietnam War and the nuclear disarmament movement of the 1980s
has the global peace movement been so powerful and so successful.
As you watch advertising for U.S. products during the Olympics,
you will see that many U.S. corporations are distancing themselves
from the Bush Administration and are wrapping their products in
messages of peace. They know what the world wants. At the same time,
the polls tell us that most U.S. people want our troops to come
home from Iraq.
Our other priority is Emergency Campaign for nuclear weapons abolition
launched by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Any successful
campaign must address what people experience as a pressing problem,
and people need to easily understand how their actions - even small
ones- can help solve the problem. The Mayors’ campaign is ingenious,
because it is based in people’s lived experiences and easy to understand.
By talking to, educating, and mobilizing our neighbors, we can encourage
our mayors to do what they know is right: to take a stand for the
elimination of nuclear weapons which increase security and unleash
funds that are sorely needed for everything from new fire engines
and schools to new jobs and health care for the poor and aged.
If we mobilize enough mayors from across the world to travel to
the U.N. next May, we will be demonstrating in a powerful and very
visible way that the people of the world and the people who represent
us want the nuclear powers to stop stonewalling* and to bend to
our demands to eliminate nuclear weapons. Along the way, we will
have educated and mobilized a new generation of nuclear abolitionists
who can press our Congressmen and women, senators, members of parliament,
presidents and prime ministers to stop threatening human survival
and to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
I want to share a little of our experience and successes in our
New England campaigning. In Massachusetts, last spring after a number
of high profile mayors across the U.S. endorsed the campaign, we
launched a peace march across the state. At each stop, marchers
talked about the continuing dangers of nuclear war and the possibilities
of the Mayors Campaign. In some towns and cities they met with mayors
and members of city or town councils. Several mayors signed on in
those meetings, and in other cases local activists committed themselves
to do the educating and organizing that some mayors seem to need
before they take public positions on what they think are controversial
issues.
Our march was followed by a visit to Boston by Hiroshima Mayor
Akiba. At least as important as his public speech broadcast nationally
from Boston, was the meeting we organized at Boston City Hall that
brought together people - including mayors and other elected officials
- from across our six-state region and as far away as Australia.
Within days, we had won new endorsements and a commitment to take
the campaign to voters in a number of communities.
This was followed by the National Mayors’ Conference held in Boston.
Between some very savvy organizing by Aaron Tovish - one of the
central organizers of the global campaign - including use of a video
made during the NPT Prep Com, we won the endorsement of the Conference’s
international affairs committee. This will serve as an important
boost for our organizing.
And, a week ago, in collaboration with the European Network for
Peace and Human Rights and the U.S. Peace Council, we organized
a nuclear weapons abolition conference within the Boston Social
Forum in which the Mayors Campaign was highlighted as the focal
point of our work over the next year. And, a few days from now,
when people in more than sixty communities across the United States
solemnly commemorate the anniversary of the Hiroshima A-bombing,
the Mayors’ Campaign will be the primary organizing initiative to
which people will be dedicating themselves.
So, yes, these are very dangerous times. While our has been difficult
and sometimes lonely, over the years and especially since the Bush
Administration launched its global military crusade, we have built
a “second superpower” that can confront, contain and transform the
nuclear powers. And, with the Mayors Campaign, we can energize and
direct our movement to have a major impact in the struggle to secure
human survival through the abolition of nuclear weapons. I look
forward to our work together in the coming year.
No More Hiroshimas!
No More Nagasakis!
No More Enola Gays!
Abolish All Nuclear Weapons!
* Note for translator and interpreters. “Stonewalling” means to
resist. The idea is that if you put up, or hide behind, a stone
wall, you can fend off criticism.
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