North
Korea shouldn't have nukes — and neither should we
President
Donald Trump and North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un signed a
declaration which Trump called "comprehensive" and is expected to
lead to a denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
Gwen L. DuBois
Leaders of
our country, Republican and Democrat alike, who demand that the United States
accept nothing less from North Korean President Kim Jong-un than his country’s unilateral
denuclearization, should consider what gives America — or any country — a right
to weapons with the power to end civilization as we know it.
Some disturbing truths:
We have 7,000 nuclear weapons, as does Russia. What’s
more, each country maintains roughly 900 nuclear weapons on “hair trigger
alert,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which means they could
be launched in minutes and potentially reach their destinations within half an
hour. Once launched, they cannot be recalled.
Our nation has never renounced the right to use
nuclear weapons first. The U.S. president can decide, on a bad day, to initiate
a nuclear launch without going to Congress, even if that president’s chief
claim to fame is that he was a reality show host with a notoriously short fuse
and possibly borderline personality.
Our current president, who recently left
Singapore following a summit with Mr. Kim, also broke the Iran Nuclear
Agreement that, though imperfect, kept Iran from developing nuclear weapons and
with which Iran, it is widely accepted, was complying. We also have threatened
economic sanctions on any corporation that does business with Iran making it
hard for the other nations to keep the agreement intact. As a result, Iran has
announced it may expand its uranium enrichment program.
The United states is presently investing $1.7 trillion to make our nuclear weapons
more useable and, if not unilaterally sparking a new nuclear arms race, surely
contributing to one.
We have boycotted the most hopeful anti-nuclear
development of this young century — the U.N. Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons — and instructed all of
our NATO allies to do the same
Since its inception in 1970, the United States
also has failed to uphold our part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Article VI: “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, and on a
treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective
international control.”
We should all be applauding the steps that
Presidents Kim and Trump have taken this week and hope that they
were undertaken in good faith — and that they, over time, lead to North Korea
giving up its nuclear weapons. ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear
Weapons) — which was instrumental in creating the U.N. Nuclear Weapons
Prohibition Treaty, for which it received the
2017 Nobel Peace Prize — has published a proposal for
a five-step plan that North Korea could embrace
to achieve nuclear disarmament.
However nuclear disarmament is not just what we
demand from other nations. It needs to be pursued by the United States as well,
and this will take a groundswell from American civil society demanding a change
in our nuclear policy (see preventnuclearwar.org). Americans should be ready to
protest on the streets if our president suddenly pivots, announces that the
talks have failed and then calls for a military solution. Metropolitan Seoul,
located only 35 miles from the North Korean border and 120 miles from its
capitol, has a population of 25 million people. A nuclear bomb dropped on Seoul
from the North might kill anywhere from 100,000 to 600,000 depending on the
weapon size and injure up to 2.5 million more. A 30-weapon nuclear ground
attack by the United States, designed to take out the entire North Korean
nuclear complex generating local fallout, would kill over 750,000 and injure 1
million more according to a recent report carried by CNN. If Russia or China is
drawn into the fight, the planet could experience its first nuclear world war —
which also would be its last.
Clearly, there is no military solution where
nuclear weapons are involved. Sooner or later we must negotiate nuclear
disarmament involving all nations in possession of nuclear weapons including
the United States. Let this be the lesson from Singapore.
Dr. Gwen L. DuBois (gdubois@jhsph.edu) is
president of Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility. She was also a
citizen lobbyist at the United Nations Draft Conference to Ban Nuclear Weapons.
Copyright © 2018, The Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore Sun Media Group
publication
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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