| WASHINGTON
- October 22 - Physicians for Social
Responsibility today praised the progress reportedly being made
by Presidents Bush and Putin toward reducing the nuclear
arsenals of the two former Cold War adversaries. The US is
considering cuts down to 2,500 strategic warheads or less while
the Russians have suggested numbers as low as 1,500.
"We have been urging very deep cuts and then the elimination
of nuclear weapons throughout the post-Cold War era," said PSR
Executive Director and CEO Robert K. Musil, Ph.D., M.P.H., in
making the announcement. "In the current climate, where we face
serious potential for terrorist attacks and even nuclear ones,
President Bush is in a position to go much further in
eliminating nuclear weapons then any of his predecessors would
have dared," added Musil.
According to PSR, which shared the 1985 Nobel Prize for Peace
for its work with Soviet physicians on the risks of nuclear war,
several additional nuclear policies need to be addressed
successfully in order to take advantage of the new US-Russian
strategic partnership. In order to reduce the remaining risks of
nuclear terror or inadvertent use of nuclear weapons, the two
sides should immediately undertake very deep reductions of
strategic weapons -- into the hundreds -- while developing plans
to move more quickly to implement Article VI of the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. (The NPT commits the US, Russia and
other nuclear powers to the elimination of nuclear weapons
altogether.)
"We have already seen India and Pakistan develop nuclear
weapons using US failure to eliminate as an excuse," said Musil.
"We now need to take the threat of further nuclear
proliferation, like terrorist threats, far more seriously than
we did before September 11."
PSR thus calls for speedy implementation of Article VI and the
elimination of both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons from
the US and Russian arsenals. The two sides have over 5,000
tactical nuclear weapons that have no realistic military use and
pose an unacceptable risk of diversion or theft, especially in
Russia.
PSR also considers President Bush's insistence on abrogating
-- or negotiating into oblivion -- the ABM Treaty and moving
ahead with NMD deployment a strategic blunder with long-range
implications that can undermine US security when non-state,
non-nuclear attacks need high priority.
"NMD would have been absolutely useless on September 11,"
asserts PSR National Security Director Martin Butcher, "and will
continue to be so in the face of the numerous means in which a
terrorists could employ nukes without using a missile."
Since President Bush seeks multilateral cooperation for the
war on terror, it makes little sense, PSR believes, to irritate
and potentially disrupt future alliances with Russia and China
in the name of a missile system that cannot prevent terrorist
attacks. "A program of nuclear elimination under the NPT,
cooperative nuclear threat reduction, the signing of the CTBT,
and other confidence measures will prove far more effective in
the long run," says PSR's Musil. "Presidents Bush and Putin have
a chance to reshape the world. They should seize it."
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