Speech by Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat at the launch of the WMD Awareness Programme
LONDON 23 September 2004
Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat
“Thank you very much Caroline for your very kind introduction. Ladies and Gentleman, Friends, as a member of the Campaign to raise Awareness among the public, relating to weapons of mass destruction and particularly in relation to nuclear weapons, I see it as my task to answer two questions.
Why now? And, why Gorbachev? I will answer the questions in reverse order; after all, my main task is to introduce President Gorbachev. I believe that Mikhail Sergeyevich is the most underrated statesman of the Post War era. I have an immense respect and admiration for him and gratitude for what he has done for us. I feel it would be no exaggeration to say that he saved our civilisation. It is now 15 years since the end of the Cold War, which lasted for about four decades. Since that time a large number of people, we have some present here, have come of voting age, and for many of them the call to war is already fading into an episode of history, something which we learn at school in history lessons. It must be very difficult for them to imagine the great dangers of the nuclear arms race during the Cold War. The two great powers at the time, the United States of America and the Soviet Union, were engaged in a relentless race building up unbelievably huge nuclear arsenals. At one time, it amounted to a total of more than 100,000 nuclear warheads, each of which had a destructive power much larger than the Hiroshima bomb. If all these weapons and arsenals had been detonated, the result would have been, not only the end of our civilisation, but possibly also the end of humankind.
But despite these huge arsenals neither side felt secure, and the military establishment, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, employed scientists who kept on inventing new means of improving the weapons on their own side, trying to make the other side more vulnerable. And on the whole, the technologies, which were introduced, such as ballistic missiles, made it necessary for both sides to keep large numbers of warheads on hair trigger alert. And, of course, this also gave rise to the possibility of something happening by accident, miscalculation, or misadventure. At one time, a flock of geese was misinterpreted as a squadron of Soviet bombers.
But the crunch came in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan introduced the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDIs), which is popularly known as the Star Wars. In this system, a ballistic missile launched from, say, the Soviet Union against the United States, would be intercepted in flight and destroyed before reaching its target. If this technology, as was presented by President Reagan at the time, had been successful, it would have radically changed the whole balance of the concept of mutual deterrence. But President Reagan said that this would present the people of the United States with an impregnable umbrella that would stop any enemy attack against the United States. This meant that the United States would not have to worry about an attack, whilst the Soviet Union would still, of course, be vulnerable.
Now what could have been the response from the Soviet Union? With their economy stagnating and overburdened with the extremely high cost of keeping up with the nuclear arms race, the Soviet Union would not have been able to cover the cost of introducing a similar system as the Americans had done. And at that time, if a hard liner, somebody like Brechnev, had been in power, it’s quite likely that he would have tried to bring matters to a head by a pre-emptive strike before the Soviet Union became too vulnerable, thus probably provoking a Third World War, with the terrible consequences which I described earlier.
Fortunately, another type of politician in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was a politician with common sense and an open mind, who wouldn’t allow dogma to cloud his vision. And he took a momentous decision, a decision to bring the nuclear arms race to an end. But this decision was much more far-reaching than just bringing the arms race to an end. It also brought to an end a whole political system, indeed in brought the Soviet Union to an end. This revolution was epitomised by two Russian words which became, for a time, household words in many countries, “perestroika” and “glasnost”. “Perestroika” – a complete change in the economic system – and “glasnost” – openness – something which had not been known in the Soviet Union for many decades.
This was a revolution that was bound to bring dire consequences to the author of these proposals. Mikhail Gorbachev knew very well that he would have to pay a very heavy price for his audacity, and indeed, as you know, he was removed from power. But even so, as you’ve heard from the introduction, he is still very active in all matters relating to peace and security in the world. In his book Perestroika he said that one should not base the security of one’s own nation in terms which spell out insecurity to other nations. This is the principle of global security, and he is the man who introduced it. You could hardly have had a better person to come to talk to us tonight than Mikhail Gorbachev, a man of enormous courage. Ladies and Gentleman, on your behalf, I extend a very warm welcome to our main guest, Mikhail Gorbachev.
I now have to answer the second question. Why now? And the single answer is, of course, any time is now, when you deal with an ongoing problem of such dimensions as the existence of nuclear weapons. But it’s not so simple, because one consequence of the Cold War coming to an end was that the public in general conceived that this was also the end of the nuclear threat. Many opinion polls showed a very large drop in the proportion of people who thought that the nuclear issue was something which should still stand, be on the agenda of serious problems facing mankind. Many people have told me that, in fact, even now, raising the nuclear issue, no one would listen to me: the public is no longer interested in it. I do raise the issue because I believe that the problem cannot be solved by pretending that it does not exist. One cannot cure a disease by a resolve not to talk about it. On the contrary, you have to talk about it and have an early diagnosis, which is the best chance for cure.
In the case of the nuclear disease, there was a very bad turn for the worse about four years ago with the nuclear policies introduced by President George W. Bush. Until that time, nuclear weapons, while they were still in the arsenals, were seen as a weapon of last resort, to be used only if everything else had been tried and failed. And in the meantime, there was a resolve that the ultimate objective was the abolition of all nuclear weapons, and this is enshrined in a treaty which came into force in 1968, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which by now has been signed by 188 nations. This is nearly universal agreement, and the treaty makes it quite clear, in Article Six, that all those nations who signed the treaty have agreed that the only way to deal with nuclear weapons is by their abolition. This has been confirmed and reaffirmed several times. But all this has changed with the nuclear posture of George W. Bush. According to his policies, nuclear weapons have become a weapon of first use. They are now being treated like any ordinary type of explosives, to be used in any conflict, perhaps even pre-emptively if need be.
This is the policy, which we now face. President Bush, of course, always claims that he is against proliferation, but actually his policies are a seed for proliferation. If a country like the United States, the largest, richest country economically and militarily, if the United States feels that it needs nuclear weapons for its security, how can you deny such security to nations which are really insecure. And the decision that only George W. Bush and America, and the nations that are friendly to the United States, can keep nuclear weapons for their security, is a prescription for proliferation, and this has created a very dangerous situation. But the only way I can see we can survive is to abide by a treaty which has been signed, as I said, by 188 nations including all the overt nuclear weapon states. They signed it solemnly and legally and they are committed to this policy, and, by denying this policy, they have violated an international treaty which is the basis of a civilised world. If we don’t abide by treaties, then we will pass into anarchy.
We talk a great deal nowadays about terrorism. Of course, quite rightly, we are worried about this. Is there a link between having nuclear weapons and terrorism? Does the possession of nuclear weapons help in reducing the danger of terrorism? Well the answer of course is “No.” On the contrary, it increases the dangers of terrorism, because as long as nuclear weapons are in the arsenals, sooner or later Al Qaeda, or some other terrorist group, will get hold of a weapon, or the materials to make it, and, should this happen, then the tragic events of 9/11 will just fade into insignificance because the horror will be a hundred times greater than what we have seen so far.
There is another aspect of terrorism, which relates to nuclear weapons. At the present time we live in a culture of violence because we are basing our security on the threat of the use of the worst type of weapon that scientists can invent. How can we ask the young generation to abide by a culture of peace, if they know that this peace is predicated on the existence of weapons of mass destruction? If we want to get rid of terrorism, we must also get rid, change our culture, the culture of violence, which permeates society in almost every walk of life.
I believe, Ladies and Gentlemen, that in this nuclear age, in this world in which we more and more rely on each other, in the interdependent world in which we can no longer afford to go to war, we must learn to seek to solve our disputes by negotiations, by peaceful means. We have got to establish a culture of peace. If we want peace, we have to prepare for peace, and this needs education – education at every level – and it is about this that our campaign is concerned, and I hope it will be successful. Thank you very much.”
ENDS
