1.
Goodman:
We’re on the road broadcasting from the studios of Okto Community Television here in the
historic city of Vienna, capital of Austria, in the heart of Europe. It was
five years ago that President Obama was in the neighboring country, the Czech
Republic, for a major address in Prague where he called for a world free from
nuclear weapons.
2.
Obama:
So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s
commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. [Skip.]
First, the United States will take concrete steps towards a world without
nuclear weapons. To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of
nuclear weapons in our national security strategy and urge others to do the
same. Make no mistake: As long as these weapons exist, the United
States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any
adversary and guarantee that defense to our allies, including the Czech
Republic. But we will begin the work of reducing our arsenal. To reduce our
warheads and stockpiles, we will negotiate a new strategic arms reduction
treaty with the Russians this year. [Skip.] To achieve a global ban on nuclear
testing, my administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S.
ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. After more
than five decades of talks, it is time for the testing of nuclear weapons to
finally be banned.
3.
Goodman:
Well, that
was April 2009. Later that year, President
Obama’s disarmament efforts were cited when he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
[Bully for that nigger.] Since then, the United States has failed to
meet its nuclear promises. In fact, a recent New York Times investigation found the United
States is on pace to spend as much as $1 trillion over the next three decades
to rebuild its nuclear arsenal and facilities. As of 2013, the Federation of
American Scientists estimates Russia has about—a stockpile of about 8,000
nuclear warheads, while the U.S. has about 7,300. Meanwhile, this
week, more than 150 countries at the United Nations signed a Joint Statement on
the Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons—nearly 80 percent of the body’s
member states. It cited the “catastrophic effects” of a nuclear weapon
detonation, whether by accident or design, and said, quote, “The only way to
guarantee that nuclear weapons will never be used again is through their total
elimination.” The statement also called on nuclear powers to attend the third
Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons scheduled this
December here in Vienna, Austria. The United States has yet to attend one of
the meetings. Well, for more, we’re joined here in Vienna by Elena Sokova,
executive director of the
Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation. Elena, we
welcome you to Democracy Now!
4.
Sokova:
Thank you for inviting me.
5.
Goodman:
There is not a tremendous amount of attention on nuclear weapons. You know,
there’s a great deal of attention, for example, on the threat of ISIS in Syria
and Iraq. But behind the scenes—I mean, this exposé in The New York Times
was quite stunning, the difference between what President Obama was saying just
next door here, in the Czech Republic, in 2009 about a nuclear-free world and
what is actually happening.
6.
Sokova:
You’re right that the promises and the announcements made in 2009 in Prague
really elevated hopes of people around the world that we’re seriously
approaching and dealing with the nuclear weapons and their reductions. But the
recent requests from Pentagon and Congress, that President Obama yet to decide
upon, project the U.S. arsenal upgrades and modernizations into 40, 50 years
from now. Is that the wrong message to send? If you’re
going down the goal of Global Zero, elimination of weapons, you’re not spending
one trillion of dollars into upgrading your nuclear arsenal. No one says
that nuclear weapons should be completely abandoned and not kept safe and
secure. But nevertheless, there are a number of these weapons that are
completely obsolete: Military doesn’t like them; they have no real purpose.
Some of them are, for example, nuclear bombs, gravity bombs, that used on—by
heavy bombers as delivery systems. They haven’t been really factored into many
of the even military scenarios.
7.
Goodman:
Explain what “Global Zero” is.
8.
Sokova:
Global Zero is
a goal of getting down to zero nuclear weapons. Of course, even president in
his speech said that is a long road, and it’s a tedious road, and expected many
bumps in this road. But if we are not working towards that goal, if we are not
pushing, we are not agreeing on concrete steps to, first, reducing nuclear
weapons significantly and then eliminating them, then how do we reach that
Global Zero goal? And speaking here from Europe, some of these modernizations
and upgrades really don’t make sense. Some of the—the only weapons that U.S.
has outside of its border are in Europe. These are the same B-61 gravity bombs
that are located in five countries in Europe, literally next door—Italy,
Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey. It’s 180 bombs that have no,
really, mission here in Europe or in the U.S.
9.
Goodman:
In 2012,
three peace activists infiltrated a U.S. nuclear facility that holds more than
400 tons of highly enriched uranium, enough to fuel more than 10,000 nuclear
warheads. It was a house painter, a Vietnam vet and an 82-year-old nun
who broke into the Y-12 nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and cut holes
in the fence to paint peace slogans. And they also threw blood on the wall.
This is Sister Megan
Rice speaking about the action in an interview with The Tennessean.
10.
Rice:
The appropriate thing was to bring the truth, express the truth, in a way that
we could do as quickly as we could and as clearly and as starkly. So we used
symbols. Then we also brought the sacred element or symbol of human blood,
because so much blood has been shed or would be shed by any of the weapons that
would be either refurbished or refined or continue to be built, and hopefully
never to be used, but as a stark reminder.
11.
Goodman:
Sister Megan Rice received a nearly three-year sentence for her actions, and
the other two activists involved were sentenced to five years in prison. Their
actions prompted the facility to shut down for two weeks and led to
congressional hearings about vulnerability of nuclear material. Recent reports show the price tag for renovations to
buildings that process uranium at the Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee has
soared from $6.5 billion to $19 billion. Elena Sokova, what about these
kind of actions and what they show?
12.
Sokova:
These actions and the fact that three activists could
break into the so-called Fort Knox of the U.S., which houses highly enriched
uranium, the material that goes into the nuclear weapons, demonstrates that
there are risks and vulnerabilities. And the only way to eliminate these
risks is to go down the road and eliminating the weapons and materials for
them. And that is a bigger goal. And even if the U.S. has problems with
securing some of these top-secret facilities housing them, what about the rest
of the world?
13.
Goodman:
I also want to turn Eric
Schlosser, the author of Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the
Illusion of Safety. During
an interview on Democracy Now!,
he described one of several nuclear “near misses” on American soil.
14.
Schlosser:
One of
the most significant near misses occurred just three days after John F. Kennedy
was inaugurated. A B-52 bomber broke apart in the sky over North Carolina, and
as it was breaking apart, the centrifugal forces affecting the plane pulled a
lanyard in the cockpit, which released one of the hydrogen bombs that it was
carrying. And the weapon behaved as though it had been released over the Soviet
Union, over an enemy target deliberately. And it went through all of its arming
stages, except one. And there was one switch that prevented it from detonating
in North Carolina. And that switch later was found to be defective and would
never be put into a plane today. Stray electricity in the bomber as it was disintegrating
could have detonated the bomb.
15.
Goodman:
Eric
Schlosser also noted that in 2010, 50 U.S. nuclear missiles suddenly went
offline and were unable to communicate with launch control centers for about an
hour due to a computer malfunction. Elena Sokova, if you could
comment?
16.
Sokova:
What Eric Schlosser described in his book are not the only cases when we almost
had near uses or near misses, where nuclear weapons were almost launched
because something else was mistaken for the incoming nuclear missiles. There is
a recent study
published by the Chatham House in London that describes additional cases. And
what it demonstrates, that there are vulnerabilities, there are risks, and risk
is more than zero, and how we can afford not dealing with this problem of
nuclear weapons and the reduction and elimination, if this risk indeed exists.
And it’s larger than we thought. All these cases that are now become public
demonstrates that we didn’t know about it, and we were really fortunate not to
have these incidents happen. Sometimes it’s just a human decision that said that “I cannot
believe the data on the radar. I better not do a false alarm.” But how we, as a
humankind, we can rely always on these decisions? That’s why
the conferences that will be held in Vienna here in December, on December 8 and
9, on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, it will look not only at what
are the impacts, short- and long-term, of the weapons on health, on
environment, on the food security, on the climate change. But most importantly,
it will also look at what the risks are, how vulnerable we are, and how we can
deal with that risk, and what if indeed a miscalculation happened or an
accident happened, or even premeditated. We speak about nuclear terrorism and
other problems. There is no adequate response that we can have. The
International Red Cross conducted studies a couple of years ago where they say
even a limited, a one nuclear weapon detonation would put severe stress on the
whole response system, on medical personnel, on how do you even go and help the
individuals who have been under radiation and burns suffering there, because
you cannot even move in. Your infrastructure is shattered by the explosion, as
well.
17.
Goodman:
Finally, in the editorial
in The New York Times that accompanied this big exposé
on how President Obama, despite his promises in 2009 next door in Czech
Republic, has now spent—invested tens of billions of dollars in rebuilding
America’s nuclear arsenal, yet, they say, “after good
progress in making nuclear bomb material more secure around the world, [Mr.]
Obama has reduced his budget requests for that priority.” The significance of
this, both increasing the money that’s going into developing nuclear weapons,
but then cutting back on securing the nuclear weapons around the world that we
have?
18.
Sokova:
Well, I think the message is clear, that we really need to follow the
priorities that we announced, and that the priorities identified in the Prague
agenda were to deal with the elimination of nuclear weapons and risks. Securing
nuclear materials is very important, and the funding need to be continued.
There are more places in the world that we need still to clean up these
materials, and we want to make sure that even the weapons that are remained are
kept secure.
19.
Goodman:
Is the U.S. attending the December conference?
20.
Sokova:
That, we don’t know yet. We really hope that they will,
that the U.S. will attend—hopefully, other countries will do, as well—because
U.S. probably one of the countries that know more than anyone else about the
effects. It
used their nuclear weapons, the only country that ever used their nuclear
weapons. It has an, you know, abundance of data from the nuclear testing and
could really contribute to the discussion. What the conference and
this humanitarian approach is trying to do is to look at the issue of nuclear
weapons not from the security, strategic security viewpoint that has been on
the agenda for a long time; it looks at the issue from the humankind
perspective of what are we dealing with, can we cope with this, what are the
risks, and why don’t we turn table around and look at as an entire humankind,
not only the countries that have nuclear weapons.
21.
Goodman:
Well, Elena Sokova, I want to thank you so much for being with us, executive
director of the
Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation right here in
Vienna, Austria. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War
and Peace Report. As negotiations around Iran and their nuclear facilities
go on here in Vienna, one former U.N. weapons inspector, Robert Kelley, is
raising questions about what Western officials are saying about Iran. Stay with
us.
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