Remarks for the 26th Annual PAND Concert, August 3, 2009
Francis Chiappa, Ph.D.
President, Cleveland Peace Action
Today, remembering the utter destruction wreaked on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, we rededicate ourselves to the goal of nuclear weapons abolition. Today I’d like to speak to our history and to our work ahead. Humanity’s passionate and principled quest to reduce the threat of nuclear war has been with us almost as long as there have been nuclear weapons. In 1957, the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy was founded, as the first anti-nuclear protests swept the world. By 1963 there was a partial victory, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear explosions in the earth’s atmosphere and oceans. As a result, radioactive fallout was greatly reduced. But testing continued underground. And the arms race between the US and Soviet Union carried on unabated.
By 1981 we’d seen enough. As a new arms race began, the nuclear weapons freeze was born. It proposed, with elegant simplicity, that the US and USSR bilaterally cease the production, testing and deployment of nuclear weapons, and it spawned a broad and spirited grassroots movement. In response, President Reagan joked about launching nukes and one bureaucrat proposed giving every family a shovel to dig a hole in case of nuclear attack. Such foolish talk only added to the wave of support, as 80% of Americans came to favor a nuclear freeze. A generation became much better educated about things like nuclear winter. Nuclear war today could still yield that unthinkable result – the extinction of the human race. Later in his Presidency, Ronald Reagan concluded significant arms reduction agreements with the Soviet Union and himself envisioned the ultimate goal of abolishing nuclear weapons entirely.
In 1982 the Greater Cleveland Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign was founded. That same year, PAND – Performers and Artists for Nuclear Disarmament - held its first annual concert, at Severance Hall. As a community, we have dedicated ourselves to preventing nuclear war for these many years. PAND and the Nuclear Freeze – now Cleveland Peace Action - have worked side by side to change how we think about nuclear weapons and foreign policy. This is PAND’s 26th annual concert and it is clear that our work is far from over.
I think we’ve been partially successful in our quest. President Reagan would not have changed his policies without our strong public opposition. The number of nuclear weapons worldwide peaked in the mid-1980s at around 70,000 warheads. Today there are about 25,000 and less than 10,000 of these are deployed for use. Congress recently voted to kill a program to replace nuclear warheads. But there are now nine nuclear weapon states, with the additions of India, Pakistan and North Korea. Only these three nations have conducted nuclear tests in this decade. But the problem of nuclear proliferation has now taken center stage. The dangers are nuclear terrorism and more governments acquiring these tools of Armageddon.
The world seems more complicated now than it did 26 years ago, in the last decade of the Cold War. Back then, two superpowers threatened each other with “mutually assured destruction.” Today the USA stands alone in military might, with almost half the world’s total military spending. But foreign policy fiascos have humbled us and continue to do so. Peace Action’s focus has gone far beyond nukes, to working for foreign policy that would bring us real security, one based on diplomacy, international cooperation, and human rights. War leads not to peace but to more war. We’ve been opposing war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine. But today, as we remember Hiroshima, remember Nagasaki, remember nuclear testing’s down-winders and all the victims of nuclear age, we have a golden opportunity to take one step further towards nuclear disarmament and abolition.
Next year, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) will be introduced for ratification in the US Senate. The US ceased nuclear testing in 1992 and President Clinton signed the CTBT in 1995. But Senate ratification failed in 1999, with only 48 of the 67 votes needed. The US is the one remaining obstacle to treaty’s “entry into force.” Why is this so important? Senate ratification and entry into force would constrain the further development of nuclear weapons by other states. It would strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which is the cornerstone of global efforts to prevent more nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. At present we lack any moral authority to tell Iran it cannot develop nuclear weapons. The International Monitoring System (IMS) would provide comprehensive global verification of the CTBT. When North Korea tested, the world confirmed it within a few minutes. And, of key importance in convincing conservative Senators, the US nuclear arsenal would remain highly reliable and credible without nuclear test explosions.
With the Democrats in control of the Senate, we are close to the 67 votes necessary for ratification. The task before us, before the peace movement, in the coming months is to convince a few Republican Senators. With George Voinovich considered a swing vote, Cleveland Peace Action, remembering it’s anti-nuclear roots, will do all it can to put this piece of the old nuclear freeze proposal into place. If you want to know more about this, if you want to work on this over the next few months, please talk to me after the program and add your name to the sign up sheet at the Peace Action table.
All the great struggles for peace and for justice have taken many decades to achieve and nuclear abolition will be no different. We’ll get there one step at a time and the CTBT is the next step. We can achieve it in 2010. To recycle one of our old slogans: Together, We Make The Difference. And once again, we will!
