Humanity's race against time to cut atomic fuse
Dr. Sue Wareham, OAM
published on Wednesday, January 16, 2007 in the Canberra Times
January 16, 2007 -- TODAY an announcement that should chill us to the core of our collective being as a species will be made simultaneously in Washington DC and London. The minute hand of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock will be advanced.
The clock has been an institution since 1947, and is the world's best recognised symbol of our proximity or otherwise to nuclear catastrophe. The time is set by a prestigious panel that includes 18 Nobel Laureates. Currently it is seven minutes to midnight.
However the clock is not, and never has been, simply an academic exercise. It is a wake-up call from experts who care passionately about our world.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by two former Manhattan Project scientists, Eugene Rabinowitch and Hyman Goldsmith, who held grave fears for the peril that humanity faced with the splitting of the atom.
Today's announcement is expected to include a number of factors that are driving us closer to nuclear catastrophe, including nuclear ambitions in Iran, unsecured nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere, the continuing launch-ready status of thousands of American and Russian weapons, escalating terrorism, and new pressures from climate change for expanded civilian nuclear power that could increase proliferation risks. (The security implications of nuclear power have been a very frequent Bulletin theme.)
If news of the Bulletin's clock crosses Prime Minister John Howard's radar, we can guess which of these he will pick up on. Iran, terrorism, and anything else that can be twisted to reinforce the current disastrous military policies. But to take any of these factors out of their proper context the context of a world awash with 27,000 nuclear weapons, 96 per cent of them in two nations is to betray the whole purpose that drove the journal's founders.
The problem that so profoundly disturbed Rabinowitch, Goldsmith and others was not simply that nuclear weapons will spread (which was predicted and inevitable), but that nuclear weapons exist. The only possible solution to that problem is to abolish nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, this goal was regarded by many as utopian, and its advocates as hopelessly idealistic. However the tide is turning, and the utopians now are those who believe that we can continue to live in a nuclear-armed world without a single weapon being used, ever. Those of us who live in the real world know that mistakes happen, signals are misinterpreted, technology can fail, and judgment can go awry in times of crisis. (The real world also teaches us that some leaders lack judgment at the best of times, crisis or no crisis.)
Robert McNamara, certainly no dove, says of the Cuban missile crisis, that, "We were a hair's breadth from absolute disaster".
McNamara is only one of a number of former senior US administration officials to call for nuclear weapons abolition.
Most recently, on January 4 this year in the Wall Street Journal, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, and defence secretary William Perry, urged the US to lead in creating a world without nuclear weapons. They said that reliance on nuclear weapons was becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective. Former president Jimmy Carter has made the same call.
High-level report after high-level report has also reached the same conclusion. It is becoming like a broken record.
Nuclear weapons cannot, at the same time, be indispensable to some nations and catastrophically dangerous for others. In June last year, the UN Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, chaired by Hans Blix, concluded, "So long as any state has such weapons especially nuclear arms others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain in any state's arsenal, there is a high risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. Any such use would be catastrophic". It's not hard to grasp. The voices of those who continue to deny such basic truths are, like the climate change sceptics, increasingly irrelevant and outright dangerous.
Who are the culprits in all this, those who hold the rest of the planet to ransom? They are easy to find. We don't need weapons inspectors. There are nine nations. They are well known, but, in the interests of naming and shaming, here they are the US, Russia, France, Britain, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. But there are also hangers-on, those 30 or so nations that shelter under a nuclear umbrella. That includes Australia.
The situation is grave. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War , which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its work in educating about the effects of nuclear weapons, has initiated a new campaign: the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons , which was spearheaded by the physicians' Australian affiliate.
The acronym "I Can" is not accidental. It is a campaign of hope and empowerment, and of imagining a world without nuclear weapons.
It's about reclaiming our right, and our children's right, to live free from the fear of nuclear holocaust. This earth does not belong to nine heads of state, 30 deputy sheriffs and their minions. It is entrusted to all of us and to billions who have not even set foot on it yet.
Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy is not a scientist, but she sums up the same abhorrence of nuclear weapons that led to the formation of the Bulletin and its clock: "The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made".
As the minute hand moves on, let us heed the wake-up call.
"If we sleep through yet again, time may not continue to be merciful to us."
Dr Sue Wareham OAM is a former president of the Medical Association for Prevention of War (Australia).
