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Hope for a Nuclear Thaw
Interview with Jayantha Dhanapala
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Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala of Sri Lanka was UN
Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs from 1998-2003 and
president of the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference. He was a
member of the 1996 Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear
Weapons and of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, which
released a groundbreaking report in 2006.
SGI Quarterly: You've said in the
past that you are optimistic about prospects for nuclear disarmament. Do
you still feel that way?
Jayantha Dhanapala: This year we
observe the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. I
think that the move for the abolition of nuclear weapons is analogous to
the move for the abolition of slavery, and we will succeed eventually.
In our lifetime we've also seen the dismantling of apartheid and of
international communism. These situations, which seemed unchangeable, in
fact did yield to change.
Now it's true that we've been through a very long, dark winter of
discontent. We've seen the wonderful opportunity of the end of the Cold
War being dissipated and no meaningful nuclear disarmament take place.
The 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference was a
disaster. The outcome document of the 60th UN General Assembly which was
held at summit level did not contain any reference to disarmament,
because there was no agreement. So that was perhaps the low point.
New Developments
Since then, we've seen a very important article by George Shultz,
William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn appearing in The Wall Street
Journal on January 4 this year. This was a major, revolutionary change
for people who have held very important positions in the U.S. government
and remain very influential in U.S. society. They were calling for
nuclear disarmament; they felt that nuclear deterrence was no longer a
valid policy to pursue. This was followed shortly thereafter in the same
newspaper by an article from former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev
who asked for a joint enterprise between the nonnuclear weapon states
and nuclear states to get rid of nuclear arms.
The other development is that we have a report from the Weapons of Mass
Destruction Commission, chaired by Hans Blix, that came out in June 2006
with major proposals for the outlawing of all weapons of mass
destruction.
We have already outlawed biological and chemical weapons, but nuclear
weapons are held by eight (nine, if you count North Korea) countries,
and the rest of the world is being denied possession of them on the
basis that nuclear proliferation is a bad thing. Now, nuclear
proliferation is certainly not good, but if you have those countries
that have nuclear weapons arrogating the right to retain their weapons
for themselves alone, while others are denied possession, then you are
almost certainly stimulating other countries into wanting to have them.
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Students at a ceremony to receive a deactivated Soviet nuclear missile
at a war museum in Kecel, Hungary [ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP/Getty
Images] |
On the other hand the more countries that acquire nuclear weapons, the
more you will have the danger of a leakage to terrorist groups and of
the actual use of these weapons of terror. We have the evidence of the
[Pakistani nuclear scientist] A. Q. Khan network supplying material and
technology to states who wanted it on the black market. You will have
other leakages taking place, because not everybody has as careful
custody of their nuclear materials and technology as they should.
Research shows that the penalties meted out to the only three people who
were punished by law in the A. Q. Khan network were comparable to what a
corrupt businessman or a spammer on the Internet would receive. The
world is not taking proliferation seriously.
Nonproliferation and disarmament are two faces of the same coin. That is
why it's so important to achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons. If
there were no weapons, they could not proliferate.
Now we have a unique opportunity because four of the five nuclear weapon
states under the NPT are undergoing changes at the summit level. We have
a new president of France, and a new prime minister of Britain. Next
year we'll have a new president of Russia as well as the U.S.
Here's an opportunity to move away from having nuclear weapons as valid
currency in the world of power, and moving to eliminating all weapons of
mass destruction.
Shifting Paradigms
SGIQ: What kind of paradigm shift do
you see underlying the dramatic change that we've seen in people like
George Shultz and Henry Kissinger?
JD: I think there are two aspects to
this. One is the normal rethinking of positions and attitudes you held
at certain stages of your career. We've seen this happen with Robert
McNamara who today argues very strongly against nuclear weapons, having
been head of the Pentagon and responsible for the Mutual Assured
Destruction doctrine of the Cold War. You have a number of other people
who have been in very responsible positions in the military in different
countries now in retirement going through a process of reconsideration
of their views.
But I also think that, on the part of Kissinger, Nunn, Shultz and Perry,
there's an understanding that the world has changed radically from the
Cold War.
Additionally, with climate change there's a new emphasis on nuclear
energy as a so-called clean source of energy. But there is a very thin
margin between the uses of nuclear power for peaceful purposes and
non-peaceful purposes. Once you enrich uranium, you could always bring
it up to weapons-grade uranium. Ultimately it's a question of the
intentions of countries, and it's very difficult for any international
organization, however skilled their verification methods may be, to
ascertain that intentions are in fact peaceful rather than non-peaceful.
So in a situation like this, many people are coming to the conclusion
that there is a need for a total ban on nuclear weapons. The U.S. does
not need nuclear weapons; it has overwhelming conventional weapons
superiority today. Also there is no great power rivalry between the
United States and any other state. China has clearly indicated that it
wants to have peaceful ascendancy to its economic rise. They also want
to have outer space free from any weaponization.
These are, I think, the considerations that are operating today, and one
hopes that they will come into some kind of prominence in policy-making,
particularly after the change of leadership in the U.S. next year.
At the same time there are negative trends: the Reliable Replacement
Warhead (RRW) that is being developed by the U.S.--the first nuclear
weapon developed after a long time. There is the missile defense program
that is continuing in the teeth of Russian opposition.
So there is the emphasis in some part of the political spectrum on re-nuclearizing
international politics; on the other hand there are the Kissingers and
others who are saying it's time we took a fresh look at the political
validity of nuclear weapons. These are no longer necessary, so why don't
we get rid of them, because the longer you have them, the greater the
chance that they will fall into the terrorists' hands and also the
greater the chance they will be used. And we know that one modern
nuclear weapon being detonated will be several thousand times worse than
a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki, and it will leave genetic effects and
ecological effects that are damaging not only to the human race but also
to the ecology that supports human existence.
The Power of Public Opinion
SGIQ: What can be done to re-engage
public opinion with this issue?
JD: At the height of the Cold War we
had a demonstration of well over a million people in New York walking to
protest against nuclear weapons. But after the Cold War ended, there was
a strong perception that the likelihood of the use of nuclear weapons
had receded into the background, and people were encouraged to feel
rather complacent about them.
Now this is no longer possible, and after 9/11 people were reminded
that, had weapons of mass destruction been used by the terrorists, the
damage would have been catastrophic. We cannot take that risk any longer
with nuclear weapons. There is that growing awareness, I believe, both
at the state level and at the public level. We need to encourage global
public opinion. Civil society has been described as "the other
superpower," and I believe it's capable of the same influence that a
conventional superpower wields in international affairs, if it's united.
We need therefore to mobilize international public opinion to apply
pressure on their leadership.
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An antinuclear rally in California, U.S.A., in 1982, at the height of
the Cold War [©Neal
Preston/CORBIS] |
The Central Asian countries, in the face of opposition from the three
Western nuclear states--France, the U.K. and the U.S.--decided they want
a nuclear weapons-free zone. They signed a treaty in September of last
year in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, the site of many, many Russian
nuclear weapons tests in the days of the Soviet Union. So you have
countries moving from the conventional nuclear postures of the past into
a new kind of thinking. But at the same time, you have a residual
element of the old thinking, and that was evident when the U.K.
government decided that it wants to renew its Trident nuclear weapons
system. There was a large volume of opinion which opposed this, and I'm
told by a number of friends in the U.K. that while they have lost the
battle, they are confident of winning the war on this issue of the U.K.
abandoning its nuclear posture.
It's in the national security interests of every country not to be on
the precipice of a nuclear catastrophe whether caused by a nation state
or a terrorist group.
The Moral Norm
SGIQ: What personal sources of hope
do you draw on to sustain yourself in work that many people would find
daunting?
JD: Culturally, I cannot but be
influenced by the fact that I've grown up in a predominantly Buddhist
country where the message of the Buddha and, in my own lifetime, the
message of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the example of Nelson
Mandela have been inspiring examples of the need for optimism and hope
in international relations and for a better future for humankind. And I
believe, as I said earlier, that there are parallels with the success of
the abolition of slavery. Slavery still exists in various parts of the
world in a modern odious form, but the norm has been clearly established
that slavery is wrong and it's immoral and illegal. And what we need to
do is to delegitimize nuclear weapons as well.
People say very glibly that nuclear weapons cannot be dis-invented, that
the knowledge will always be there. Sure, the knowledge is there for
even the manufacture of biological weapons and chemical weapons, but
once we establish a norm, it makes it easier to pursue the elimination
of a pernicious evil than if it continues to exist in the hands of some
people, while we tell others it's wrong for you to possess the same
weapon that we have.
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