Weapons Of Peace

[Rolando Kumar]

ICAN is an international organisation with partner organisations in more than one hundred countries, including Norway. Its headquarters are in Geneva. The organisation was founded in 2007 to mobilise people all over the world to convince their governments to support a ban on nuclear weapons. In the eyes of the initiators, the nuclear powers were not fulfilling their pledges of nuclear disarmament under the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

The foundation of ICAN was instigated by the organisation awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The campaign was also inspired by the 1987 Peace Prize laureate, Jody Williams and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

(Saionji) I was told that you were only 21 years old, Dr. Krieger, when you visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the very first time. At that time you visited the museums to see the devastation of those cities, and since then you have been involved in trying to eliminate nuclear weapons.

What I came to understand was that American way of educating about the Bomb was from a perspective of being above the Bomb. The perspective was that we made use of this new technology and we won that war. At the museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you could gain perspective from under the Bomb. I found that a far more compelling perspective and far more human perspective. I realized that what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could happen anywhere. It was not acceptable as means of warfare to have the mass killing of civilians. It was a very strong experience for me to visit those cities and their museums. It was an awakening.

(Saionji) I see. Since having gone through that experience, I take it this has motivated you to be very active in trying to eliminate the weapons for the next 40 plus years. As a result, you have established the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation so as to educate people. Very, very briefly, would you let me know the activities of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation?

We also have links with like-minded groups around the world. We were involved in the establishment of the Abolition 2000 Global Network in 1995. We are one of the eight international organizations in the Middle Powers Initiative, trying to encourage middle-power governments to play a greater role in seeking the abolition of nuclear weapons.

In addition to education, we also engage in advocacy, for example, with our Action Alert Network. We ask people to send messages to government leaders, primarily in the United States. We try to awaken interest, raise awareness and help people to become more active and engaged in critical issues of peace and disarmament.

(Saionji) I agree that the capability of nuclear weapons serving as a deterrent would work if the countries are going to be viewed as a country, but our world at present is becoming globalized, so that many of the issues we have at present cannot be resolved by looking at individual nations. We need a global perspective.

So what we need to think is not based upon individual countries, but upon the whole Earth. Maybe the theory of the deterrence could have had some place in the 20th century, but now we are in the 21st century, and in this 21st century as well as into the future I believe that the theory of deterrence is no longer meaningful.

(Krieger) I agree with your latter premise that the deterrence is no longer meaningful, but I am not sure if deterrence really was helpful in the 20th century. I tend to think that we survived the nuclear threat in the 20th century more by great good fortune than by the effectiveness of deterrence. As you know, we had many close calls and came very near to nuclear disaster. I think we were extremely fortunate and we cannot rely on that good fortune to last indefinitely.

But I agree with you totally on your main point that we are now entering into a global age. There are many problems confronting humanity, including poverty, hunger, health care, environmental degradation, and issues of terrorism. There is not one of these problems that can be resolved without global cooperation. No matter how powerful any single country is, it cannot solve global problems by itself. No country can rely upon nuclear weapons to protect it in an island of prosperity in the midst of a world with the kinds of serious problems that our world faces.

(Saionji) Let me continue a story about a shelter. It is in Voluntary Simplicity written by Duane Elgin. He talks about the activist Dr. Helen Caldicott, because she said what would happen if the nuclear weapons were used, what tragedy is going to follow.

Even a very, very rich person with a beautiful nuclear shelter, if his city is a target of a bombing, even if he is in a shelter, there will be flames that would eat up all the oxygen, so whoever is in a shelter is going to die because of suffocation. Even if the bombing struck far away in the community, and he makes it to run into the shelter, he would have to stay there for at least two weeks. Otherwise there will be very strong radiation that he would be exposed to.

We try to continue refining the vision of how global nuclear disarmament can come about, but the most important work we should do is educating people everywhere about the necessity of eliminating nuclear weapons and encouraging their engagement in pressing in an active way for the goal of abolition.

I do recall that Dr. Krieger you have written about this somewhere, looking at the activities of democratization like the example of the Berlin Wall in the former East and West Germany. It was the change in the mentality of each German who came together to achieve the major change in destroying the Berlin Wall.

So the democratization type of campaign and activities are necessary. To take another example of the non-smoking movement, even though there were dozens of reports that smoking induced lung cancer, not the federal government nor the state government nor the city government take any action. Of course, we know that there was strong pressure from the cigarette companies.

But why has the country changed? It is because there have been changes in the awareness of the people towards smoking. That was at a basis of the foundation to change the position of the government. If you really wanted to have the nuclear-free world, what we need to do is to change the awareness and mentality of the people. Otherwise, it will not be assured for eternity into the future.

(Saionji) How do we change the way of thinking? Of course, there are different ways like education, public awareness campaigns and such. However, if we think of how we can really change the mentality and way of thinking of the people, we need to go back to the fact of how much money has been spent to prepare for wars as well as for the military budget. In a year, more than $1 trillion U.S. dollars is spent for military budgets around the world.

(Krieger) I completely agree with your analysis. When you look from a macro point of view, nuclearism is the problem, but it is embedded in the larger problem of militarism. Nuclear threats are one manifestation of it. Nuclearism happens to be a manifestation that can destroy humanity, so it has special importance.

One of the figures that is worth noting is that the United States alone spent $7.5 trillion on its nuclear weapons and delivery systems from the beginning of the Nuclear Age. This enormous amount of money has been diverted from socially beneficial programs into making weapons that hopefully will never be used again.

(Krieger) We are trying to reach as many people as possible, particularly young people, and teach them about peace and about leadership. When I say peace, I mean it in a broad sense, because peace requires justice and human security. We want young people to have a sense that they can contribute to making a better world. There are things they can do and things that they need to know in order to make a contribution.

(Saionji) Yes, we do put importance in education, so here again is another area that we would like to further step up our collaboration, especially in the Peace Leadership Program you have mentioned. I hope that we shall be able to share and exchange more information about the Peace Leadership Program, and activities that we do as well. It would be very nice if the young man you have referred to, who is a graduate of West Point, would come to Japan one day and speak to the people here in Japan.

We need to take our responsibilities, learn to think globally, become better world citizens, and speak out on these issues of inequities and injustice, and not allow them to be buried from view. We need to make these issues transparent, and we need to work to change them. Eliminating nuclear weapons is getting rid of a big threat hanging over humanity. Then we can concentrate on the many things we need to change in a positive direction.

(Saionji) I just want to share with you the Declaration for All Life on Earth, that is by our Foundation, in which people, animals, and plants all have the responsibility to support the Earth. Furthermore, we have four guiding principles: 1) reverence for life; 2) respect for all differences; 3) gratitude for coexistence with all of nature; and 4) harmony between the spiritual and material, in which regardless of different ethnicity, or countries, there are common values that could be shared by all the people on Earth.

I know we are running out of time, so this will be the last question. Having had the discussion this morning, I would like you to refer to what each individual can do in order so that he or she shall make a contribution to creating a world free of nuclear weapons.

One of the challenges is just to imagine what nuclear weapons are capable of. Beyond that, people need to speak out, they need to communicate with their political leaders, they need to not accept simplistic solutions from political leaders, but rather to challenge reliance upon these weapons.

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