Ending Nuclear Evil

CAPE TOWN – Eliminating nuclear weapons is the democratic wish of the world’s
people. Yet no nuclear-armed country currently appears to be preparing for a future
without these terrifying devices. In fact, all are squandering billions of dollars
on modernization of their nuclear forces, making a mockery of United Nations
disarmament pledges. If we allow this madness to continue, the eventual use of these
instruments of terror seems all but inevitable.


The nuclear power crisis at Japan’s Fukushima power plant has served as a dreadful
reminder that events thought unlikely can and do happen. It has taken a tragedy of
great proportions to prompt some leaders to act to avoid similar calamities at
nuclear reactors elsewhere in the world. But it must not take another Hiroshima or
Nagasaki – or an even greater disaster – before they finally wake up and recognize
the urgent necessity of nuclear disarmament.


This week, the foreign ministers of five nuclear-armed countries – the United
States, Russia, Britain, France, and China – will meet in Paris to discuss progress
in implementing the nuclear-disarmament commitments that they made at last year’s
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference. It will be a test of their
resolve to transform the vision of a future free of nuclear arms into reality.


If they are serious about preventing the spread of these monstrous weapons – and
averting their use – they will work energetically and expeditiously to eliminate
them completely. One standard must apply to all countries: zero. Nuclear arms are
wicked, regardless of who possesses them. The unspeakable human suffering that they
inflict is the same whatever flag they may bear. So long as these weapons exist, the
threat of their use – either by accident or through an act of sheer madness – will
remain.


We must not tolerate a system of nuclear apartheid, in which it is considered
legitimate for some states to possess nuclear arms but patently unacceptable for
others to seek to acquire them. Such a double standard is no basis for peace and
security in the world. The NPT is not a license for the five original nuclear powers
to cling to these weapons indefinitely. The International Court of Justice has
affirmed that they are legally obliged to negotiate in good faith for the complete
elimination of their nuclear forces.


The New START agreement between the US and Russia, while a step in the right
direction, will only skim the surface off the former Cold War foes’ bloated nuclear
arsenals – which account for 95% of the global total. Furthermore, these and other
countries’ modernization activities cannot be reconciled with their professed
support for a world free of nuclear weapons.


It is deeply troubling that the US has allocated $185 billion to augment its nuclear
stockpile over the next decade, on top of the ordinary annual nuclear-weapons budget
of more than $50 billion. Just as unsettling is the Pentagon’s push for the
development of nuclear-armed drones – H-bombs deliverable by remote control.


Russia, too, has unveiled a massive nuclear-weapons modernization plan, which
includes the deployment of various new delivery systems. British politicians,
meanwhile, are seeking to renew their navy’s aging fleet of Trident submarines – at
an estimated cost of £76 billion ($121 billion). In doing so, they are passing up an
historic opportunity to take the lead on nuclear disarmament.


Every dollar invested in bolstering a country’s nuclear arsenal is a diversion of
resources from its schools, hospitals, and other social services, and a theft from
the millions around the globe who go hungry or are denied access to basic medicines.
Instead of investing in weapons of mass annihilation, governments must allocate
resources towards meeting human needs.


The only obstacle we face in abolishing nuclear weapons is a lack of political will,
which can – and must – be overcome. Two-thirds of UN member states have called for a
nuclear-weapons convention similar to existing treaties banning other categories of
particularly inhumane and indiscriminate weapons, from biological and chemical arms
to anti-personnel land mines and cluster munitions. Such a treaty is feasible and
must be urgently pursued.


It is true that nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented, but that does not mean that
nuclear disarmament is an impossible dream. My own country, South Africa, gave up
its nuclear arsenal in the 1990’s, realizing it was better off without these
weapons. Around the same time, the newly independent states of Belarus, Kazakhstan,
and Ukraine voluntarily relinquished their nuclear arms, and then joined the NPT.
Other countries have abandoned nuclear-weapons programs, recognizing that nothing
good could possibly come from them. Global stockpiles have dropped from 68,000
warheads at the height of the Cold War to 20,000 today.


In time, every government will come to accept the basic inhumanity of threatening to
obliterate entire cities with nuclear weapons. They will work to achieve a world in
which such weapons are no more – where the rule of law, not the rule of force,
reigns supreme, and cooperation is seen as the best guarantor of international
peace. But such a world will be possible only if people everywhere rise up and
challenge the nuclear madness.



Desmond Tutu is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and supporter of the International
Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (www.icanw.org).



Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011