There is a clear solution to the crisis over Iran’s nuclear ambitions--but it requires much more than the current proposals for using diplomacy rather than waging war. The US must keep its own promise to give up nuclear weapons which it made in 1970 when it signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We must also terminate our $8 billion annual program to develop new weapons and take up President Putin's offer to cut our mutual nuclear arsenals of about 10,000 weapons down to 1,000.

First the US and Russia need to get to numbers approaching the arsenals of the other nuclear weapons states--China, UK, France and Israel, with stockpiles in the hundreds, and India, Pakistan, and North Korea each with less than one hundred bombs. Then we can take up China's offer to negotiate a treaty to eliminate all nuclear weapons and call every nuclear weapons state to the table. There already exists a plan for a model treaty prepared by scientists, lawyers, and policy makers which was submitted to the UN as a discussion document. It lays out all the steps for dismantlement, verification, guarding, and monitoring the disassembled arsenals to insure that we will all be secure from nuclear break-out.

To succeed, we must initially also take up Russia and China's repeated proposal in the UN General Assembly to ban weapons in space. That is the only way those two nations will agree to join us in abolishing nuclear weapons. They do not want US control and domination of space, which indeed is the aggressive mission statement of the US Space Command, seeking the high ground for military superiority over the whole planet. We must also replace the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s guarantee of an "inalienable right" to so-called "peaceful" nuclear technology. This is the provision upon which Iran is now lawfully relying. We can nullify it obsolete by establishing an International Sustainable Energy Agency as we phase out nuclear power. Since every nuclear power plant is a potential bomb factory, we wouldn't be dealing with a full deck if we attempted to eliminate nuclear weapons without phasing out nuclear power. We could easily fund the Agency, and jump-start a 21st Century sustainable economy powered by the safe, clean energy of our sun, wind and tides.

All we need is a redistribution of the more than $200 billion in tax breaks and subsidies for the nuclear and fossil fuel industries world-wide. The treaty negotiations and actual dismantlement of the nuclear arsenals could be done within 10 years, which is how long it would take Iran to enrich its "peaceful" technology to make a bomb. By that time, with the whole world declaring nuclear weapons and nuclear power taboo, we should be able to convince Iran that it would be acting illegally under these new conditions.

All the other nuclear weapons states are on record that they would be willing to give up their nuclear weapons, numbering in the 100s or 10s, if everyone else does. So the ball's in our court. The US has been the biggest block to the world’s ability to stop proliferation. It's totally naive to believe that anything less than the elimination of nuclear weapons, and their evil twins, nuclear reactors, would actually work. To think otherwise is a clear indication that we’re not dealing with reality and will condemn our planet to a state of perpetual war, with unimaginable catastrophes. Giving peace a chance by negotiating an end to the nuclear age is the only practical way out of our terrifying dilemma.

Alice Slater is a founder of Abolition 2000, a global network working for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons, and is the Co-Convenor of the Abolition 2000 Working Group for Sustainable Energy. She also serves as President of the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE), a nonprofit organization working to form links between research, policy, and grassroots communities.

© 2006 MinutemanMedia.org

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