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WHAT'S NEW IN INES? |
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No.42/2001 |
Dateline: October 28, 2001 |
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This is the weekly electronic information service of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility
Editor: Tobias Damjanov, e-mail:
WNII is archived at: http://inesglobal.org/archive.htm
INES homepages: http://inesglobal.org http://www.inesglobal.com/
INES International Office
INES Chair: Prof. Armin Tenner [Please note that the first "1" in q18 is the number one, while the last "l" is an "L"]
CONTENTS of WNII No. 42/2001
MEMBERSHIP AND PROJECTS' NEWS
David Krieger: Building Peace From The Ashes
President Bush has described the September 11th terrorist attacks as a new kind of war, one that requires a new way of thinking. The shock of these attacks has awakened Americans and people throughout the world to the need for a new way of thinking. But what should this new way of thinking consist of? I would like to suggest some elements.
First, we must recognize that we are all vulnerable, and our vulnerability is interconnected. No one on the planet can escape into a fortress of security. So long as people anywhere are insecure, the potential exists for making people everywhere insecure.
Therefore, the United States, as the worlds most economically and militarily powerful nation, must dedicate itself to helping assure the security of people everywhere, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinians.
Second, we must understand that military power can only have limited results in a war against terrorism. Terrorists are difficult to locate and do not occupy a fixed territory like a nation. Finding terrorists will be more dependent upon good intelligence than military operations. Such intelligence will require global cooperation. It is not something the United States can hope to do alone.
Therefore, the United States must strengthen its ties with the rest of the world through diplomacy. We must maintain an ongoing global alliance in the fight against terrorism. This will require the United States to be a good global citizen and to join other nations in efforts to achieve global cooperation in such areas as supporting the law of the sea, preventing global warming, banning landmines, banning illegal transfers of small arms, banning nuclear tests, establishing an international criminal court, providing verification procedures for the Biological Weapons Convention, and fulfilling our obligations for the global elimination of nuclear arms.
Third, we need to abandon Cold War thinking and policies such as nuclear deterrence and deployment of missile shields. These policies are utterly useless against small groups of extremists prepared to use any instrument at their disposal, even box cutters, to attack the United States.
Therefore, the United States should stop spending obscene amounts of money on military might, such as on our bloated nuclear arsenal and on missile defenses. Rather, we should allocate our resources to providing better intelligence to protect the American people, to eliminating stores of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in our country and throughout the world, and to improving the lives of people in the poorest countries who suffer each day for lack of basic necessities or from brutal government policies.
The United States needs to be a beacon of hope throughout the world based on our active support of democracy, human rights, and the alleviation of the conditions of poverty for all the worlds people.
The new way of thinking that is now needed could lead us to a new way of Peace. Our challenge and opportunity, as we grapple with the aftermath of September 11th, is to build peace from the ashes, helping to construct a culture of peace worldwide that will make terrorism unimaginable, undesirable and unacceptable to every citizen of the planet.
Alberto Salazar Martínez: A New World Order
Mexican WNII reader Alberto Salazar Martínez sent the following:
Dear friends, I am convinced peace and prosperity can only be achieved with a minimum of ethical principles. Take a look at Wilson's 14 points for World Peace (1919) whose spirit gives us a conceptual basis to understand how the USA (&G7) have moved away from these principles and therefore did not got to the world leadership that Wilson envisioned. You will see a document made after World War I, a jewel of the liberal thought signaling a different foreign policy based not on the balance/counterbalance of power but on self-determination and decolonisation; where security is not supposed to depend on military alliances but establishing a collective security; where diplomacy is not seen to be ruled by obscure hands but based on open and democratic agreements. Compare this kind of attitude with the current Bush administration in order to come out with plans towards Peace.
You can find the documents in:
Best regards, Fis. Alberto Salazar Martínez < > Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM
SPECIAL SECTION ON US MISSILE DEFENSE POLICY
"Missile defense and space war do not provide security against terror"
This is the title of a speech given by Dr Juergen Scheffran, leading member of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation (INESAP), at a major national anti-war demonstration in Berlin on 13 October. It is available in German or English language (revised translation by the author) from the WNII Editor as an rtf-formatted email attachment.
Abolition 2000 homepage: http://www.abolition2000.org Grassroots News: http://www.napf.org/abolition2000/news/
2002 NPT PrepCom
According to an agreement of the UN General Assembly's First Committee, the 2002 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee meeting [for the 2005 NPT Review Conference] would be held April 8-19, 2002, in New York with Ambassador Henrik Salander of Sweden as Chair.
(Source: Felicity Hill, Director, WILPF UN Office)
David Krieger: Nuclear Weapons and Homeland Security
Nuclear weapons do not make us safer. They make us less secure.
The greatest vulnerability of the United States and the rest of the industrialized world is not to terrorists who hijack planes or disperse biological agents. It is to terrorists with nuclear weapons.
September 11th was a shocking reminder of the futility of relying on nuclear weapons for security. Nuclear weapons cannot deter a suicidal terrorist, but a suicidal terrorist with nuclear weapons could destroy the United States.
US nuclear policies make it more likely that terrorists will be able to attack the United States with nuclear weapons. In general, the US has pursued a nuclear weapons policy of Do as I say, not as I do. We have set the wrong example for the world, continuing to rely upon nuclear weapons long after the end of the Cold War.
The US has slowed the process of nuclear disarmament, leaving many thousands of nuclear weapons potentially available to terrorists. If we want to prevent a nuclear holocaust by terrorist nuclear bombs in American cities, the US must take leadership in a global effort to bring all nuclear weapons and nuclear materials under control. This will require significant policy changes.
To gain control of nuclear weapons, the numbers of nuclear weapons in the world must be dramatically reduced. Numbers need to be brought down from the over 30,000 currently in the arsenals of the US and Russia to far more reasonable numbers capable of being effectively controlled in each of the eight nuclear weapons states, on the way to zero.
The numbers being discussed by the Bush administration of 2,000 to 2,500 strategic nuclear weapons are far too high and will send a signal to the world that the US is not serious about nuclear disarmament. The Russians have already proposed many times joint reductions to 1,500 strategic nuclear weapons. Even this number is too high. Just one of these weapons in the hands of terrorists could do immeasurable damage.
To gain control of nuclear materials, a global inventory of all nuclear weapons and materials must be established immediately. We must know what nuclear materials exist in order to establish a rational plan to guard and eliminate them.
All nuclear weapons should immediately be taken off hair-trigger alert and policies of launch on warning should be abandoned. The US and Russia still have some 4,500 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. This is an accidental nuclear holocaust waiting to happen, particularly given the gaping holes in the post Cold War Russian early warning system. Smart and determined terrorists could potentially trick one of the nuclear weapons states into believing it was being attacked by another nuclear weapons state, leading to retaliatory strikes by one nuclear power against another.
The US should forego its plan to build a national missile defense system, and reallocate these funds to more immediate security risks. US deployment of a national missile defense will lead Russia and China to rely more heavily on their nuclear arsenals and to develop them further. No so-called rogue state currently has nuclear weapons or long-range missiles capable of reaching the United States. Nor could a national missile defense system protect us from terrorists.
The US should rejoin the international community in supporting a treaty framework to control and eliminate nuclear weapons. We should fulfill our treaty obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for good faith negotiations to eliminate all nuclear weapons. We should stop threatening to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. We should honor the Outer Space Treaty, and stop seeking to weaponize outer space. We should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and move forward with START III negotiations. Finally, we must stop putting up obstacles to nuclear disarmament in the United Nations and its Disarmament Commission, and instead actively assist them in their efforts.
Since September 11th, the US government has made only one change in our nuclear weapons policy. It removed the sanctions on India and Pakistan that were put in place in response to their testing nuclear weapons in 1998. That change was a move in the wrong direction, away from nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.
President Bush made campaign promises, which he has reiterated since assuming office, to move forward with unilateral reductions and de-alerting of our nuclear arsenal. But unilateral actions are not sufficient.
The US must lead the way in bringing all nuclear weapons states to act swiftly and resolutely in dramatically reducing all nuclear arsenals and assuring that no nuclear weapons or materials fall into the hands of terrorists. If the US fails to provide this leadership, efforts to achieve homeland security could fail even more spectacularly than they did on September 11th.
2002 Word Summit on Sustainable Development: Listserver for Webmanagers
There is an increasing number of web-sites being developed for the Johannesburg Summit 2002. These web-sites represent the activities of a number of different stakeholder groups, UN agencies and governments.
In order to better integrate and co-ordinate our joint efforts ANPED, the Dutch-based Northern Alliance for Sustainability and the UK-based UNED Forum have created a listserver for web-managers. The purpose is for the group to communicate online developments, share resources and increase awareness, through their sites, of the 2002 process.
To join, please inform one of the owners of this list: either Toby Middleton (UNED Forum): < >
or Ronald Visser (ANPED): < >
NOTE: This listserver is really for webmanagers, it will NOT contain any information on political processes, statements, etc, nor will there be strategy discussions. If you want to subscribe, please inform which website you are managing.
2002 Word Summit on Sustainable Development: Summaries of recent Preparatory Conferences
5th Conference on the UN Convention to Combat Desertification
The Fifth Conference of the Parties (COP-5) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD) took place at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1-13 October 2001. Attended by delegates from over 150 Parties, eight observer States, 15 UN agencies and relevant organizations, and 17 intergovernmental organizations, as well as numerous non-governmental organizations, COP-5 focused on setting the modalities of work for the two-year interval before the next COP, scheduled for October 2003.
As with other conferences, the "Earth Negotiations Bulletin" has again made available an extensive coverage of this event, publishing detailed reports in 11 consecutive bulletin issues (Vol. 4 No. 150 - 160). These reports are available from the WNII Editor as an rtf-formatted email attachment.
Also, you can find a daily conference coverage at: http://www.iisd.ca/desert/cop5/
Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer: 13th Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol
The 13th Meeting of the Parties (MOP-13) to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer convened in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from 16-19 October 2001. The meeting was attended by 325 participants from 108 countries, representing governments, UN agencies, and international and non-governmental organizations.
A preparatory segment was held from 16-17 October, followed by a high-level segment from 18-19 October. MOP-13 adopted decisions on, inter alia: the terms of reference (TOR) for a study on the 2003-2005 replenishment of the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol; an evaluation and review of the performance of the Protocol's financial mechanism; a review of the Multilateral Fund's fixed-exchange-rate mechanism; Parties' compliance; procedures for assessing the ozone-depleting potential (ODP) of new substances; expedited procedures for adding new substances to the Protocol; chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) production for metered-dose inhalers (MDIs); monitoring of international trade and prevention of illegal trade in ozone-depleting substances (ODS) and mixtures and products containing ODS; and the budget of the Trust Fund. MOP-13 also adopted the Colombo Declaration and took note of a Pacific Island Country Declaration.
The focus of MOP-13 was on the implementation of existing commitments, rather than the negotiation of new provisions. MOP-13 marked the first opportunity to review compliance by developing countries with their initial ODS controls, thus quietly launching a new era in the regime.
Again, the "Earth Negotiations Bulletin" has made available an extensive coverage of this event including a brief history of the Ozone Regime, publishing detailed reports in 5 consecutive bulletin issues (Vol. 19 No. 13 - 170). These reports are available from the WNII Editor as an rtf-formatted email attachment.
Also, you can find a daily conference coverage at: http://www.iisd.ca/linkages/ozone/mop13/
UNEP IETC's "Insight" October issue
The October 2001 edition of "Insight", the newsletter from the UN Environment Programme's International Environmental Technology Centre (UNEP IETC) is now available online at: http://www.unep.or.jp/ietc/Publications/Insight/Oct-01/Oct-01.pdf
Subjects covered include:
(Source: James Sniffen < >, 25 Oct 01]
CONFERENCES, MEETINGS, SEMINARS
17th World Congress of Soil Science (WCSS) http://www.17wcss.ku.ac.th
For more details, contact: Secretariat, 17th WCSS: < >
International Conference on Sustainable Agriculture for Dry Areas for the Second Millennium http://res2.agr.ca/lethbridge/hebei/confindex.htm
For more details, contact: Catherine Vachon, Lethbridge Research Center, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada: < >
No new or changed email or web addresses in this issue. All INES e-mail addresses and homepages are available upon request from:
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