'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Hiroshima + 60

Talking of wise elders, 97-year-old Nobel Peace Laureate Joe Rotblat has a good, serious op-ed in today's NYT to mark the upcoming 50th anniversary of the signing of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.

The headliners among the signatories to that prophetic document were the british mathematician and philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, the father of e = mc².

In his piece, Rotblat recalls:

I was the only scientist to resign on moral grounds from the United States nuclear weapons program known as the Manhattan Project. On Aug. 6, 1945, I switched on my radio and heard that we had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. I knew that a new era had dawned in which nuclear weapons would be used, and I grew worried about the future of mankind.

Several years later, I met Bertrand Russell... I had become an authority on the biological effects of radiation after examining the fallout from the American hydrogen bomb test in Bikini Atoll in 1954. Russell, who was increasingly agitated about the developments, started to come to me for information. Russell decided to persuade a number of eminent scientists from around the world to join him in issuing a statement outlining the dangers of thermonuclear war and calling on the scientific community to convene a conference on averting that danger.

The most eminent scientist alive at that time was Albert Einstein, who responded immediately and enthusiastically to Russell's entreaty...

Today, the International Herald-Tribune is running Rotblat's piece alongside another on non-proliferation "anomalies", written by the considerably younger Ramesh Thakur, the Vice-Rector of the Tokyo-based U.N. University.

Thakur identifies six such anomalies. To me, the fourth, fifth, and sixth of them are the most interesting:

The fourth anomaly is lumping biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in one conceptual and policy basket. They differ in their technical features, in the ease with they can be acquired and developed, and in their capacity to cause mass destruction. Treating them as one weapons category can distort analysis and produce flawed responses.

... The creeping tendency to redefine their mission to counter all weapons of mass destruction weakens the nuclear taboo and allows the nuclear powers to obfuscate the reality that they are the possessors of the most potent of those weapons. If nuclear weapons are accepted as having a role to counter biochemical warfare, then how can we deny a nuclear-weapons capability to Iran, which has actually suffered chemical weapons attacks?

Fifth, the five nuclear powers preach but do not practice nuclear abstinence. It defies history, common sense and logic to believe that a self-selecting group of five countries can keep a permanent monopoly on the world's most destructive weaponry...

Can the country with the world's most powerful nuclear weapons rightfully use military force to prevent their acquisition by others? The logics of nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation are inseparable. Hence the axiom of nonproliferation: As long as any one country has them, others, including terrorist groups, will try their best (or worst) to get them.

The final paradox concerns the contradiction between rhetoric and example. It is not possible to convince others of the futility of nuclear weapons when the facts of continued possession and doctrines and threats of use prove their utility for some. Refining and miniaturizing nuclear weapons, developing new doctrines and justifications for their use, and lowering the threshold of their employment weaken the taboo against them and erode the normative barriers to nuclear proliferation.

Thakur ends with these questions:

Are these anomalies so few in number and so lightweight that they can be accommodated within auxiliary arrangements inside the nonproliferation treaty ?

Or are they such big problems that the treaty will grind to a halt and be replaced? The negotiators in New York have their work cut out for them.

I have studied nuclear proliferation issues, including the anomalies Thakur lists, for 20-plus years now. I think that despite the evident flaws in the NPT, it is still better to have this flawed vehicle than not to. But I quite agree with Thakur that the nuclear-weapons states (declared and undeclared) need to get a lot more serious about moving toward the "complete and general disarmament" which was the stated goal of the treaty.