An Iowa Nuclear Disarmament Primer, Part 1

Many of us were sleeping when President Obama addressed nuclear disarmament to a crowd in Prague on April 5, 2009. It seems the whole United States has been asleep regarding nuclear disarmament. Whatever your politics, we should be ready to say that our nuclear weapons are no longer on high alert and that we have backed away from being an hour away from launching an attack that would end life as we know it on earth. President Obama has taken to this idea and the Prague speech is where he articulated his policy. It is time to wake up and smell the plutonium! In a series of posts on Blog for Iowa, I will address the history and legislative aspects of implementation of the Obama nuclear disarmament policy.

A reason many of us may not recently have been focusing on nuclear disarmament is that the George W. Bush administration was not in favor of disarmament. In fact, the Bush Administration was in favor of new U.S. nuclear weapons and delivery systems. During the last two years of the Bush administration, they proposed reliable replacement weapons to keep the U. S. nuclear arsenal moving forward in technology, a multi-decade plan to upgrade the bombers and submarines that launch nuclear weapons, a deal with India to provide nuclear technology and through the efforts of Ambassador John Bolton, attempted to remove the United States’ signature from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In contrast, President Obama brings what we hope will be change we can believe in to the United States nuclear disarmament discussion: a path to zero nuclear weapons in the world.

On Tuesday, September 22, former Ambassador Nancy Soderberg described nuclear disarmament as an “alphabet soup” of treaties and agreements to the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council. There is the LTBT (Limited Test Ban Treaty), the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), NPR (Nuclear Posture Review), the CTBT (Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty) and many more. In a series of posts on Blog for Iowa I will discuss these treaties as they relate to nuclear disarmament and follow the legislative climate for ratification of the New START Treaty between Russia and the United States and the CTBT. Let’s start with the NPT.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was proposed by Ireland and Finland and signed first by these countries in 1968.  The NPT has three basic tenants: non-proliferation, disarmament, and the right of sovereign nations to peacefully use nuclear technology. It is in force with 189 of the 193 countries in the world with India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea being non-signatory. North Korea signed the treaty, but withdrew in 2003. Of the 189 countries that have signed the NPT, five possess nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom. Originally, the NPT was intended to be a 25 year treaty, and during the 1995 NPT review conference in New York, the signing parties to the treaty agreed to extend the treaty indefinitely and without conditions. The NPT is reviewed every five years by parties to the treaty and a series of preparatory meetings is being held before the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Conference in New York.

The significance of the NPT is that most nations have signed it. The four who have not, each assert their sovereignty and their desire to equip a nuclear weapons arsenal for defense purposes. During the Bush administration, it appears that little was been done to bring these four states into the world community and sign the NPT. The current administration sees the value of getting to zero nuclear weapons, and even though the four non-signatory states have a relatively small number of nuclear weapons compared to the United States and Russia, their participation in the NPT is important.  My next post will be about nuclear weapons testing.

In the meantime, I suggest you to learn more about the Obama administration nuclear disarmament initiative by viewing the Prague speech.

~Paul Deaton is a native Iowan living in rural Johnson County.  Check out his blog, Big Grove Garden.    E-mail Paul Deaton