A new START: good Intentions, poor resolve

The past two weeks have seen the issue of nuclear weapons feature prominently in the news. The discussion of these weapons has been led predominantly by President Obama, who has focused on three key issues. These include a new treaty to reduce US and Russian nuclear weapons, a Nuclear Security Summit in Washington aimed at preventing terrorists from getting hold of nuclear weapons and materials, and publication of a new US “Nuclear Posture Review”, which has narrowed the circumstances in which the US would threaten or use nuclear weapons. The reason for this flurry of activity is that 189 countries will be meeting in New York next month at the review conference of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The United States and others desperately want this conference to be a success, and hope that it will help them deal with the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran. But the treaty also contains an important obligation to eliminate the existing nuclear arsenals held by Britain, China, France, Russia and the US.

This is a particularly sensitive issue for Scotland. The UK government in Westminster took a decision three years ago to build the next generation of Trident nuclear weapons. The nuclear submarines and powerful nuclear warheads are all based in Scotland, although the Scottish government and 80 percent of Scots oppose this decision. Replacing Trident, estimated to cost taxpayers £97 billion, flouts the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s disarmament obligations and sends dangerous signals to others, suggesting that nuclear weapons are so vital that even when the economy is in deep crisis, Britain wants to make more. The truth is, nuclear weapons are as irrelevant for our security as mustard gas: they don’t deter terrorists, can’t protect us, and having them makes us much more vulnerable than the 184 nations in the world that have chosen to renounce the nuclear option.

On 8 April 2010, Mr Obama and Russia’s President Dmitri Medvedev signed a new “Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty”—New START—that will ensure further verified reductions to their deployed nuclear arsenals. This treaty cuts the number of nuclear warheads that each country is allowed to deploy to 1,550, with a maximum of 800 launchers (land and sea-based missiles and bombers). While it represents a 30 percent reduction in current levels of deployed strategic weapons New START does not cover the thousands of nuclear weapons in reserve or storage. This includes over 2,500 short range “tactical” nuclear weapons, some of which are deployed by the US and NATO in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. These issues are on the table for further US-Russian negotiations intended to follow on from New START.

The date and place chosen for the treaty signing was symbolically significant too. Exactly a year before, Mr Obama gave a powerful speech in Prague in which he pledged “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”. He set the scene for this commitment by reminding people: “One nuclear weapon exploded in one city—be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague—could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences may be—for our global safety, security, society, economy, and ultimately our survival.” Explicitly acknowledging that “if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable”, Mr Obama pledged that “the United States will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons”.

New START is the first such step that the President has been able to make. That was the good news. But in the same week, the US Department of Defense updated the nuclear doctrine that would govern US policy for Obama’s administration. This indicated that, though the role of nuclear weapons would be reduced, the US would give more money to the nuclear weapons laboratories. It would reduce the numbers of weapons in its arsenal and continue negotiating with Russia on further cuts, but the doctrine stopped short of promising not to use nuclear weapons first.

Since biological and chemical weapons are banned under treaties known as the Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention, people and governments all over the world are now demanding negotiations on a global Nuclear Weapons Convention that would prohibit the further production and use of all nuclear weapons and set out the necessary steps to eliminate and abolish these weapons of mass destruction world wide.

On 5 June, there will be demonstrations in over 130 countries calling for negotiations on a Nuclear Weapons Convention to start by 2015. In Britain these demonstrations will be held at Faslane, near Helensburgh, where the submarines are deployed, and at Aldermaston, near London, which manufactures the nuclear warheads.

As President Obama’s Prague speech, New-START and the Nuclear Security Summit show, his heart and mind are in the right place but he has failed to challenge the nuclear addicts in the Pentagon. Mr Obama and all the other political leaders need to get the message loud and clear from the rest of us—don’t just talk about the vision of a world without nuclear weapons; use your power to start negotiations and make concrete progress to achieve this goal.