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	Demand a Bullet Proof Arms Control Treaty by Control Arms & agencies   March 2011   Much of the weaponry used against peaceful protestors in the Middle East and North Africa has been supplied by foreign governments who should know better. There are international treaties to regulate the sale of dinosaur bones and postage stamps - but not the $400+ billion dollar international arms trade that fuels war and conflict every year.   Demand a global Arms Trade Treaty and stop governments irresponsibly arming dictators and despots.   Stop arms getting into the hands of those likely to commit war crimes or grave human rights abuses, as well as those likely to use arms to exacerbate armed violence and crime, gender-based violence and poverty;   Control all arms and ammunition and their parts, and all those involved in their export and import; End the secrecy and corruption in the global arms trade; and hold governments to account.   Over the past decade, there has been growing international momentum to the various manifestations of "armed violence". To date the discourse has focused largely on the causes and effects of armed violence and explored the range of available programming options to prevent and reduce it.   Discussions on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) currently underway in the United Nations (UN) provide an important opportunity to examine armed violence in the context of decisions concerning international transfers and the export and import of conventional arms used in armed violence.   One of the objectives of the ATT is to address the "absence of common international standards on the import, export and transfer of conventional arms."   As the UN General Assembly has noted, this absence contributes to "conflict, displacement of people, crime and terrorism" thereby undermining peace, reconciliation, safety, security, stability and sustainable development."   In other words, the absence of such common international standards contributes to armed violence.   Common international standards in the ATT should require States to establish and maintain effective national regulatory mechanisms.   The ATT should also require States to licence or otherwise authorise exports and other international transfers of conventional weaponry, munitions and related equipment ("conventional arms") in conformity with an agreed list of clear criteria that take into account the potential risks stemming from such transfers.   An ATT establishing such standards and rigorous procedures will help generate consistency in national arms control regulations.   Importing States should be required to authorise imports of conventional arms into their jurisdiction. Such authorisations must be in conformity with each State"s primary responsibility to provide for the security of all persons under its jurisdiction and to promote respect for and observance of human rights as affirmed in the UN Charter and in other relevant international law.   Demand a Bullet Proof Arms Control Treaty. (Amnesty)   Today, there are no global standards controlling the international trade in conventional arms to help protect human rights. Most governments continue to permit the irresponsible trade in weapons, munitions and other military and policing equipment, inflicting misery and carnage on people in many countries.   Every year hundreds of thousands of people are killed, injured, raped and forced to flee their homes as a result of armed violence. Amnesty International’s research shows that the majority of grave human rights abuses are committed using small arms, light weapons and other military and policing equipment.   To protect human rights, governments must prevent easy access to arms, and strictly regulate their lawful uses. Armed forces and police are too often poorly trained and unaccountable when measured by international human rights standards. Opposition groups, vigilantes, criminal gangs and civilians can also easily access and misuse arms, sometimes on a massive scale. Surplus and unlawful arms need to be removed and destroyed. And new supplies must urgently be restricted.   In order to help stop irresponsible arms transfers globally, Amnesty International has joined with Oxfam and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) to set up the Control Arms campaign.   The Control Arms campaign calls for a global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) that would establish strict rules for the international transfer of arms, and hold irresponsible arms suppliers and dealers to account.   A "golden rule" is desperately needed in an ATT that would require governments to stop an arms transfer when there is a substantial risk that the arms are likely to be used for serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.   Since 2003, the Control Arms campaign has gone from strength to strength. When it was launched, we had only a handful of government supporters. Control Arms petitions gathered the support of more than one million people worldwide. Popular mobilisation coupled with smart advocacy in over 100 countries has resulted in increasingly large historic votes at the UN General Assembly in favour of developing a "strong and robust" ATT.   But what kind of Arms Trade Treaty will they agree? Formal deliberations and negotiations on the treaty text will start in July 2010 and lead to a UN conference in 2012. Will the treaty cover all types of arms transfers and contain a "golden rule”? Or will supportive governments surrender to the few sceptical powers which have opposed the treaty and who now seek to include major loopholes in the treaty?   You can join the Control Arms campaign in demanding a strong and robust ATT that will have proper rules to really help save lives, protect livelihoods and prevent further grave abuses of human rights. Visit the related web page
	Million-signature petition to end nuclear weapons goes on display at UN Headquarters by UN News & agencies   24 March 2011   A one-million signature petition from cities around the world demanding the abolition of nuclear weapons went on exhibition at United Nations Headquarters in New York today in a ceremony attended by Japanese survivors of the first and only use of the devastating bombs.   Organized by Mayors for Peace, which was founded in 1982 by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities laid waste by atomic bombs in 1945, and now counts 4,540 cities in 150 countries, the exhibition underscores the goal of transcending national borders to fight for nuclear disarmament in what Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called a “landmark occasion” that helps to build international momentum.   Together, we can rid the world of nuclear weapons and answer the call of these hibakusha, who survived a nuclear attack and dedicated themselves to making sure no one else would ever suffer the same fate   “These one million signatures demanding an end to the nuclear threat are the voice of the world’s people. This movement brings together mayors and mothers, like-minded citizens and peace groups. They all understand that nuclear weapons make us less safe, not more,” he told those present, first addressing three ‘hibakusha,’ as atomic bomb survivors are called, including one he met on a visit to Hiroshima last year.   “Everywhere I go, I will repeat my strong, consistent and clear call for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. I will carry the message of the million petitioners represented here today and the many millions more around the world seeking to end the nuclear threat. Together, we can rid the world of nuclear weapons and answer the call of these hibakusha, who survived a nuclear attack and dedicated themselves to making sure no one else would ever suffer the same fate.”   Dec 2010   Nuclear memories, by Jonathan Holmes. (ABC Online)   The WikiLeaks cables keep on coming, as do the leaks from Sweden about Julian Assange"s alleged encounters with Ms A and Ms W. But today, in the season of peace and good will, some memories are brought back by perusing just a few of those hundreds of thousands of cables - those that deal with Pakistan"s growing nuclear arsenal.   There"s the cable, for example, sent from Islamabad to Washington by US Ambassador Anne Patterson last November, and posted by The Guardian and WikiLeaks a couple of weeks back. She"s reporting on the likelihood of Pakistan agreeing to a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty that would limit its access to weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. She isn"t optimistic. In a crucial passage, she writes:   India"s growing conventional military superiority... poses a new level of threat, according to Pakistani counterparts. Indian plans and capabilities have forced Pakistan to rely more on nuclear weapons and less on conventional military capability to balance Indian force... Pakistani military planners... believe that Pakistan needs to transform its arsenal to smaller, tactical weapons that could be used on the battlefield against Indian conventional capabilities. The result of this trend is the need for greater stocks of fissile material to feed Pakistan"s nuclear weapons requirement.   More than 55 years ago, NATO planners in Western Europe, faced with the same perceived military imbalance, came up with precisely the same solution.   I know a bit about this, because for a couple of years in the mid-1980s I worked on a major documentary series, a British-American television co-production called "War and Peace in the Nuclear Age" . And one of the programs I produced* dealt with the decisions that led to thousands of so-called "tactical nuclear weapons" - carried on fighter-bombers, and short-range rockets like the Honest John missile, and even fired from a specially-developed 280mm cannon - being deployed in Western Europe in the mid-1950s.   The problem, as perceived by NATO"s planners, was simple enough. The Soviet Union was believed to have at least three times as many divisions as the Western European alliance could muster - or rather, than its population, in the aftermath of World War II, was prepared to pay for. So, in the words of one planner, US Air Force General (then a colonel) John Richardson, they looked for "a way of doing the business, a method of resisting Soviet aggression... that was affordable and did not depend upon mass".   And that meant tactical nuclear weapons. Atomic bombs to be dropped wherever the enemy forces were concentrating on the battlefield. Nuclear artillery shells to be fired 20 kilometres in front of our own armies, each one packing a bigger punch than the bomb that had wiped out Hiroshima 10 years earlier. As a British military official, Sir Richard Powell, told me: "They were accepted as being perfectly reasonable weapons to use in a tactical battle in continental Europe... I mean, the fact it would have devastated quite a large part of Germany had to be accepted."   A French strategist, Air Force General Pierre Gallois, recalled presenting the military plans to NATO governments in 1954: "Everybody said the strategy was a good one. Except the Germans".   No wonder. In June 1955, NATO forces staged Operation Carte Blanche, a full-scale war game in West Germany. In "defending" that country against a putative Soviet invasion, more than 300 notional atomic weapons were dropped in a single week. If the bombs had been real, it was estimated that a million and a half German civilians would have been killed, a further three million injured - and that"s before taking account of any radioactive fallout, or the effects of Soviet retaliation, which might well have taken the form of dropping its own small number of very large bombs on European cities.   The West Germans, utterly dependant on NATO, were not in a position to change the strategy. But in any case, General Richardson told me, it worked:   We didn"t have at that time the capability to fight effectively with nuclear weapons... But that didn"t matter, because no-one knew we didn"t, least of all the Russians, who regardless of their superiority (in conventional forces) were then forced to go back and take 10 or 20 years to figure out how to cope with this new technology and this new threat, and we bought 20 years of deterrence.   Deterrence. It"s often forgotten by those who oppose nuclear weapons (and who, outside the tiny circle of those who dealt with these appalling concepts for a living, doesn"t oppose nuclear weapons?) that nuclear deterrence did work. Against all likelihood, against the evidence of the previous half century, Europe survived the Cold War with barely a shot fired in anger. All the shots were being fired elsewhere in the world, away from the shelter of the superpowers nuclear "umbrella".   I vividly remember Pierre Gallois - a man who was regarded as one of the fathers of the French nuclear force de frappe - telling me in 1986, as hundreds of thousands were dying in the unspeakably bloody Iran-Iraq War, that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was a far more despicable exercise of racist power than the colonial empires ever were; that it was directly responsible for all those deaths.   "Do you really think," he asked me, "that if Iran and Iraq had had the ability to destroy each other"s cities with nuclear weapons, they would ever have gone to war? Of course not. But we regard them as untrustworthy children; so we sell them weapons they can use to kill each other, but refuse to let them have the weapons that would have made killing each other unthinkable." (He said this off camera, so there"s no record in the WGBH archive).   It"s a point of view, and one to bear in mind, as we read American and British diplomats pondering how to persuade the Pakistanis to give up their foolish notions about countering Indian military superiority with the threat of tactical nuclear weapons. After all, despite the fact that no conceivable existential threat to either the United States or Britain currently exists, both cling stubbornly to their own nuclear arsenals.   Of course, it"s not the appalling carnage of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan that really worries the West: nuclear deterrence is likely to work just as well on the sub-continent as it did in Europe. What keeps Western governments awake at nights is the very real possibility that fissile material, or even an actual nuclear weapon, will find its way from Pakistan"s military into the hands of the Islamist militants whose power in Pakistan is still steadily growing. People who believe that taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of infidels might be a short-cut to Paradise are not easily deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation.   But here"s some Christmas cheer for you. A nuclear device delivered by a terrorist to New York City or London might cause hundreds of thousands of deaths. A nuclear war between Pakistan and India might cause millions. But in 1961, when Robert McNamara took over as John F Kennedy"s secretary of defence, he found that the Single Integrated Operational Plan (the SIOP) drawn up by the planners of Strategic Air Command in Omaha Nebraska presented the president with but a single option in the case of nuclear war: the simultaneous delivery of around 3,000 nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union, on China, and on every nation of Eastern Europe, some of them 10 megaton hydrogen bombs, almost a thousand times more powerful than the fission bombs that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima. As one of those planners told me in 1986, the "guidance" to which he and his colleagues worked called for "severe damage" to be inflicted on most targets:   "Moderate damage", to be facetious, is gravel, "severe damage" is dust. They didn"t want it reduced to gravel, they wanted it reduced to dust." (Admiral Jerry Miller, US Navy) And that dust would have been massively radioactive.   Of course, the SIOP was one of America"s most closely-guarded secrets. But if the internet, and WikiLeaks, had existed back then, and the plan had been published for all to read, it might not have made much difference.   We all knew, around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, that if deterrence failed, it could mean the end of intelligent life on earth. No threat that we now face compares with that. Merry Christmas.   * The quotes and data are from my own notes and transcripts. WGBH Boston"s Open Vault has posted video and transcripts of many interviews conducted for the series, but apparently not those I conducted with Gen. John Richardson, USAF, NATO planner in the 1950s, or with Admiral Jerry Miller, USN, SIOP planner in 1960. Nor have I been able to find transcripts of War and Peace in The Nuclear Age on line.   * Jonathan Holmes is the presenter of ABC TV"s Media Watch.
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