Global Security Newswire

UNITED NATIONS -- A number of leading peace activists this week said they were losing faith in U.S. President Barack Obama's commitment to working toward nuclear disarmament, and are questioning whether he would match his soaring rhetoric with practical steps (see GSN, Dec. 15, 2009).

"I personally do not know what Obama's intentions are," said Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of a disarmament group based in Oakland, Calif., and North American coordinator of the Mayors for Peace. "I cannot reconcile his statements with any of his policies so far."

Activists are in New York this week in number to attend the opening of a monthlong conference on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Diplomats from 189 NPT member nations meet here every five years to review implementation of the 1970 accord and debate ways in which it might be strengthened.

On Sunday an estimated 10,000 peace advocates from around the world marched from Times Square to the United Nations, demanding the immediate abolition nuclear weapons. They delivered petitions signed by more than 7 million people -- including 100,000 from the United States -- "calling for a world free of nuclear weapons in our lifetime," Judith Le Blanc, a field organizer for Peace Action, said in a news release. "We want the U.S. to start negotiations at the nonproliferation review conference."

Obama in an April 2009 speech in Prague laid out an ambitious agenda for reducing the nuclear weapons threat, which he called "the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War." He vowed to take "concrete steps" toward disarmament; "reduce the role of nuclear weapons" in national security; "aggressively pursue" ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the U.S. Senate; and "seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons," among other initiatives (see GSN, April 6, 2009).

A year later, the president signed a "New START" nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that caps weapons at a new, post-Cold War low -- 1,550 warheads on each side -- and limits strategic delivery vehicles like missiles and bomber aircraft to 800 (see GSN, April 8).

The Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review, released April 6, expands U.S. security guarantees for non-nuclear nations, states that the "fundamental role" of the arsenal is to deter nuclear attacks against the United States and its allies, and calls for declining reliance on atomic weapons as conventional military capabilities improve.

During a Wednesday panel discussion at the United Nations, which is hosting the NPT review conference, several activists said that the U.S.-Russian arms control treaty was a step in the right direction. However, they said it remained unclear whether or when the two sides would agree on a follow-on accord to take deeper strategic arms reductions or pull back thousands of tactical nuclear arms deployed in Europe.

They additionally expressed disappointment that the Obama team has not submitted the test ban accord to the Senate for ratification nor has set any time table for doing so (see GSN, May 6). The president also has not taken many visible steps toward negotiating a global fissile-material control treaty, disarmament proponents complained.

Rather, the White House has at times gone in the opposite direction, some have asserted. The administration has roiled activists by supporting a Bush administration civil nuclear trade agreement with India despite New Delhi's refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, submit all its nuclear power facilities to international safeguards, or promise not to conduct any new atomic explosive tests (see related GSN story, today).

Under the NPT agreement, five nuclear weapon-holding nations -- China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States -- have committed to reduce and ultimately eliminate their arsenals, while non-nuclear signatory states have pledged never to build or acquire atomic arms. Nations in good standing under the accord can receive nuclear materials and technical assistance for peaceful purposes, like atomic energy and medical needs.

Even as the NPT review meetings kick off, many activists appear convinced that politics have already trumped real progress toward achieving the treaty's goals.

Democrats in Congress -- sometime allies of the disarmament movement -- appear intent on immunizing themselves against a disaster at the polls next November and are trying to burnish more conservative credentials on national security matters, suggested Cabasso, who heads the Western States Legal Foundation. The foundation seeks the abolition of nuclear arms.

"The reason why the Democrats are ready to support the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is because they're convinced they don't need it to maintain nuclear superiority, and that's what they're trying to convince the Republicans about," she said during the panel presentation. "So that's what the debate is [about] -- not should we get rid of nuclear weapons, or what are nuclear weapons for, [or] what's their role and use in nuclear policy."

Perhaps most disturbing to Cabasso and others is the White House request to allocate more than $5 billion in additional funding for the nuclear weapons complex over the next five years, detailed in a fiscal 2011 budget proposal delivered to Congress earlier this year (see GSN, Feb. 2). A proposed 13.4 percent budget increase for the Energy Department's semiautonomous atomic weapons organization, the National Nuclear Security Administration, constitutes the largest relative plus-up among all federal agencies for the new fiscal year.

The NNSA funding boost would apply to a variety of initiatives, including efforts to secure "loose nukes" around the world. However, a substantial portion of the 2011 hike would go toward "weapons activities," which under the Obama budget would receive a hefty $7 billion. These funds are to be used for building up laboratory and production facilities, and ensuring the safety and reliability of the stockpile.

Using the funds, the Obama administration plans to take a variety of approaches toward modernizing the existing arsenal. It has left open the possibility of employing controversial methods such as replacing warheads or their components, or reusing them in new ways, according to policies laid out in the Nuclear Posture Review (see GSN, April 7).

Critics have raised concerns that such warhead modifications could open the door to new nuclear capabilities, infuriating some non-nuclear nations that have promised not to acquire new weapons of their own. Some observers say updates to existing warhead designs could also increase the risk of their malfunction, in the absence of underground testing. The United States has observed a voluntary moratorium on nuclear explosive tests since the early 1990s, which Obama has said he intends to honor.

Conservative and liberal pundits alike widely see the large NNSA funding boost and the steps to embrace of Bush-era warhead-overhaul methods as White House concessions aimed at cultivating Republican support for Obama's more left-leaning nuclear treaties.

Vice President Joseph Biden described the administration's thinking in a February speech at National Defense University.

"Guaranteeing our stockpile, coupled with broader research and development efforts, allows us to pursue deep nuclear reductions without compromising our security," he said.

Yet, peace activists are far from convinced that this tactic will work politically and, in any case, are dismayed at the long-term price they believe will be exacted.

"The budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies," said Andrew Lichterman, an attorney associated with Cabasso's foundation, citing a remark originally attributed decades ago to socialist economist Rudolf Goldscheid.

"I am not quite so willing to draw happy conclusions about the intentions of the Obama administration until I see them reflected in budgets," Lichterman said.

"This circle can't be squared," Cabasso agreed.

She raised the possibility that a future president -- one possibly more conservative than Obama -- would take full advantage of the nuclear complex investments that today's White House is making.

"There are very long planning horizons here in terms of budgetary increases projected over the next five years and beyond," she said. "Which means that if the infrastructure is being beefed up, then the next president -- President [Sarah] Palin perhaps ... [or] somebody whose ideological views are very similar -- that president is going to have enhanced capacities."

To head off such an outcome, the disarmament supporters envision a global populist campaign that forces governments in new directions. They voiced distaste for the political jockeying that many in Washington see as necessary for incremental progress toward long-term objectives.

Cabasso described a meeting earlier this year between the mayor of Hiroshima, a nuclear abolitionist, and Capitol Hill aides from both parties in which all sides agreed that depicting the New START accord as a step toward disarmament would hurt its prospects for Senate ratification.

"My experience in that meeting was it was like meeting with the mafia," she said. "They had a made a deal and that was the deal. I don't really see much prospect for any short-term progress until we build a social movement that demands it."

Lichterman echoed that view.

"We need bigger, broader social movements that can change the political conditions under which disarmament might occur," he said. "Our job is to change the boundaries of political possibility, not to cut the deals or to try to anticipate what deals can be cut."

Disarmament advocates are looking to form new coalitions that broaden the appeal of activism against nuclear weapons, they said. The mission statement used for the Sunday march and rally here encapsulated this approach.

"Nuclear disarmament should serve as the leading edge of a global trend towards demilitarization and redirection of resources to meet human needs and restore the environment," the activists stated.

"I think it is possible to be too caught up in the microanalysis of these big, powerful, dangerous [governmental and research] institutions -- so mesmerized and fascinated by the ways in which they work -- that we don't see the bigger opportunities in the wider political sphere," said Colin Archer, secretary general of the International Peace Bureau, who attended the panel discussion.

To spur spending shifts away from military research and development, as one example, Archer proposed that the disarmament crowd start a dialogue with "the green economy -- the people who are involved in creating new jobs, people who are involved in creating ... what's becoming the dominant intellectual paradigm."

The efforts at coalition-building between those with security, environmental and economic interests have already attracted new partners, including the International Trade Union Confederation, which helped collect millions of signatures on a petition calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons by 2020, Cabasso noted.

"That needs to be the demand," she said. "We want abolition, we want it now, and we are not going to get hung up on these steps that will make it harder and harder to get there."