In a speech in Prague in April 2009, President Obama acknowledged that our country was the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon in war, and declared a U.S. commitment to work for “a world without nuclear weapons.” On his historic visit to Hiroshima later this month, the President should announce a plan for countries to unite on a path to eliminate all the world’s weapons of mass destruction.
In 2015, the United States, working with a delegation representing the five permanent United Nations Security Council members plus Germany, and with Iran, achieved the most comprehensive nuclear nonproliferation agreement with the most rigorous monitoring protocols ever negotiated. In 2013, the United States, Russia and Iran successfully cooperated in negotiating with Syria to eliminate its chemical weapons. The U.N. should respond urgently to new allegations that Syria may have violated the agreement. Dangers posed by smaller and more portable chemical and biological weapons, make it essential today that the global goal must be to eliminate, not just nuclear but all weapons of mass destruction.
President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima will remind the world of the horrendous, destructive threats posed to civilization by these weapons; and it will open a window of opportunity for determined progress to eliminate them. As long as the weapons exist, the world faces the real risk that one country or another may choose to use them. More recently, there is the additional threat of non-state actors acquiring and using them. The window of opportunity will be short-lived since, even as negotiations proceed to reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons, the United States, Russia and China are on the verge of spending billions to modernize their nuclear arsenals by building smaller, faster and deadlier bombs, like the already flight-tested U.S. B61 Model 12, that make using nuclear weapons more thinkable.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, launched in 1970 and ratified by 190 countries, provided the international framework for the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 and for decisions over the years by several countries, including Brazil, Libya and South Africa, as well as former states of the Soviet Union to give up their nuclear weapons or programs to develop nuclear weapons. At the same time, of the three pillars of the treaty, “non-proliferation, disarmament and peaceful use of nuclear energy,” the least progress has been made toward the big goal of disarmament.
Complicating work toward disarmament, four countries — India, Israel, Pakistan and South Sudan — have refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty, and three of these possess nuclear weapons. North Korea initially signed, but later withdrew from the treaty and also has nuclear weapons. A determined global campaign to eliminate weapons of mass destruction would both incentivize and, realistically, depend on achieving its goal on cooperation between the United States and Russia, which together possess 90 percent of nuclear weapons, and on progress toward resolving the decades-old India-Pakistan and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, and the conflict with North Korea.
Resolving these conflicts, or at least extracting WMDs from them, would be complicated and difficult, but not impossible especially with engagement by the U.N. Security Council and in the context of predictable worldwide public support for a global campaign to eliminate all WMDs.
A 2008 poll of 19,000 people in 21 countries, including all countries that possess nuclear weapons, except North Korea, on average revealed that 76 percent support eliminating nuclear weapons and support strict monitoring to assure verification of the results. As signaled in the recent statement by scientists and faith leaders, a campaign to eliminate all weapons of mass destruction would almost certainly evoke strong public support from arms control experts and religious leaders everywhere. A path and timetable for abolishing WMDs would also attract support from Global Zero, an international nonpartisan campaign of more than 300 world leaders committed to eliminating nuclear weapons.
In his time left in office, it is unrealistic to expect that President Obama could achieve the goal of eliminating all weapons of mass destruction, but he could invite Russia, Iran and other countries to unite on a path and timetable to get there. In the wake of the Iran nuclear deal, the president’s historic visit to Hiroshima this month is exactly the right time and place to launch this bold and creative path.
Ron Young, an Everett resident, serves as consultant to the National Interreligious Leadership Initiative for Peace in the Middle East (NILI). This commentary represents his personal views, not the views of NILI. He can be contacted at ronyounwa@gmail.com
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