Saturday, December 7, 2013

REMEMBERING NELSON MANDELA
 
I remember when we learned that Nelson Mandela was planning to make his farewell address to the United Nations, our Abolition 2000 Network organized an international letter writing campaign to him to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons in his UN speech. Sure enough, the London Guardian reported on its front page, Nelson Mandela Calls for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons! In his speech he actually said "what do they need them for anyway?" I only hope that we can honor and remember the enormous contribution he made to peace when he used the truth and reconciliation process he started as President of South Africa to avoid bloodshed and dedicate ourselves to making that process work for Syria, for Israel-Palestine, and other troubled spots on our beleaguered planet. Let us truly honor him by putting revenge and war behind us in a more peaceful world!
See, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/1998/09/21_mandela.htm

See how the NY Times handled the story compared to the London Guardian, in a somewhat longer piece about the news and how it’s reported.
http://globalhousework.blogspot.com/2011/02/nixon-in-china-max-frankel-and-me.html

Sunday, November 3, 2013


Grassroots Pressure Builds on Nuclear Dependent States to Come Out from Under Their Nuclear Umbrella and Take a Stand to Ban the Bomb 

Steve Leeps, former Chair of the Hiroshima Peace Foundation and organizer of Mayors for Peace, wrote a great article on recent developments in Japan, where citizen pressure caused Japan to  sign on to a statement at the UN General Assembly emphasizing the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war and stating that nuclear weapons should not be used under “any circumstances”.   This past summer in Geneva, Japan, sheltering under the US promise to use nuclear weapons on its behalf in retaliation for any attack it might suffer, refused to sign a similar statement and caught tremendous disapproval from citizens active in the new International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons working to ban nuclear weapons, just as the world has banned chemical and biological weapons.  Steve posted his article to an expert group of US campaigners against nuclear power http://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/mediacenter/article.php?story=20131029144834760_en&query=leeper.  
 
One campaigner asked: “Does Japan have any nuclear weapons?  I thought they did not.”  I replied as follows: 

The short answer, is no, they don’t have nuclear weapons, but they are part of a nuclear mafia that shelters behind the US nuclear “umbrella” pledged to be used on their behalf should their enemies fail to be “deterred”.  Additionally, since every nuclear reactor has the capacity to manufacture nuclear bomb material, Japan has all the technology it needs to swiftly assemble nuclear bombs of its own, having enriched uranium to weapons grade, as has Brazil and others, the very thing we are threatening to go to war over with Iran.  In other words, it’s OK for Japan, but not for Iran because Japan is part of our alliance.   Indeed we actually park a few hundred nuclear weapons on the territory of our NATO allies, including Germany, Netherlands, Turkey, Italy, and Belgium!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing  

And this despite our promise in the Non-Proliferation Treaty as one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states (UK, France, China, Russia) not to share nuclear weapons. The NPT is a flawed Faustian bargain in which the five nuclear weapons states promised to give up their nuclear weapons in return for a promise from all the other countries in the world not to get them.   To sweeten the pot, the non-nuclear weapons states were promised an “inalienable right”, to “peaceful“nuclear power thus giving them the keys to the bomb factory.  Only India, Pakistan and Israel refused to sign and they got their own nuclear arsenals.  North Korea availed itself of its right and then walked out of the treaty to build a bomb.  This is the right Iran is lawfully asserting.

For years, those of us battling nuclear power, and those of us working to ban the bomb, have operated in separate spheres.  This was the result of a deliberate policy by the US after the horrendous revulsion at what occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to make the atom more acceptable to people.  Hence, President Eisenhower, seeking to counter public revulsion at the normalization of nuclear war in US military policy, was advised by the Defense Department’s Psychological Strategy Board that “the atomic bomb will be accepted far more readily if at the same time atomic energy is being used for constructive ends.” Thus his Atoms for Peace speech at the UN in 1953, in which he promised that the US would devote “its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life” by spreading the peaceful benefits of atomic power across the globe.   The benefits of nuclear power were aggressively marketed as miraculous technology that would power vehicles, light cities, heal the sick.  The US made agreements with 37 nations to build atomic reactors and enticed reluctant Westinghouse and General Electric to do so by passing the Price Anderson act limiting their liability at tax-payer expense.   

The fallout from the 1954 Bravo test of a hydrogen bomb contaminating 236 Marshall Islanders and 23 Japanese fisherman aboard the Lucky Dragon and irradiating tuna sold in Japan resulted in an eruption of rage against the atomic bombings which were forbidden to be discussed after 1945 by a ban instituted by US occupation authorities.  For damage control, the US NSC recommended that the US wage a “vigorous offensive on the non-war uses of atomic energy,” offering to build Japan an experimental nuclear reactor and recruiting a former Japanese war criminal, Shoriki Matsutaro, who ran the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and Nippon TV network to shill for nuclear power by getting him released from prison without trial. 

And now we’re reaping the whirlwind with Fukushima.   

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, does global monitoring for radiation releases, to make sure no one is cheating on promises to stop full-blown underground tests (not to be confused with sub-critical tests, 26 since the 1992 treaty was signed, where the US blows up plutonium with chemicals at the Nevada Test site on Western Shoshone land, claiming that since there’s no chain reactions they’re not really tests!?).  The CTBTO originally reported some of the fallout from Fukushima but now all reports are going to the industry-corrupted IAEA and the WHO and to governments.   We need a FOIA to find out where the fallout is going.   See www.ctbto.org 

This has been a long answer to a short question about Japan’s nuclear status, but y’all know more about nuclear power than anyone else in the US and it’s important that you know about its evil twin, the nuclear bomb.  The Abolition 2000 Network, working for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons recognized the “inextricable link” between nuclear weapons and nuclear power in 1995 when we were founded.   See www.abolition2000.org  The ICAN campaign that Steve Leeps referred to is a new and exciting development to get a simple treaty saying that possession, use, manufacture of nuclear weapons is illegal and should be banned, just as we have banned chemical and biological weapons.   A legal ban treaty would have the advantage of not needing the recalcitrant nuclear weapons states to negotiate it.  Those negotiations would come afterwards for a treaty to actually eliminate them.   In the meantime, we are shaming non-nuclear weapons states to take a less hypocritical honest position, and to stop hiding behind the nuclear umbrella. Since the fall UN meeting, questions have been raised in Germany and Italy as well, nations which actually house and shelter US nuclear bombs on their territory as part of NATO’s unlawful nuclear sharing program.  See www.icanw.org

 

 

Sunday, August 25, 2013


Time for a Missile Ban Treaty

By Alice Slater

This July, only one day after the US celebrated another anniversary of its Declaration of Independence from tyranny, it was reported that once more, a test of US anti-missile defenses against incoming long-range ballistic missiles, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California had failed again.  This was the third consecutive test of the Missile Defense Agency’s Ground-Based Mid-Course  system, in which our military was unable to intercept an incoming missile, programmed to target the US, which had been launched towards the mainland from the U.S. Army's Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein atoll, in the Marshall Islands.  This lunatic program, dreamt up by Reagan and known by its comic book reality, Star Wars, will never work.  Numerous scientists have testified that it would be impossible to guarantee that our anti-missile interceptors could accurately hit an incoming nuclear missile, because the enemy launch would be accompanied by a phalanx of decoys, preventing us from ever knowing with certainty which incoming missile would be carrying a lethal payload.  In the sixteen tests of this ill-conceived “defense”, only eight have ever hit their target over the past nine years[i] and the target has been rigged with a homing device sending a signal to allow the anti-missile to zero in on its location.   One truly need not be a rocket scientist to figure out that this ill-gotten program, a multi-billion dollar gift to the military-industrial-academic-congressional complex is insane because no enemy attack would give such friendly instructions to our “defenses”. 

In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which had been negotiated with the Soviet Union as a way to slow down the arms race.  The two countries reasoned that if they refrained from building anti-missile systems, they could also stop the burgeoning pile-up of missiles they were acquiring to “deter” each other during the Cold War.   After the Berlin Wall came down, any good will we had built up with the Russians swiftly began to dissipate.  We expanded NATO right up to Russia’s border, despite promises we gave to Gorbachev that if he didn’t object to a united Germany joining NATO, it would expand no further.   Russia lost twenty million people during the Nazi onslaught, and was understandably wary of a reunited Germany in NATO. Today NATO is even working to admit former Soviet Republics, Georgia and Ukraine, as members.  And we are planting our missile “defenses” in Poland, Romania, and Turkey.  A powerful global grassroots campaign influenced the Czech Republic to back out of a scheduled deployment in that eastern European country.   Adding Turkey to the mix of NATO missile bases must be particularly offensive to Russia, when you consider that part of the deal during the Cuban missile crisis between Kennedy and Khrushchev, was a secret agreement to remove US missiles from Turkey when the Soviets agreed to bring back their missiles from Cuba. 
The US anti-ballistic missile defense program, started in 2002 after we walked out of the ABM Treaty, now deploys about 30 interceptors in Fort Greely, Alaska and at Vandenberg in California.    Despite the latest fizzle, the Pentagon announced that it would not be deterred in its plans to place another 13 interceptors in Alaska at a cost of $1billion.  In addition, the Congress has mandates that the Pentagon study an ground-based missile defense system in either New York or Maine.   One of the biggest sticking point in moving towards meaningful negotiations for nuclear disarmament is Russia’s strong objection to the US missile defense program.  When you realize that it wouldn’t work anyway, that it’s costing billions of dollars and untold losses of intellectual treasure applied to meaningless work, surely it’s time to call for a missile ban treaty. [ii]   Indeed, both China and Russia have repeatedly offered a draft treaty to ban weapons in space where the US was the only nation to block their proposal at the UN’s Commission on Disarmament which requires consensus to move forward.  Any ban on weapons in space would have to deal with the missiles as well which are an integral part of a space fighting system.   

Sunday, June 9, 2013


 
Renewable Energy: An Idea Whose Time is Now:  Obstacles and Opportunities
Left Forum, June 9, 2013
 
Despite promising reports and overwhelming factual evidence that it is totally possible to wean ourselves off of polluting and death delivering energy systems—fossil, nuclear, and industrial biomass—which are threatening planetary destruction and public health around the globe-- the common conversation about the possibilities for a safe clean energy future has been distorted in the media-- muddled by the energy corporations, peddling their toxic fuels by flooding the airwaves with false advertising and corrupting our elected leaders with hundreds of millions of dollars spent in lobbying and campaign contributions to buy their twisted votes. 

This month, Common Cause, New York issued a report, "Generating Influence: Entergy's Spending and the Battle over the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant" [i]  noting that Entergy, the owner of Indian Point, between 2005 and 2012, spent over $4.5 million in New York State and $35.6 million in Washington on political contributions and lobbying.

Indian Point, sitting on the Hudson River only 25 miles from New York, is applying for a 20 year license renewal for the 40 year old plant.  Its operating license expired this year, although the industry-dominated Nuclear Regulatory Commission unprecedentedly allows it to continue operating without a license, since they have yet to decide on the renewal application which was submitted four years ago. [ii] Indian Point has the distinct advantage of having been mentioned in Al Quaida’s documents and the 911 Commission Report, as a possible target, at the time the World Trade Center was destroyed in NYC.   It is sitting on an earthquake fault, and has been spewing radioactive tritium, cesium and other noxious poisons into the Hudson River, killing billions of fish, and fish eggs a year with higher incidences of childhood cancer and leukemia reported in the local area.  Its radioactive waste pools, have built up more than four times the radioactive waste materials that the catastrophic Fukushima accident continues to spew out across the world.

In reporting on Entergy’s efforts to manipulate the public debate over whether its license should be renewed, Common Cause notes that in addition to campaign contributions and lobbying, Entergy has developed a grassroots “astroturfing” campaign, hiring one of the most sophisticated PR firms, Burson Marsteller, to create the appearance of public support to perpetuate the life of this unsafe accident waiting to happen. Entergy established two shill front-group organizations, NY AREA and SHARE, which hide their connection to their corporate sponsor while attempting to exert influence on its behalf. [iii]They have hired former NY Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, to hawk for Indian Point in slick commercials, both print and TV,  as a provider of safe, clean, energy, with the ex-Mayor threatening that New Yorkers will have to contend with blackouts if the plant closes, despite  numerous studies indicating  that the city doesn’t need Indian Point to meet its energy needs. [iv]

Then there are the factual distortions raised in the media about the oil industry’s efforts to mine the filthy tar sands in northern Canada and pipe in millions of gallons of the dirtiest, most carbon-laden oil clear across America, from Canada to New Orleans, adding to the catastrophic consequences we are facing if we don’t rein in our use of fossil fuel.  Corrupt member of Congress falsely argue that as many as 20,000 jobs would be created by the project.  USA Today touted that number in a headline, “Obama Rejects Keystone Pipeline: Business Leaders, GOP Say Decision Kills 20,000 New Jobs.”[v], despite a Cornell University Global Labor Institute finding that the pipeline would add only 500 to 1400 temporary construction jobs. [vi]  Obama only delayed the decision temporarily and is now still considering whether to inflict it on the land.

Numerous studies show that green energy jobs are growing faster than traditional jobs.  A Pew Charitable Trust report found that between 1998 and 2007, jobs in the clean energy economy grew at a national rate of 9.1 percent while traditional jobs grew by only 3.7 percent. By 2007, more than 68,200 businesses across all 50 states and the District of Columbia accounted for more than 770,000 green energy jobs, despite a lack of sustained government support in the past decade.[vii] A 2011 Brookings Institute Report found that the clean-economy sector includes 2.7 million jobs. The oil and gas industry, by contrast, has 2.4 million jobs. Its study,  called "Sizing the Clean Economy," cited jobs scattered across more than 41,000 companies nationwide, not just in clean energy industries like solar and wind power, but emerging fields like greenhouse-gas reduction, environmental management, recycling, and air and water purification technologies.  Smart-grid efforts directly employ nearly 16,000 people, and battery technology about the same. Conservation accounts for a big chunk, with 314,000 jobs, as does public mass transit – 350,000 jobs. Add to that wind power and solar power, with about 24,000 direct jobs each, and sustainable forestry products with 61,000.[viii] 

A report this year by the Economic Policy Institute, analyzing 2012 data on green jobs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, concluded that “greener industries grow faster than the overall economy”, finding that the productions of green goods and services created 3.1 million jobs in the US.  Green jobs were defined as those which "benefit the environment or conserve natural resources" in either their process or output such as jobs in renewable energy, efficiency, pollution reduction and other traditionally "green" industries, along with jobs in any industry in which workers’ duties involve making procedures more energy efficient or environmentally benign.

EPI found that those states which have a higher share of employment in green jobs,[ix] like California, New York and Texas, generally fared better in the current economic downturn.   EPI’s statistical analysis found that a one percent increase in a particular industry's "green intensity," or share of employment in green jobs, corresponded with a 0.034 increase in annual employment growth in the last decade.  The report noted that green jobs are still accessible to workers that don't hold a college degree. A one percent increase in green intensity in a given industry corresponded with a 0.28 percent "increase in the share of jobs in that industry held by workers without a four-year college degree."[x]

Working against the momentum to move to a green energy economy, industry has been able to influence government policy to continue to subsidize polluting fossil, nuclear, and industrial biomass industries at much higher levels than funds made available to clean safe, sun, wind, geothermal and hydropower.  The International Energy Agency estimates indicate that fossil-fuel consumption subsidies worldwide amounted to $523 billion in 2011, up from $412 billion in 2010. In comparison, subsidies to renewable energies were $88 billion dollars. [xi]  And the IEA figure doesn’t include the $50 billion a year or so which the US was giving to the Pentagon even in peace time, just to protect the sea lanes for the oil tankers plying their way across the oceans with their toxic cargoes. [xii]

The Obama administration has announced an $8.3 billion subsidy to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia—the first new ones to be built since the catastrophe at Three Mile Island,[xiii] giving short shrift to the greatest industrial tragedy the world has ever experienced—the melt down of four nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan two years ago.  Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy and Belgium have agreed to phase out nuclear power, but the United States is in the grip of a nuclear industry, which keeps insisting that nuclear power is the answer to global warming because it doesn’t emit carbon during its operation.   This is another gross industry distortion since there are fossil costs associated with the whole nuclear fuel chain—from mining, milling and processing uranium to the decommissioning at the end of the reactor’s lifetime.  And a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, The Gift That Keeps on Giving, estimates that the nuclear industry has received hundreds of billions of dollars over the past 50 years from the US taxpayer, for every aspect of the nuclear chain, including liability insurance to cap catastrophic losses, to up to $12 billion, with any additional charges to be borne by the taxpayers.[xiv]  It is estimated that Fukushima will cost as much as one trillion dollars! [xv]  Things are looking up though.  Just this Friday it was announced that the hazardous San Onofre plant in California will be shut down.  Others that have announced closures in the past year were the Pilgrim plant in Massachusetts, Keawaunee in Wisconsin and Crystal River in Florida.  Four down, 100 more to go in the US! 

Every 30 minutes, enough of the sun’s energy reaches the earth’s surface to meet global energy demand for an entire year.  Wind can satisfy the world’s electricity needs 40 times over, and meet all global energy demands five times over.  The geothermal energy stored in the top six miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times the energy of the world’s known oil and gas resources. Tidal, wave and small hydropower, can also provide vast stores of energy everywhere on earth, abundant and free for every person on our planet, rich and poor alike.  From water, broken down by solar or wind-powered electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen, we can make and store hydrogen fuel in cells to be used when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.   When hydrogen fuel is burned, it recombines with oxygen and produces water vapor, pure enough to drink, with no contamination added to the planet.  Iceland plans to be completely sustainable by 2050, using hydrogen in its vehicles, trains, busses and ships, made from geothermal and marine energy. [xvi] 

New research and reports are affirming the possibilities for shifting the global energy paradigm.  Scientific American reported a plan in 2009 to power 100% of the planet by 2030 with only solar, wind and water renewables, calling for millions of wind turbines, water machines and solar installations to accomplish that task.  The authors assert that “the scale is not an insurmountable hurdle; society has achieved massive transformations before”, reminding us that “[d]uring World War II, the U.S retooled automobile factories to produce 300,000 aircraft and other countries produced 486,000 more”.  Their scenario for 2030 contemplates, in part, building 3.8 million windmills to provide 51% of the world’s energy demand which would take up less than 50 square kilometers (smaller than Manhattan). They reassure us that even though the number seems enormous, the world manufactures 73 million cars and lights trucks every year.   

The authors review the policies that would need to be in place to make the energy transition, such as taxes on fossil fuels, or at least the elimination of existing subsidies for fossil and nuclear energy to level the playing field, and an intelligently expanded grid to ensure rapid deployment of clean energy sources. [xvii] 

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) also issued a Report in 2010, 100% Renewable Energy which outlined a scenario for relying on 100% renewables by 2050. [xviii] 

The Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN) released their 2012 Renewables Global Status Report and had encouraging news to report:[xix]
 
              ·        Renewable sources supplied 16.7% of global final energy consumption.

·        118 countries –more than half in the developing world– implemented RE targets.

·        Investment in renewables increased 17% to a record $257 billion, despite a widening sovereign debt crisis in Europe and rapidly falling prices for renewable power equipment.

·        Photovoltaic module prices dropped by 50% and onshore wind turbines by close to 10%, bringing the price of the leading renewable power technologies closer to grid parity with fossil fuels such as coal and gas.

·        Recent estimates indicate that about 5 million people worldwide work either directly or indirectly in the renewable energy industries.

·        The majority of renewables jobs worldwide are located in a handful of major economies, namely China, Brazil, the United States, and the European Union where the renewable energy sector contributes 1.1 million jobs

·        Developing countries have begun to track green energy jobs; India estimated 350,000 in 2009.

Yet despite these encouraging reports and facts on the ground, the corporate dominated media is still beating the drums for continued reliance on fossil, nuclear and industrial biomass fuels.  It is obvious that they will do all they can to block the development of green energy because they will lose their cash cows.   Once the infrastructure is in, they can’t sell the sun, or the wind or the tides the way they can peddle coal, oil, gas, uranium, and biomass. 

We mustn't buy into the propaganda that clean safe energy is decades away or too costly. We need to be vigilant in providing the ample evidence in its favor to counter the corporate forces arguing that it’s not ready, it’s years away, it’s too expensive—arguments made by companies in the business of producing dirty fuel.   

Here’s what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to say about similar forces in 1936:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.[xx] 

These are the enormous forces we must overcome.  I heard Ralph Nader speak this week about his new book, I Told You So, at Barnes and Noble.   Ralph is suggesting that we all organize Town Meetings this August with our members of Congress and address an issue of such unfairness, that it would be easy to build huge alliances and coalitions—that is to raise the minimum wage.  The current federal minimum wage is $7.25, way below what’s needed to earn even the unrealistically low federal poverty definition of $18,123 per year for a family of three. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage in 1968 would be above $10.50 per hour.  Go to www.timeforaraise.org    If we are truly the Left Forum we should be helping tens of millions of Americans currently struggling to make ends meet.   And despite the general breast beating and bemoaning the loss of jobs to globalization, we know there could be tens of millions of jobs right here in America if we repair our infrastructure and stop the corporate rape of the earth by shifting to a green and sustainable future.

 

 

 



[ii] http://www.lohud.com/article/20130513/NEWS/305130070/Indian-Point-reactor-operate-after-license-expires
Woolf, Tim, et al. “Indian Point Replacement Analysis: A Clean Energy Roadmap: A Proposal for Replacing the Nuclear Plant with Clean, Sustainable Energy Resources.” Synapse Energy Economics. Cambridge, Massachusetts. October 11, 2012. Available at: http://www.riverkeeper.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Synapse-Indian-Point-Replacement-Study--11.pdf_;.New York Assembly member James F. Brennan and New York Assembly member Kevin A. Cahill. “Assembly Committees’ Preliminary Findings Show Indian Point Can Be Shut Down: Proper planning would allow Indian Point to close with little impact on ratepayers and reliability.” February 1, 2012. Available at http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/James-F-Brennan/story/46159/; New York Independent System Operator. “Final Draft: New York State’s Transmission and Distribution Systems Reliability Study and Report.” August 30, 2012. pp. 84-85.
[v] USA Today, 1-19-12
[vi] EXTRA!, March 2012, p.3
[xii] Winning the Oil Endgame Fact Sheet, Rocky Mountain Institute.
[xv] http://agreenroad.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/fukushima-crisis-total-cost-up-to-10-trillion-dollars/
[xvi] See generally, A Sustainable Energy Future is Possible Now, http://www.abolition2000.org/a2000-files/sustainable-now.pdf
[xix] http://www.ren21.net/REN21Activities/GlobalStatusReport.aspx

Monday, May 13, 2013

Nuclear Abolition: New Opportunities and Old Obstacles


Nuclear Abolition:  New Opportunities and Old Obstacles
Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee Meeting, Geneva,  April 26, 2013  

At the end of last year, the airwaves and internet were filled with chatter about the ancient Mayan calendar which was predicting the end of the world or a similar catastrophe.  Some scholars argued that the Mayan prophecy related not to an impending disaster but to the end of a 5000 year cycle which would usher in a period of new consciousness and transformation.  While our planet seems to have dodged a bullet and survived the more gloomy interpretations of the ancient prophecy,  the Mayans may have been on to something as it appears we are actually seeing the breakup of a certain kind of world consciousness  regarding nuclear weapons this year and it’s all for the good.  

New initiatives for nuclear disarmament are springing up in both conventional and unconventional forums.   Norway stepped up to the plate in February and convened an unprecedented international meeting to address the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war.  In Oslo, 127 nations, plus UN agencies, NGOs, and the International Red Cross participated in a debate and discussion of the catastrophic potential of nuclear weapons.  Two nuclear weapons states, India and Pakistan attended.  

The five recognized nuclear weapons states under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, who also happen to wield the veto as permanent members of the Security Council (the P5) the US, UK, Russia, China and France, refused to attend.  They spoke in one voice, as I learned on a conference call with Rose Gottemoeller, US Acting Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, who told us that the US decision not to attend the conference “was made in consultation with the P5.   They all agreed not to attend” because “Oslo would divert discussion and energy from a practical step by step approach and non-proliferation work.  The most effective way to honor the NPT.”  Other P5 spokespeople characterized the Oslo initiative as a “distraction.”   Of course it was a distraction from the P5 preferred methods of business as usual in the ossified and stalled NPT process, as well as in the procedurally stymied Conference on Disarmament in Geneva which has been paralyzed for 17 years because of lack of consensus,  required by its rules to move forward on disarmament agreements—a recipe for nuclear weapons forever—with regular new breakout threats by nuclear proliferators. 
 
Oslo was an end run around those institutions.   Taking its model from the Ottawa Process that wound up with a treaty to ban landmines, working outside of the usual institutional fora, it held an electrifying new kind of discussion as testimony was heard about the devastating impacts of what would occur during a nuclear war and the humanitarian consequences, examining the need to ban the bomb.  Prior to the Oslo meeting, more than 500 members of ICAN, a vibrant new campaign, met to work for negotiations to begin on a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons.  At Oslo, the nations pledged to follow up with another meeting in Mexico.    

Right before Oslo, The Middle Powers Initiative, working to influence friendly middle powers to put pressure on the P5 for more rapid progress for nuclear disarmament, held a Framework Forum for a Nuclear Weapons Free World in Berlin, hosted by the German government, under the new leadership of Tad Akiba, former Mayor of Hiroshima who oversaw the burgeoning Mayors for Peace Campaign grow to a network of some 5300 mayors in more than 150 countries calling for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons.  At that meeting, we were urged to organize Civil Society’s support for a new initiative promoted by the UN General Assembly’s First Committee establishment of a Geneva Working Group to meet for three weeks this summer to “develop proposals for taking forward multilateral negotiations on the achievement and maintenance of a world free of nuclear weapons. “    And then in New York this September, for the first time ever, Heads of State will meet at a global summit devoted to nuclear disarmament!  

Furthermore, thanks to the tireless organizing of the Parliamentarians for Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Disarmament,, nearly 1000 parliamentarians from approximately 150 parliaments, meeting at  the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU) in Ecuador last month chose the topic "Towards a Nuclear-Weapons-Free World: The Contribution of Parliaments"  as a focus this year under their Peace and International Security work.  IPU, which includes most of the nuclear weapons states in its 160 parliaments enables parliamentarians to engage on core issues for humanity.   That they chose the issue of nuclear weapons ahead of seven other proposals indicates the rising interest and consciousness for nuclear abolition around the world.

And just before this meeting, Abolition 2000, the global network formed in 1995, at the NPT Review and Extension Conference, which produced a model nuclear weapons convention, now  promoted by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon in his five point proposal for nuclear disarmament,  held its annual meeting in Edinburg Scotland, supported by the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which is urging that after the referendum on Scottish independence from England, that England’s Trident nuclear submarine base at Faslane be closed, and that Scotland no longer house the British nuclear arsenal.  The network joined with Scottish activists at Glasgow and Faslane supporting their call to   “Scrap trident: Let Scotland lead the way to a nuclear free world.”

Despite these welcome harbingers of a change in planetary consciousness in favor of nuclear abolition, we cannot ignore recent obstacles, setbacks and hardened positions in the old patriarchal and warlike paradigm.   Disappointingly the Obama administration is proposing deep cuts in funding for nuclear non-proliferation programs so it can boost spending to modernize its massive stockpile of nuclear weapons adding another $500 million to the already bloated weapons budget, which includes spending for three new bomb factories at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Kansas City with programs for weapons modernization and new missiles, planes and submarines to deliver a nuclear attack which will come to more than $184 billion over the next ten years.  

In the provocative US military “pivot” to Asia, war games with South Korea for the first time simulated a nuclear attack where the US flew stealth bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons over South Korea and sent two guided-missile destroyers off the coast of South Korea, announcing plans to deploy an advanced missile defense system to Guam in the next few weeks two years ahead of schedule.   

This engendered an aggressive response from North Korea which moved a medium-range missile to its east coast and threatened to launch a nuclear attack on the US.  The US put a pause on what it had called its step-by-step plan that laid out the sequence and publicity plans for US shows of force during annual war games with South Korea.  But ominously, the New York Times reported on April 4, 2013, that the US and South Korea “are entering the final stretch of long-stalled negotiations over another highly delicate nuclear issue:  South Korea’s own request for American permission to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel. “  Which raises another key obstacle to the surge of sentiment for moving boldly towards nuclear disarmament. 

How can we tell Iran not to enrich uranium when we are negotiating that issue with South Korea as well as with Saudi Arabia?   If we are serious about nuclear abolition we cannot keep spreading nuclear bomb factories around the world in the form of “peaceful” nuclear power.   That is why this new negotiating possibilities outside the NPT are so promising.   In order to ban nuclear weapons we are not bound to provide an “inalienable right” to so-called “peaceful nuclear power, as guaranteed by the Article IV promise of the NPT.   

The tragic events at Fukushima, have caused a time-out in the so-called nuclear renaissance that expected a massive increase of nuclear power worldwide.  Just last week, we learned that all of Fukushima’s holding ponds for the toxic radiated water that is used to prevent a meltdown of the stored radioactive fuel rods by cooling them with a constant flow of water, the radioactive trash produced by the operation of nuclear power plants, are all leaking into the earth.  We have not yet absorbed the full catastrophic consequences of Fukushima which is still perilously poised to spew more poisons into the air, water and soil; poisons which are traveling around the world.   And as the Japanese people rose up to develop plans to phase out nuclear power, members of the Japanese military, acknowledging the significance of nuclear plants as military technology, succeeded in getting the parliament to amend Japan’s 1955 Atomic Energy Basic Law last year, adding “national security” to people’s health and wealth as reasons for Japan’s use of the nuclear power.

We were warned from the beginning of the atomic age that nuclear power was a recipe for proliferation.   President Truman’s 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Report on policy for the future of nuclear weapons, concluded that “the development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes and the development of atomic energy for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent” and that only central control by a global authority controlling all nuclear materials, starting at uranium mines could block the proliferation of nuclear weapons.[i]    Nevertheless, President Eisenhower, seeking to counter public revulsion at the normalization of nuclear war in US military policy, was advised by the Defense Department’s Psychological Strategy Board that “the atomic bomb will be accepted far more readily if at the same time atomic energy is being used for constructive ends.” [ii] Hence his Atoms for Peace speech at the UN in 1953, in which he promised that the US would devote “its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life” [iii] by spreading the peaceful benefits of atomic power across the globe.   

The fallout from the 1954 Bravo test of a hydrogen bomb contaminating 236 Marshall Islanders and 23 Japanese fisherman aboard the Lucky Dragon and irradiating tuna sold in Japan resulted in an eruption of rage against the atomic bombings which were forbidden to be discussed after 1945 by a ban instituted by US occupation authorities.  For damage control, the US NSC recommended that the US wage a “vigorous offensive on the non-war uses of atomic energy,” offering to build Japan an experimental nuclear reactor and recruiting a former Japanese war criminal, Shoriki Matsutaro, who ran the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and Nippon TV network to shill for nuclear power by getting him released from prison without trial.  The benefits of nuclear power were aggressively marketed as miraculous technology that would power vehicles, light cities, heal the sick.  The US made agreements with 37 nations to build atomic reactors and enticed reluctant Westinghouse and General Electric to do so by passing the Price Anderson act limiting their liability at tax-payer expense.   Today there is a cap of $12 billion for damages from a nuclear accident. Chernobyl cost $350 billion and Fukushima estimates are as high as one trillion dollars.[iv] 

Ironically, Barack Obama is still peddling the same snake oil. During the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit,  designed to lock down and safeguard nuclear materials worldwide, Obama extolled the peaceful benefits of nuclear power while urging “ nations to join us in seeking a future where we harness the awesome power of the atom to build and not to destroy. When we enhance nuclear security, we’re in a stronger position to harness safe, clean nuclear energy. When we develop new, safer approaches to nuclear energy, we reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism and proliferation. 

The Good News:  We don’t need nuclear power with all its potential for nuclear proliferation

Following Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Japan have announced their intention to phase out nuclear power.  

·       Kuwait pulled out of a contract to build 4 reactors.

·       Venezuelan -froze all nuclear development projects .

·       Mexico-dropped plans to build 10 reactors.[v]s

·       Bulgaria and the Philipines also dropped plans to build new reactors

·       Quebec will shut down its one reactor

·       Spain is closing down another

·       Belgium shut down two reactors because of cracks. 

New research and reports are affirming the possibilities for shifting the global energy paradigm.  Scientific American, reported a plan in 2009 to power 100% of the planet by 2030 with only solar, wind and water renewables. 

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) also issued a 2010 Report 100% Renewable Energy by 2050.  

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that the world could meet 80% of its energy needs from renewables by 2050.[vi] 

In 2009 the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA),  was launched and now has 187 member states.[vii]   

We mustn't buy into the propaganda that clean safe energy is decades away or too costly. We need to be vigilant in providing the ample evidence in its favor to counter the corporate forces arguing that it’s not ready, it’s years away, its’ too expensive—arguments made by companies in the business of producing dirty fuel.  Here’s what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to say about similar forces in 1936: 

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.[viii] 

These are the enormous forces we must overcome.  The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, describes these times as ”the great turning”.  In shifting the energy paradigm we would essentially be turning away from “the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization”, foregoing a failed economic model which “ measures its performance in terms of ever-increasing corporate profits--in other words by how fast materials can be extracted from Earth and turned into consumer products, weapons, and waste.”[ix] Relying on the inexhaustible abundance of the sun, wind, tides, and heat of the earth for our energy needs, freely available to all, will diminish the competitive, industrial, consumer society that is threatening our planetary survival.  By ending our dependence on the old structures, beginning with the compelling urgency to transform the way we meet our energy needs, we may finally be able to put an end to war as well.