The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has found a new lease of life as an uncertain future galvanises the veteran movement again for a new generation.
Former chair of national CND Bruce Kent writes exclusively for Exeter Flying Post on how to get involved, and why the South West is in the spotlight.
In January this year two nuclear armed submarines, one French and one British collided under water somewhere in the Atlantic. They scraped each other down their sides and did some damage, enough to send both back to their two bases.
Had they been on courses even a few yards closer they would have smashed into each other head on with the most disastrous consequences. Many sailors would have died and there would have been nuclear pollution over a very wide area. A nuclear explosion? Unlikely but not impossible.
This is only the most recent of the many accidents that we have been told about. We do know that in 1962 we came as close to a nuclear war with the Soviet union as possible.
That year a desperate Soviet submarine captain, blockaded under Cuban waters for many hours in temperatures of about 40c, decided to fire his nuclear torpedoes at the American ships above in a final act of desperation. Only the good sense of a junior officer, who pointed out that he might be starting WWIII, prevented disaster.
We may well owe him our lives. This was just one moment of major risk. There have been others just as close. The list of ‘minor’ accidents with nuclear weapons would fill many pages.
But familiarity has bred indifference. We have got used to a nuclear weapon world. That is a big mistake.
There are now about 27,000 nuclear weapons in the world, nearly all of them more powerful than the bombs which flattened Hiroshima and Nagaski in 1945.The United States and Russia have by far the largest stocks but Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel have their own arsenals. Perhaps North Korea has as well. There are a number of other countries which, thanks to their nuclear energy programmes, could very quickly build their own nuclear weapons. Japan could for instance acquire its own nuclear arsenal if it so wished within a year granted the extent of its nuclear energy programme.
There is also the ever increasing risk that terrorists will one day be able to build their own bombs. Nuclear deterrence has no application against suicidal people or those not based in a defined territory.
The global progression towards this very dangerous situation has been built largely on propaganda. We were endlessly told that the Bombs on Japan of August 1945 were the only way to end WW11,and that nuclear weapons ‘ kept the peace’ for the 40 years of the Cold War. Tell that to the millions who died in dozens of countries from Afghanistan to Nicaragua where the United States and the Soviet Union ran their surrogate wars.
Whatever differences there may be about past history it is to the future to which that we should look and the future offers us the chance of eliminating nuclear weapons forever. It is time to start negotiating nuclear weapon abolition.
It is not that there have never been negotiations in the past. There have been many but I describe them as Good Housekeeping arrangements not steps towards nuclear weapon abolition. Fewer missiles, limits on nuclear testing, nuclear free zones and no nuclear weapons in space are all to be welcomed. Now is time to move on from Good Housekeeping to Abolition.
In 2010 there will be another review conference of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty signed in 1968. Article V1 of that treaty called on the then five nuclear weapon states to take the road to abolition. They did not heed that call. The obligation is even clearer now. In 1996 the International Court of Justice , the highest legal authority in the world, said that,
‘ there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control’.
No ifs .No buts. A clear obligation.
The time is indeed right. People know that the real threats today to their security lie in global warming, terrorist threats against which nuclear weapons provide no answer, and the collapse of the global financial system. Another change is that now a range of surprising people with political clout, with Henry Kissinger at their head, are now backing negotiations aimed at abolition.
Against this is the ever present pessimism of those who always say ‘it cannot be done’. But it can be. We have to a large extent already managed such a change in the world of chemical and biological weapons.
Cluster bombs and landmines are on the way out as a result of negotiations.
A hundred page Model Abolition treaty, now lodged with the United Nations by Costa Rica, has been prepared by top level lawyers, doctors, academics and politicians. It covers all the difficult issues of inspection, verification, fissile materiel, criminality and the protection of whistle blowers
No one is suggesting that negotiations will be either easy or brief. The Mayor of Hiroshima calls for a signed and binding conclusion by 2020 and even that may be optimistic. However it is the start that matters.Once we start mentalities will also change. Already there is a new awareness that we have to live together in one global world. War is, by more and more people, understood to be no solution to global problems.
There is a special issue for this country. How can it possibly be the ‘good faith’ called for by the International Court during negotiations, to start to plan now to replace our existing nuclear Trident system? Another generation of nuclear weapons that will keep this country armed with nuclear weapons until the middle of this century. This is no way to negotiate in good faith.
If Gordon brown wants to be serious as well as sound serious he should cancel all replacement plans and spend the billion thus saved on the real needs of the people of this country. Affordable public transport and housing, decent state pensions for the elderly, maintaining post offices, an end to hospital waiting lists -- all these are possibilities. But not if a new Trident is to cost between £25billion and £70billion.
Journalists, in my experience, always want to find a local issue to which to tie a story. Well nuclear war by accident or design will never be a local issue. Even if this country is not a target the wind will bring radioactive fallout wherever it blows. But if this country is directly involved in a war involving nuclear weapons then there is a real local issue for the people of Devon.
Plymouth, with its nuclear submarines and storage depots, has to be a prime target. Get a map of flattened Hiroshima and place it over the Plymouth of today.
Please God such a calamity will never happen. It won’t if we now take abolition seriously and make sure that our politicians of whatever colour do the same.
‘Yes we can’ was the Obama call. It applies to getting rid of nuclear weapons too.