While the breakup of the Soviet Union at
the end of 1991 marked the closure of the Cold War, the sudden dissolution of
this vast Communist empire brought the greatest nuclear proliferation threat in
the nuclear era. In 1991 when the SU had 37,000 nuclear warheads (twice the
number of American nukes), they were mostly deployed in four of the 15
republics – Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine.
Overnight, the Union’s
disintegration critically impinged on the control and command of thousands of
strategic nuclear arms. Eventually it was agreed that Russia should take over
and take sole charge of all the former-Soviet nuclear arsenals, and
subsequently all the nuclear missiles and warheads were withdrawn from service and
brought back for dismantling on Russian soil.
In Ukraine, for example,
where the Soviets had deployed 46 SS-24 missiles (known as the Scalpels, each
one of them armed with ten 550 KT warheads), these solid-fueled ICBMs (first
deployed in mid-1984) were removed from service by mid-1998, and their last
silo was destroyed in 2001.
Vladimir Orlov, director of
Center for Policy Studies, has written and posted 29 December 2011 online
Russia in Global Affairs:
“…The main problem
after the collapse of the Soviet Union was the presence of strategic nuclear
weapons, alongside those in Russia, in three other newly established countries
(formerly republics in the Soviet Union): Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
“Kazakhstan’s nuclear
arsenal was equivalent to the nuclear forces of Britain, France and China
combined on the day the Soviet Union collapsed…”
It took nearly half a decade
for all the nuclear weapons in the three former Soviet republics to be totally
withdrawn and safely transferred back to Russia, that is, by the end of
1996.
25.01.2014 03:37
With the Russian monopoly and
sole control of the world’s largest nuclear stockpile, the threat of a massive
nuclear dispossession, dispersion and proliferation was effectively contained.
In 1979 Nigel Calder, a
widely traveled and highly regarded science writer, recalled in writing his
last meeting way back in 1966 with the distinguished Indian physicist Homi
Bhabha shortly before his death at the age of 31 in a plane crash. Calder
wrote: “He was a close friend of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru,
and in a poverty-stricken country he won public funds and precious foreign
exchange for the nuclear palaces that symbolized India’s hopes for the future.
“At that last meeting he paid
careful lip service to Nehru’s doctrine of the peaceful atom but, following
China’s nuclear weapons tests (the first one on October 1964), he had the
military option clearly in mind.
“Jerking his head with a
characteristic tic, Bhabha told me that he could make a bomb within eighteen
months, when the government of India gave him the go-ahead. He did not live to
do the job himself, but his manner taught me the inevitability of nuclear
proliferation…”
On May 1974 India exploded a
nuclear device, using material from a reactor provided by Canadians. The
underground explosion had a yield of 10-15 KT (Hiroshima bomb).
“The Indians created a
general awareness that nuclear abstinence could not be taken for granted,”
Lawrence Freedman, a research fellow at the Royal Institute of International
Affairs, Chatham House, wrote in 1978. “As France and China had argued before
them, the Indians wrote of the dangers of being beholden to the superpowers for
military protection and of the national independence that could come from a nuclear
programme…”
Alva Myrdal, Sweden’s former
Minister of Disarmament, wrote in 1976: “With its underground test in May 1974
India demonstrated possession of a device which is per se an atomic bomb,
whether or not it is so used or intended…”
“More nations will follow
India’s example, perhaps aiming straight forwardly at the weaponizing of
nuclear explosives…”
Calder wrote in 1979: “Three
countries, India, Israel, and South Africa, have acquired nuclear weapons in
the 1970s, and at least one more, Pakistan, is working hard to secure them in
the early 1980s…”
And, he added: “Israel’s bomb
will probably set off a chain reaction of bomb making throughout the Middle
East…” In 1974 the CIA reported that Israel had operational nuclear weapons.
Israel’s military nuclearization had been an open secret since the late 1960s.
The world should remember,
however, that on February 1990 South Africa’s President Frederick Willem de
Klerk issued written instructions to dismantle the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
His successor Nelson Mandella often implored the nuclear powers to follow South
Africa’s exemplary lead in relinquishing nuclear weapons. Addressing the UN
General Assembly in 1998, he described the nukes as “these terrible and
terrifying weapons of mass destruction” and he asked (not rhetorically, but
indeed with profound significance) “why do they (the nuclear powers) need them
anyway?”
Shortly after India’s
resumption of nuclear tests in 1998, Pakistan initiated a short series of
nuclear tests of its own. North Korea surprised the world by conducting its
maiden nuclear test on October 2006, and a second explosion on 25 May 2009.
According to the
Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a public education and lobbying
organization, India had 100 nuclear weapons and Pakistan 30-50 in 2009. Israel
was said to have 100-200.
The new kid on the
nuclear block, North Korea has an estimated 8 bombs. And, of all people,
President Barack Obama has declared North Korea a “grave threat” to the world.
Perhaps so, to go by the North Korea’s wild rhetoric threatening the American
superpower and its followers with “a one hundred- or one thousand-fold
retaliation with merciless military strike.” Whatever it’s meant.
Expressing grave
concern over North Korea’s nuclear test on 25 May 2009, Malaysia reiterated its
anti-nuclear stand: “Malaysia strongly believes the continued existence of
nuclear weapons presents a grave threat to humanity, particularly by increasing
the risk of proliferation…”
An Myong Hun, a North
Korean diplomat, told the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that
moves to acquire a nuclear arsenal were for self-defence.
The North Korean diplomat
then restated his country’s policy to achieve nuclear disarmament.
Following the UN
resolution on 12 June 2009 to impose tougher sanctions, North Korea defiantly
declared that “a proud nuclear power will not flinch from them.”
North Korea said it had
turned to nuclear weapons, forced by US hostility.
“It has become an
absolutely impossible option for the DPRK (North Korea) to even think about
giving up its nuclear weapons,” North Korea stated. And defiantly added that
“all plutonium to be extracted (reprocessed from the Yongbyon reactor) will be
weaponised...”
After its third nuclear
test on February 2013 which triggered new United Nations sanctions in March,
North Korea’s National Defence Commission issued a statement on 18th
April demanding an end to UN sanctions, following which the North’s top
military body stated that the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula would
begin – but first with the removal of the US nuclear weapons deployed in the
region.
“The denuclearization of
the Korean peninsula can begin with the removal of the nuclear war tools
dragged in by the US and it can lead to global nuclear disarmament,” the
Defence Commission boldly stated.
17.01.2014 18:23
On November 1987, Nigerian
Foreign Minister Bolaji Akinyemi was reported to have said: “Nigeria has a
sacred responsibility to challenge the racial monopoly of nuclear weapons.”
Ali Mazrui wrote in 1986,
suggesting that only when African nations, with “their underdevelopment and
instability,” seem about to acquire the nukes would the major powers understand
the need to abolish nuclear weapons.
Article VI of the Treaty on
the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (signed in 1968 and ratified to come
into force in 1970) commits the US, the Soviet Union, and Britain (the first
three nuclear powers) “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective
measures relating to cessation of the arms race at an early date and to nuclear
disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict
and effective international control..”
Alva Myrdal observed in
1976: “First and foremost, the superpowers must cease the nuclear arms race as
they solemnly pledged to do in NPT, Article VI. In addition, the Treaty obligations
must be balanced. There are several prices that must be exacted in the form of
improvements in NPT rules in order to make them more equitable and more
effective…”
Myrdal added: “The
superpowers must be brought to realize that they are losing prestige and
credibility, that they can have no leverage against further proliferation if
they do not immediately proceed seriously to agree on restraints…”
According to Norris and
Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, the Soviets increased
their nuclear warheads from more than 12,600 in 1970 to over 30,000 in 1980.
The Soviet arsenal peaked in 1986 with 45,000 nuclear weapons (the most the US
had was over 32,000 in 1966).The US managed to reduce its nuclear stockpile,
while improving its quality, from over 26,000 in 1970 to more than 24,000 in
1980.
At the second review
conference on the NPT in 1980, the final document called for multilateral
negotiations on nuclear disarmament. And negotiations were to be conducted in
the stated context of “A comprehensive, phased programme with agreed
time-frames, whenever feasible, for progressive and balanced deduction of
stockpiles of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery, leading to their ultimate
and complete elimination at the earliest possible time.”
Frank Blackaby, director of
SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) wrote in March 1985:
“In signing the NPT the parties agreed that the treaty was only a step in the
larger process of disarmament, in which the self-imposed denial of non-nuclear
weapon states was to be matched, ultimately, by corresponding acts of the
nuclear weapon powers. The non-fulfilment by the latter of their disarmament
obligations contributes to sapping the legitimacy of the non-proliferation
regime, particularly in Third World countries, where the regime may begin to be
seen as an imposition by the great powers…”
To quote Lawrence Freedman: “Furthermore,
as drunkards (the nukoholics) insisting on the abstinence of others (that is,
do as they say, not as what they do), the superpowers have been warning others
to stay clear of nuclear weapons while building up and improving their
capabilities at an intensive rate.
“If they take these weapons
to be so essential to national security or as a symbol of national virility,
why should not others?”
Why not? And if the two
nuclear superpowers can have thousands of nuclear weapons, why can’t the
have-nots have only one or even a handful of the nukes? Mao Tse-tung once said
that a handful was enough for a nation.
“One single nuclear weapon is
enough to level the larger part of almost any major city in the world,” stated
Anders Thunborg, Sweden’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and
chairman of the group of experts for the 1980 UN study on nuclear weapons.
“A small number of nuclear
weapons aimed at important targets could cause tremendous destruction…”
A Swedish foreign minister
told the UN General Assembly: “Nuclear weapons continue to be the greatest
threat to mankind. The appalling spectre of their possible use haunts the minds
of people everywhere. The nuclear weapons of a few States affect the security
of all States…”
Gareth Evans, former
Australian foreign minister and presently chancellor of the Australian National
University, has recently written (as published in the New Straits Times, Kuala
Lumpur, April 30, 2013):
“With Russia and the US
holding 18,000 of the world’s current stockpile of 19,000 nuclear weapons, it
is proving impossible to persuade any of the other nuclear-armed states to
reduce their own (much smaller) arsenals…
“None of the nuclear-armed
States, inside or outside the NPT, pay anything more than lip service to the
ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons.
“The continued seductive power
of the Cold War logic and language of nuclear deterrence is the primary reason,
though for some states it is clear that the testosterone factor – perceived
status and prestige – also plays a role…”
One of the leading figures in
the global nuclear disarmament campaign, Evans has persuasively and strongly
addressed the need for the world’s leaders to reconsider and resolve the problem of nuclear weapons, more
than two decades after the end of the Cold War. To quote him, as he has put it
so cogently and succinctly:
“Progress toward achieving a
safer and saner world requires all of the nuclear-armed states to break out of
their Cold War mindset, rethink the strategic utility of nuclear deterrence in
current conditions, and recalibrate the huge risks implied by retaining their
arsenals. In today’s world nuclear weapons are the problem, not the
solution.”
Therefore, the only answer to
the apocalyptic threat of a nuclear war as well as the solution to the
persistent and protracted problem of nuclear proliferation, is to be found in
total nuclear disarmament.
“The arsenals of nuclear
weapons states set a bad example for the world, encouraging proliferation. And
they could kill us all,” Distinguished Professor Alan Robock of Rutgers
University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Professor Owen Brian Toon of
Colorado University in Boulder jointly posted in the Strategic Security Blog of
the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) on 3 February 2014.
After reviewing the 1962 Cuban
missile crisis and other incidents which had close to a nuclear conflict,
Robock and Toon concluded: “The only way to be sure we do not annihilate the
human population is to destroy the (nuclear) weapons…”
While the overwhelming majority
of nations (184 of them) do not have nuclear weapons, nine nations have these
“doomsday” weapons, with the two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the US in
blatant and immoral possession of more than 90% of the world’s present total
stock of over 17,000 nuclear warheads. 14.03.2014 06:10
To quote from the February 2010
report by Global Zero Commission:
“…The world is nearing a
“proliferation tipping point” when nuclear weapons spread beyond the capacity
of any effort to rein them in and the danger increases that they will be used
by a country in conflict or by accident, or by a terrorist group.
“The only way to eliminate the
nuclear threat is to achieve the phased, verified, multilateral elimination of
all nuclear weapons – global zero
(by 2030)…” 13.03.2014 09:13
Yes; get rid of all the nuclear
weapons. And the earlier, the better, for the peace, security and wellbeing of
humankind.
