For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is Lawrence Wintner.
He is the author of Confronting the Bomb, a short history of the world nuclear disarmament movement.
And he is a professor of history at the State University of New York, Albany, and former president of the Peace History Society.
He's also the author of the trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb, One World or None, and Resisting the Bomb, and Toward Nuclear Abolition.
Welcome to the show, Lawrence.
How are you?
Fine.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
So, first of all, let's talk about the current news.
The piece that you have at the History News Network, the Liberty in Power blog, about the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the upcoming review conference.
What is that?
What's the importance?
Well, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which was signed in 1968 and went into force in 1970, is probably the linchpin, the centerpiece, of the whole nuclear arms control and disarmament regime in the world.
It provides two things, basically.
The first is that non-nuclear nations, who signed the treaty, agree to forego developing nuclear weapons.
And the second part is that the nuclear nations, who signed the treaty, agree to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons.
So, it basically provides for movement toward a nuclear-free world.
And every five years since 1970, there have been review conferences on this Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, held at the United Nations.
And these conferences look at what's been going on and see whether the world is indeed moving away from nuclear weapons toward a nuclear-free world.
So, that's what's going to be happening this coming May at the United Nations.
Okay, now, Barack Obama announced some sort of changes to his nuclear policy last week, but it seemed pretty much universally understood that really, well, believe me, here's my take, you set me straight.
Okay.
It seemed like what he said was, we are changing the policy.
We used to have an ambiguous policy that more or less reserved the right to use nuclear weapons in a first strike on any country in the world.
And we changed that to, no, we won't use nuclear weapons in a first strike against anyone, unless, you know, we promise never to, unless they have nuclear weapons themselves, then we still reserve the right to do that, or unless they're Iran.
Is that basically what happened two weeks ago?
That's part of it, although I would put it in a somewhat different way.
He stated that the U.S. use of nuclear weapons on the world scene would be narrowed somewhat from being willing to use them at any time, any place, with anybody, to using them only against countries that were not living up to their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Now, that was- Wait, wait, stop right there.
So I totally misunderstood something then, if I just understood you right.
You're saying that Russia, China, Europe, you know, France and Britain, these countries also are promised we will not first strike, as long as they're within their end of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Yes, the United States is saying that.
I'm sorry, I thought it was just, if you're a non-nuclear weapons state, and you're within your obligations, we promise not to nuke you.
Well, in a sense, while it can be read different ways, it comes down to the fact that the United States is not likely to engage in a first strike against nuclear powers, among other things because they have nuclear weapons.
Nonetheless, I think my interpretation is correct.
But the key departure from the past is that Obama is saying that non-nuclear nations that are in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty have nothing to worry about from the United States when it comes to nuclear weapons, so that this gives them an incentive to stay in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but also means that they can be free of the perceived need to develop nuclear weapons, because they have nothing to fear from the United States when it comes to nuclear war.
So it gives them both a negative and a positive incentive to stay away from developing nuclear weapons.
You know, it's interesting, my hero, Dr. Gordon Prather, he wrote an article called Obama the Great, and it was how to become Obama the Great if you want to be Obama the Great, Mr. President, and it was all you've got to do is give a speech.
And it's not even up to Congress, it's simply up to the President, and all you have to do is promise to the world that you will never bomb or countenance an Allied attack on any IAEA safeguarded facilities, which is almost what you just said, only it's much more specific, because of course, live up to your international obligations is vague enough to mean that even if Iran, for example, is completely within the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the International Atomic Energy Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of any of their nuclear material to a military or other special purpose, the UN Security Council, wrangled by the United States, can issue basically resolutions that themselves violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty, demanding that the Iranians cease uranium enrichment altogether.
And so, therefore, they can say, oh, well, if they're not doing that, they're in violation of their international obligations, but they're illegal obligations that the Security Council really has no right to mandate in the first place.
Am I right?
I think that probably wouldn't happen.
I think that nations that have nuclear weapons are unlikely to be trigger-happy when it comes to utilizing them against non-nuclear nations.
In fact, they haven't done so since 1945.
Well, I guess, I agree with that, I mean, sure, but I'm thinking...
And so I don't necessarily see a divergence between the UN Security Council and the United States' pledge on this score.
I think that other nations would hold the United States to account at the United Nations and point to the discrepancy if, in fact, the United States was going too far.
In fact, right now the United States has been curbed, in effect, from using its nuclear superiority on the world scene, and has been curbed for years on that basis.
In fact, that's one of the points made in my Confronting the Bomb book, that it's been popular pressure and pressure from other governments that has led to the absence of nuclear war since 1945.
Well, I want to make sure we get to that, but it is worth highlighting right now how important it is to have popular sentiment, even conscious of the fact that nuclear weapons are still an issue in this world.
I remember when I was a kid they did that movie with Jane Fonda where...
What was that other actor?
I forget.
And where I think Kansas City gets nuked and all of America gets nuked the day after, right?
Right.
And I guess they say even Ronald Reagan saw that and was like, oh, man.
And it kind of changed his life in a way or whatever.
We don't have that kind of mindset about nuclear weapons anymore.
Now that the Cold War is over, it's sort of assumed that it's, I guess, for these major powers to still have thousands and thousands of thermonuclear hydrogen bombs, even though we all kind of agree that nobody has any plans to use them on each other, hopefully.
Well, I think you're right.
I think there's been a great complacency since the end of the Cold War.
No great liking or love for nuclear weapons on the one hand on the part of the general public, but the kind of mass mobilization against them that was so prominent during the early 1980s and in earlier periods, too, seems to have faded.
So I think in that sense the situation is more dangerous today because if it's been at least in part popular pressure against nuclear war that has prevented nuclear war, then that popular pressure has declined.
Right.
And you know, especially, I don't know exactly what the numbers are.
I'm sure you have an accurate count where you are, but I saw something said there were 20 extremely close calls of accidental nuclear wars, not even the brinksmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis or anything, but just a flock of birds or a Norwegian satellite or just mistakes, almost leading to the extinction of mankind over and over again.
And that's just in 60 years so far.
Right.
Oh, you're quite right.
There have been slides toward nuclear war by the great powers.
For example, in 1973, the U.S. and Soviet governments almost got into a nuclear war when the Soviet government was talking to the U.S. government about intervention in the Israeli-Egyptian crisis of that year.
Well, there have been many other times when nuclear nations have almost slid into nuclear war quite accidentally, when radar has malfunctioned, when flocks of birds have flown over.
In fact, there have been nuclear weapons that have been lost, that have been scuttled over the Atlantic at times, planes that have crashed carrying nuclear weapons, so that in many ways we're very lucky that a nuclear war hasn't taken place since 1945.
And we shouldn't assume that it won't take place in the future unless we get rid of nuclear weapons.
Well, and you know what?
Why don't you talk a little bit about nuclear bombs themselves and how destructive they are and what a nuclear war might look like.
I know that Daniel Ellsberg is fond of explaining to people that we use Nagasaki bombs as the blasting cap to set off our modern thermonuclear hydrogen bombs.
Yeah, the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima destroyed an entire city, of course, and virtually leveled it in a great blast of fire and explosion and, of course, the long-term nightmare of radioactive poisoning, cancer, and so on.
But hydrogen bombs, the successors to the atomic bombs of that period, can be made a thousand times as powerful as an atomic bomb.
And most of the world's nuclear weapons today, those 23,000 nuclear weapons that remain on the world scene, are more powerful than the atomic bomb of 1945, so that the world can be absolutely destroyed or life could be brought to an end.
Indeed, even a small nuclear war, a war between India and Pakistan, two countries now armed with nuclear weapons, would create a nuclear winter.
A January 2010 article in Scientific American by a group of scientists pointed that out, that only a very small number of these nuclear weapons, if used, would create a huge atmospheric pollution of dust and radioactivity that would block out the sun, that would leave the earth cold and dry, that would destroy agriculture, that would lead to famine and food riots around the world, not just in India and Pakistan.
So even small numbers of nuclear weapons would create a catastrophe, far worse than any war we've seen in modern times.
Yeah, you know, you look at World War II, I guess people argue whether it was 50 or 60 million people that died in that, the tens of millions killed by the Soviet and Chinese communist regimes, that kind of thing, but that would be, what, 15, 20 minutes of fighting in a nuclear war.
I saw Daniel Ellsberg again publish the chart of how many days, how many hundreds of millions of people dead.
Oh, absolutely, even the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was a long time ago, of course, back in 1962, with a far smaller number of nuclear weapons at that time, was estimated by President Kennedy to have caused, if nuclear wars took place, to have caused 300 million deaths.
That's a lot.
Yes, absolutely.
Well, you know what, here's the thing, too, a modest proposal of mine.
How about just getting rid of the H-bombs?
I mean, I know the problem is, right, that they want to use miniaturized hydrogen bombs that are still only in the kilotons, but you can fit five of them on an ICBM.
That's the problem with that, right?
Right.
Well, there are all sorts of possibilities for getting rid of nuclear weapons.
And, indeed, the nuclear powers have gotten rid of some of them, but they haven't lived up to their commitment under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to engage in good faith negotiations for the abolition.
And, therefore, there are still 23,000 nuclear weapons on the world scene, and it's time for them to move from these halfway steps, these hesitant arms control and disarmament agreements, to full-scale abolition of nuclear weapons.
Without that, we'll be in danger of a nuclear holocaust, as long as those weapons exist.
Well, I'm sorry I don't have the footnote here, but I'm sure you saw the study that was put out.
I believe one of the authors of it was a colonel or a lieutenant colonel that is like the right-hand smithers to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And these guys came together and wrote this thing for, I think, the Armed Forces Journal, or the Air Force Journal or something, saying, we can get rid of all of our nukes down to, what did they say, half a dozen or something, because everybody knows we can bomb Moscow off the face of the earth with just one of these things.
We can get rid of 99% of our nuclear arsenal, and we still would have all the deterrent we would ever need.
How about that?
Yeah, well, it's certainly true that no nation wants to lose its major cities and millions of its people, and it doesn't take many nuclear weapons to do that sort of thing.
It certainly doesn't take 23,000 nuclear weapons that are mostly stronger than the atomic bomb that wiped out Hiroshima, so that only a tiny fraction of nuclear weapons today could have the same deterrent effect.
Furthermore, from the standpoint of the United States, even if it got rid of all its nuclear weapons and other countries did the same, the United States has vast military superiority over other nations.
The United States spends something like 50% of the world's military spending.
That is, all the nations of the world, with the exception of the United States, spend roughly as much as the United States does on its military.
So the United States has enormous conventional military superiority today.
It doesn't need nuclear weapons, and in fact, that's one reason why some countries are hesitant to engage in nuclear disarmament, because they feel that the balance is better if they retain nuclear weapons than if they don't, because if all countries are down to conventional weapons, then the United States simply overrides anybody else, and there's nothing deterring the United States.
Well, and if there's one lesson for would-be despots and dictators and politicians all over the world from the last decade, from the axis of evil and American foreign policy, it's that if you're North Korea and you actually have the ability to harvest some plutonium, make some atom bombs, we leave you the hell alone.
And if you're Iraq and you ain't got squat, we'll roll right into your country.
And if you're Iran and you go, look, we got our hands up, let your inspectors in, we're not doing nothing, we'll still threaten to kill you.
And if we're not there yet, so why would any politician in the world not learn the lesson that they need to get at least one or two of these things to keep the Americans out?
Well, that's the great temptation, I'm afraid, on the world scene.
As long as any one country has nuclear weapons, other countries are going to want to have them.
There has to be mutual obligations.
There has to be an agreement among powers to disarm.
And not just, I suspect, nuclear weapons, but other kinds of arms as well.
The United States can't expect to maintain military superiority on the world scene.
It can't simply expect to dominate the world militarily.
It's going to have to expect some measure of international cooperation and agreement.
The United States simply can't go it alone.
That's why I really got a kick out of that journal article that those officers put out.
It didn't even really talk about, well, I think it explicitly said, it doesn't matter what other countries do.
Even if the Russians, the Chinese, the Europeans, the Israelis, the Pakistanis, the Indians, keep their nuclear weapons, America can unilaterally disarm and say, look at us, world, follow us.
And that would be the number one best way to disarm the rest of the world anyway.
But even if they kept their nuclear advantage, we'd still be fine.
Yeah, well, I'm not sure the United States would be in a good position, assuming other nations kept nuclear weapons.
And I think politically it's probably not practical.
And polls have shown that a unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United States is not favored by the American public.
But multilateral disarmament, that is all nations getting rid of nuclear weapons, is heavily favored by the public.
Something like 84% of the American people tell pollsters that they'd be happy in a world in which no nation had nuclear weapons.
Well, given the fact that the Obama administration claims that it's for having a world with no nuclear weapons, and other members of the old national security elite have said the same thing, people like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and Sam Nunn and so on, and given the fact that the public doesn't want nuclear weapons, we're at a point, I think, when we can actually push successfully for a nuclear-free world.
That great Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union is gone.
Why not move towards a nuclear-free world today?
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
I think the real wisdom in that article is not necessarily that this is a likely future, American unilateral disarmament, but just from the point of view of these very highest top rats at the Pentagon, that they wouldn't be worried if we did.
Right, right.
And in fact, the goal of a nuclear-free world is stated in the Obama administration's Nuclear Posture Review.
The real question is, will there be more foot-dragging, or will they actually come through finally with the kind of world we want to see?
All right, now in the last five minutes here, I could go one of two ways, or maybe both.
You decide whichever both you want to answer.
But I want to ask you what you expect to happen at this upcoming review conference, if anything.
And then secondly, if you could just maybe quickly address the role of religious and or other political groups in leading the way on this issue, because I know that there are hardcore atheist communists, and there are Catholic workers and Quakers and all kinds of people who have made nuclear weapons their top priority for a long time now, and it's an important lesson for the rest of us to follow.
So I would like to hear a little bit of it from you, if I could, please.
Sure.
This conference, like others, could result, and hopefully won't, in a lot of finger-pointing.
The nuclear power saying to non-nuclear powers, oh, no, no, no, don't develop nuclear weapons.
And a non-nuclear power saying, well, you've retained your nuclear weapons, you're in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
So there can be a lot of blaming on the other side.
Nonetheless, given enough public pressure, and there will be massive demonstrations in New York City, for example, on May 2nd, just before the NPT review conference gets underway, if there's enough public pressure, I think there's a real possibility of a significant movement toward a nuclear-free world.
And part of that public pressure is coming from some pretty mainstream groups, including religious groups.
The National Council of Churches, for example, has called for a nuclear-free world.
The Conference of Catholic Bishops has called for a nuclear-free world.
All sorts of mainstream groups, including the labor movement, have called for a nuclear-free world.
So I think we have a real chance at this point to actually get going down that road, maybe fairly far down that road in the next few years.
So I'm hopeful at this point.
And for anybody in the audience who wants to join up, maybe not something as mainstream as the Council on Churches, that kind of thing, but maybe a group that's getting a little bit more done where the rubber meets the road, what would you suggest?
Oh, I'd suggest they should join Peace Action.
It's the descendants of the National Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, the two largest American peace groups of the post-Second World War years.
They merged in 1987 to form Peace Action, which is today the largest peace and disarmament organization in the United States.
So I think that's a good group for people to join and express their desire for a peaceful world and a nuclear-free world.
All right, everybody, that is Lawrence S. Wittner.
The book is Confronting the Bomb, A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement.
And you can find his recent article about the NPT Review Conference at the History News Network website.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
