核武器

dream0619UID: 2369435

These are strong words, to be sure, but justifiably so when seen in the context of the new doctrine of preemptive war propagated by the United States, which should more accurately be called preventive war. Let me examine with you the connection between this new doctrine and nuclear weapons.
The advent of nuclear and other sophisticated weapons has dramatically increased the degree of potential harm, and the importance of the temporal factor has diminished. Weapons of mass destruction threaten devastating and indiscriminate long-term damage to large segments of the civilian population and environment.? Professor Ruth Wedgwood of John Hopkins University uses President Kennedy handling of the Cuban missile crisis as a precedent for President Bush抯 action last spring. he introduction of nuclear weapons into Cuba? She writes, educing Soviet launch time to seven minutes, would have destroyed any adequate interval for the assessment of nuclear warnings,? Thus justifying the United States in imposing a defensive quarantine.
I submit to you that they are the characteristics of by far the most destructive weapon in the history of warfare, i.e. the nuclear bomb.
The mere invocation of the threat of nuclear weapons, whether delivered by plane, by missile or by suitcase, tends to freeze the mind and cut off discussion. But because the preemptive war doctrine is couched in broad and vague terms it will, I am afraid, spread like nuclear fallout to the four corners of the earth and be used in the future to justify so called defensive wars, whether based on an alleged nuclear threat or some other threat.
When the Non-Proliferation Treaty was done in London, Moscow and Washington in 1968, its Article VI required each party to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament? In other words, NPT a deal between the then existed five nuclear weapons powers - the US, the UK, France, China and the Soviet Union - and the rest of the world. If you, said the five, agree not to develop or acquire nukes, we agree in good faith to give them up.
When the nuclear weapons case on the illegality of the threat and use of nuclear weapons went to the International Court of Justice in 1994, the Court two years later rendered a split advisory opinion that the threat and use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law, but concluded unanimously that here exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.?
Professor Saul Mendlovitz maintains that nuclear weapons will never be abolished until we abolish war first. And I reply that it is the other way around; war will never be abolished so long as nuclear weapons have not been effectively banned and eliminated. If he were here today, I would offer him my latest piece of evidence. In the May 2003 issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz, the US Undersecretary of Defense who is credited with being the intellectual instigator of the war against Iraq, is quoted as saying that "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."
Here then is the ultimate paradox of nuclear deterrence: The weapon that is supposed only to dissuade countries from going to war is turning into a, if not the, major reason for countries to go to war.