03/29/17 Paul Kawika Martin: the New Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons

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All right, introducing Paul Kawika-Martin.
He is the political and communications director for Peace Action, and that's peace-action.org.
So the subject here today, sorry I don't have an article or anything to refer to, but this big United Nations meeting on the abolition of nuclear weapons.
So the big question for you, Paul, is what all did and did not happen at this meeting?
Go ahead.
Yeah, the conference is actually still going on, so we'll have to see exactly what pans out.
And it's the first part of a negotiations on a convention to ban nuclear weapons.
This is one week long.
They start the negotiation process, and then there'll probably be talks and whatever behind the scenes and working groups and whatnot.
And then they come back again in June to try to actual finalize some sort of a treaty.
Now realistically, is this going to happen?
Probably not.
In December is when 113 countries voted to have this negotiations.
And as you would imagine, most of the nuclear weapons countries voted against it.
With some exceptions, China, India, and Pakistan actually abstained from the vote.
The U.S., of course, has been driving countries now to be against this negotiations process.
And so far there's been, I think, about 40 countries now that are boycotting these negotiations, which is very sad.
Some of the listeners may not remember, but at one point in the world we had 120,000 nuclear weapons.
And those weapons were 10 to 100 times more powerful than the ones that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And as a reminder, that killed several hundred thousand people instantaneously and several hundred thousand people more over the lifetime of those victims.
So it's important that we try to get a world without them.
We don't need a world with nuclear weapons.
And this was one step in trying to negotiate that.
So that's what's currently happening in the UN.
And we'll have to see how this week plays out and continue to push on countries through the whole process that should end sometime in June.
All right, so, well, lots of stuff to go over here.
But first of all, China, India, and Pakistan abstained.
Does that mean that they're, are they sending a signal then that, hey, if the other major powers were willing to go ahead and forego nukes, then we would be for that?
I think in some ways, yes.
Let's take a look at China.
The best intelligence says that they probably have about 200 nuclear warheads.
You know, compare that to the U.S., we have approximately 1,500, give or take, that are strategically deployed.
That means on missiles, bombers, and submarines, and another approximately 3,000 in reserve.
And again, these are not the same weapons used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
These are 10 to 100 times more powerful.
If they're ever used, you can just not even imagine the devastation they would have on any major city and how that would affect the world.
And it's also clear that if a small nuclear war were to happen, let's say, between India and Pakistan, it's very possible it could cause what's known as nuclear winter, which is putting up enough dust in the air that it would significantly change the climate of the Earth and how we live on it.
So there are countries, we think, that are against it, like China, who would be probably for moving towards nuclear weapons.
They only have, not having nuclear weapons, they only have 200.
And some intelligence says that their warheads are not even on missiles right now.
So that means they wouldn't even be able to launch them immediately or to respond to any kind of attack.
Because that's the way they just think nuclear weapons are just kind of an insane thing to think about using.
India and Pakistan, I think, is a more complicated issue.
And it's unclear exactly why they abstained.
I think both countries realize that any kind of a nuclear exchange between the two would affect both countries.
Even a small nuclear weapon used on Pakistan, you would have radiation that would come over into India and vice versa.
So, you know, they hopefully are rethinking that detente and that is not certainly a wise thing to have these weapons around.
And so they don't get in the wrong hands, etc.
Well, we got a real big problem there where Pakistan is making smaller and smaller, more quote usable nukes and giving authority to the colonels in the field to deploy them, to go ahead and use them.
But then the Indians only have megaton strategic nuclear weapon, you know, city erasers to use in response, which, of course, they would do if the Pakistanis use one small one.
What are the Indians going to do?
Not nuke back?
I mean, and this is the kind of thing that could break out really at any time.
It seems like over Kashmir.
One big terrorist attack in Mumbai, another one of those or whatever.
It is a huge concern and especially, you know, the command and control of these weapons that could change the face of the planet.
It's one of the concerns we have here in the United States.
There is, you know, not really the red button, but the president does have access to the nuclear football, can launch nuclear weapons at any time without necessarily congressional approval or anyone else's.
Right.
And so there's concerns that that not only is here in the U.S., but you might have some of the same dynamics in Pakistan and India.
And you'd hope people would not do that.
There have been already cases should look up the the colonel in in Russia who was given the command actually to launch nuclear weapons against the United States because they had false readings from a Norwegian satellite rocket.
And he was commanded to launch nuclear weapons and did not.
So a person who saved the world, you know, because there was a human in between, you know, people who are not really thinking clearly on these issues understand what would really happen in the world if we were to have a nuclear war.
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Yeah, and that kind of thing has happened at least 20 times and people can just look up nuclear close calls where a friend was just mentioning to me, reminding me of one last night where the USAF accidentally dropped an H bomb on Lubbock, Texas.
And I think that was the one where seven of the eight fail safes failed.
And it was the last little safety on the bomb that prevented it from going off at, you know, a few megatons.
So, yeah, this kind of thing can happen.
And we've seen all kinds of accidents in the world happen.
We are humans.
We make mistakes.
The problem is, if you make a mistake here, it could be the end of humanity.
It was a real low.
There's I think it was Amarillo.
I was just thinking at hand.
There's also a place where a bomb was accidentally dropped sometime somewhere over of North Carolina.
Yeah.
And so they're like you said, there are a whole host of these mistakes where, you know, for whoever's watching out for us, they have not culminated into a nuclear war or something like that.
So.
So what's to do with the nonproliferation treaty?
Because the nonnuclear weapon states, of course, who sign it, they promise never to get nuclear weapons by hook or by crook and to allow the IAEA to sign a safeguards agreement with the IAEA to allow them to verify that they're not participating in any non-peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
But then the nuclear weapon states have already agreed.
And this excludes India, Pakistan and Israel.
But the rest of them are members of the NPT and they have all sworn to get rid of their nuclear weapons.
But is that just written in there as the vaguest of promises?
As sort of a fig leaf to get the nonnuclear weapon states to promise to stay that way?
Do we need a new treaty that's much more specific in saying, you know, US, UK, France, China, Russia have to give up this amount of nukes by this time frame and that kind of thing?
I mean, clearly we do.
And as you mentioned, you exactly laid out basically what the NPT treaty did, which was signed in 1970.
So many, many years ago in that treaty, Article 6 clearly states, you know, that countries are supposed to move deliberately or whatever the wording is to getting rid of nuclear weapons.
And the interesting language there and it says and general disarmament, which some people actually say that means getting rid of and slowly getting rid of conventional weapons as well.
So so the nuclear weapon states, they argue they all they we have been doing that.
I mean, look, we did have one hundred and twenty thousand nuclear warheads and now we're down to about I think it's like fourteen thousand or something like that combined in the world.
Yeah, I like how you keep emphasizing that.
I think that's the important thing, because on one hand, this sounds like some hippie utopian thing.
We're like, yeah, right.
Jane Fonda thinks we shouldn't have nukes or some crap that's so easy to write off.
But then, oh, yeah.
How come the Republicans reduce them by tens of thousands?
Yeah, let's not forget it was Reagan.
It was Reagan who finally drank the Kool-Aid of this is what we need to do.
You know, it was Reagan who built a lot of this stuff up and then finally realized, you know, and history will have to show exactly why.
But best guess is actually because of his daughter, Patty, who was bringing in people like Helen Caldicott and other folks to have conversations with him, that he finally kind of realized.
I didn't know about that part of it.
That this is, yeah, that this is craziness and started having discussions, you know, surprised diplomacy does work, having discussions with Russia.
And we turned from the Cold War and the Cold War ended when we started signing treaties with Russia on nuclear weapons.
That's how we went from the hundred and twenty thousand, you know, and started.
We started these great treaties and moved us and moved us away from, you know, the brink of world war and complete disaster to where we are today.
Yeah.
Well, Bush, you know, too, did his part and pulled them all out of Korea.
And I don't know about Japan and other places, but he continued the reduction by the tens of thousands before Clinton ever came in.
In fact, it may have all mostly already been done before Clinton ever got there, if I remember.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is completely a nonpartisan issue.
There's no, but it's a great way to argue it.
Right.
Because if the frame of reference is that, oh, yeah, hippies are against nukes, then.
Yeah.
But if you can argue it and and outflank the right from the right and say, look at all the greatest Republican heroes who say that this is absolutely unnecessary, it threatens our civilization, it costs too much money.
It's, you know, this dangerous for all these reasons, then that takes it that confuses the usual narrative that this is, you know, kind of an issue to dismiss and makes it all of a sudden a very serious one.
You know what I mean?
And I think military officers and that kind of.
Yeah, you're exactly right, Scott.
And even if you want to believe in the idea of deterrence, which I don't.
But if you want to believe in this idea that you need to have nuclear weapons to deter another country or actor from attacking you, you know, under the Obama administration, the DOD told them, oh, we only need we we think we only need a thousand at the most for that.
And there have been even air force generals who came up with a way to have deterrence with only three hundred in the U.S.
And we have fifteen hundred plus three thousand in in the reserves that and I can tell you, it costs billions of dollars a year to maintain them, to secure them, to to keep them going.
And there's currently a plan to actually escalate our nuclear weapons program to the tune of about a trillion dollars over 30 years.
That would be like replacing all these warheads with newer ones.
We're all new factories, right?
A whole new infrastructure for the industry.
Everything.
Well, yeah, it's not necessarily completely all new, but just a lot of money new.
They want new ICBMs, new submarines, new bombers like replacing all this, all this a trillion, a trillion dollars, just hard to really even comprehend that amount of money.
And like you said, even the most conservative of conservatives realize we can't afford this and it's at the cost of other security needs, whatever that might mean to you.
Maybe you think we need more tanks or we need more planes.
We're not going to be able to afford those if we're going to spend this kind of money on nuclear weapons, which, you know, in my opinion, actually makes us less safe rather than more safe.
Well, and that's the thing of it, right, is if you stop halfway through the thought, then, yeah, nuclear deterrent makes a lot of sense.
Nobody's ever going to mess with us.
We got H-bombs.
OK, but then what if they do anyway?
And you've got to follow through now.
Now you're talking about using H-bombs.
And this is crazy.
And here's the way I think of it is just, all right, are you saying that for the next 700 years, humanity ought to have this equal balance of hydrogen bomb fusion terror that nobody ever better mess with anybody ever?
Does that make sense to think that this is a long term solution to the problem of atomic power or we're going to have to come up with something else?
You know what I mean?
It's crazy to think that these are, in other words, unthinkable doesn't mean impossible as much as we would like it to mean impossible.
Look at the world wars.
That is all unthinkable happen anyway.
Yes, all kind of things have been unthinkable.
Three Mile Island.
You just go down the list of things that we could never imagine that would happen, that it has happened and may happen.
So it's certainly our responsibility to attempt to mitigate these risks.
And that's why this convention was come up, because most of the countries who don't have nuclear weapons are opposed to the world have nuclear weapons.
And it's, you know, this kind of almost weapon classism where you have the nuclear haves and the nuclear have nots and the nuclear has want to keep their, you know, powerful weapons as a way of putting pressure and putting their their military kind of hegemony on other countries.
And you have the have nots who either one are trying to oppose or two are submissive to these other countries and try to get them to so-called keep them under their nuclear umbrella.
This is Japan and other countries who supposedly we are protecting with our nuclear umbrella.
And at the end of the day, these geopolitics just don't work and it needs to be something else.
And that's why this convention is moving forward.
And whether or not one happens or not, it'll be clear, at least to the rest of the two nuclear weapons states, that countries are getting more and more serious, that they need to take their their obligations on their NPT more seriously and and really show that they're moving towards a world without nuclear weapons.
You know, Paul, I think maybe somebody needs to do a remake of The Day After, something like that, because, you know, we have here and I know you know this a lot better than me, but you have this Global Zero campaign and all this.
There are a lot of people who, you know, usually really old guys who are retired now, but they have a lot of experience with this issue.
People like William Perry, Bill Clinton's former secretary of defense, who really knows, you know, Dan Ellsberg is another great example.
People who really know about nukes and what they really mean, you know, who don't have to resort to vague imaginations of nuclear detonations the way most Americans do, who are saying something has got to be done about this.
And it just seems, you know, and right at this at the start, as you're saying, of this brand new trillion dollar project.
I know all the, you know, faux controversy over Putin and Trump right now, you know, could poison this a little bit, but it just seems like a perfect time to go ahead and say, actually, no, instead of doing the trillion dollar thing, we're going to go the other way.
And we're going to go ahead and get all the way down to 300 or whatever, something more reasonable as though that's very reasonable at all than the stockpile that we have now.
But it seems like we need something to really galvanize people's attention.
And, you know, we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, Paul.
We want to get people's attention some other way, you know, I guess the ABC TV primetime TV movie wouldn't do it in the year 2017, but something.
Yeah, it's it's interesting, it's really the fault of the educational system here in the U.S. I think that, you know, there's a couple of things happened first, as you mentioned, a lot of the old people actually remember what it's like in the duck and cover times where people really did fear for their lives.
You know, people were building, you know, so-called underground bunkers thinking that that would protect them, even though they probably wouldn't have in a complete nuclear war.
People were really fearful for their lives at every moment that there was going to be a nuclear war.
And that generation is starting to die off, unfortunately.
And so that memory is being lost.
And young people, if you ask them, they think that maybe we have a couple of hundred nuclear weapons and they also don't even understand, like, the impact, as you mentioned.
So the educational aspect of this is very important.
And that's part of the reason that this convention of negotiations is important, because it is getting the attention like you're you do, but you talk about these issues all the time.
You've been an excellent person on foreign policy for a number of years.
But there are a lot of people who don't talk about this issue.
So when this comes to the U.N., you know, you're getting stories about it.
And hopefully we can educate people about these risks and what we have and the costs so people can think twice about whether they think our country should have so many, should spend so much money on them.
Or there are other, one, better ways to spend our tax dollars and two, better ways to protect the planet from possible annihilation.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, make some suggestions.
How do listeners get involved in this issue?
Peace-action.org is the best way.
We have 100 chapters of affiliates around the country.
So you can look there to see if you have a chapter to join.
You can get on our email list.
We send an email about once, once a week about various issues where you can take action.
And that's a good place to start.
Peace-action.org.
All right.
Good deal.
Thank you very much, Paul.
Appreciate it.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I appreciate it.
All right, y'all.
Paul Kawika-Martin, he is political and communications director at peace-action.org.
That's the Scott Horton Show.
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