The Senate must ratify START by a two-thirds vote. Arms control advocates are being urged to lobby their Senators, but Senators would listen to city and town governments much, much faster than to individual voters. Hundreds of cities around the world remain targeted by ICBMs, twenty years after the Cold War ended. Cities are therefore the logical entities to demand de-targeting. They can speak on behalf of their populations, not to mention their targeted hospitals, libraries, parks, office buildings, and city halls.
A Mayor, City Councilor, Alderman, or Town Selectman is readily accessible for an appointment, especially for an appointment of a group three or six or ten, or representatives of a neighborhood organization. Ask your governing body to hold a public hearing. Local media will be there.
160 American municipalities belong to Mayors for Peace, started by the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, numbering 4144 communities in 144 countries. Go to the Mayors for Peace website and see whether your municipality belongs. If it does belong, that will give you a leg up in getting your state’s Senators to vote to ratify START. Mayors for Peace has adopted the 20-20 Vision Campaign, calling for eradication of nuclear weapons by 2020. START is just the start of that.
In my state, Massachusetts, fifteen cities and towns belong to Mayors for Peace, and Republican Senator Scott Brown’s vote is in doubt. Brown should receive resolutions from all those communities, and many more besides.
What you are asking your local governing body for is a resolution addressed to your two Senators, making these points:
1. 65 years have passed since Hiroshima.
2. Twenty years after the Cold War, some one thousand Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles remain targeted at cities around the world, on fifteen minute alert.
3. START is the next step in universal, progressive, verifiable nuclear arms reductions. Slowness in ratifying the Treaty is blocking further progress.
4. This city (or town), on behalf of its targeted population, says ratify START now!
Showing posts with label Mayors for Peace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mayors for Peace. Show all posts
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Two Things At Once
The politics of ratification and the military’s strategic judgement will exact a price for such comfort as we can draw from the Nuclear Posture Review, the Nuclear Security Summit, and hopefully, the Non Proliferation Treaty Five Year Review in May. Part of the cost is to spend huge amounts that, according to many experts, is unnecessary, to “extend” the life of the nuclear arsenal that is not scheduled for discard. Another is to continue huge conventional arms budgets so as to make credible the promise of non-nuclear retaliation in the event of attack with chemical or biological weapons on the U.S. or its “nuclear umbrella” protectees. A third is to join enthusiastically in the current world-wide missile race, both defensive and attack missiles.
To arm while disarming is to perform two contrary tasks at once. Doing two things at once is hard - for people and for countries. Do I concentrate on two sets of facts and goals or attack them one at a time? There is my emotional commitment - hard to split, or spread. There is my credibility - how to communicate security and conviction about more than one subject at a time? There are resources - from hours in the day to money to manpower. With countries, there is political opportunism - if one goal is slighted, the opposition will champion it, and claim that the other goal must not be pursued simultaneously. There are unshakeable devotees, emotionally, irretrievably committed to, or advantaged by, one goal and opposed to the other, even if the two are in fact compatible.
A nation that must be prepared for war while trying to keep peace is faced with all this and more. War usually wins, because to prepare for peace seems inconsistent. To remove causes of war and enforce peace would weaken the nation. War always is there first, commanding money and emotion, enlisting war veterans, the business establishment, the misinformed and uninformed, arousing excitement, dreams of glory, and entertaining the populace.
You hear about peace mostly after peace has been lost. Peace necessitates law creation, adjudication, enforcement, and the politics that will deliver the power to create them. It is easier to build missiles, planes and tanks. They cost more but create profits and jobs and provide spectacle.
This argues for mounting peace efforts through some other vehicle than nations. Yes, peace must be between nations, more or less by definition. But let us stop expecting nations to carry the peace burden. Let us design peace and enlist the citizens of the nations to demand peace, through the cities and towns of the world, which, after all are the targeted, terminal victims of the next war, whether started with missiles or suitcase terrorist devices.
It would be relatively simple for a few cities and towns in a handful of countries to hold a security conference every year. They could legitimize the effort by putting a slot on their municipal ballots to elect representatives to the conference.
To arm while disarming is to perform two contrary tasks at once. Doing two things at once is hard - for people and for countries. Do I concentrate on two sets of facts and goals or attack them one at a time? There is my emotional commitment - hard to split, or spread. There is my credibility - how to communicate security and conviction about more than one subject at a time? There are resources - from hours in the day to money to manpower. With countries, there is political opportunism - if one goal is slighted, the opposition will champion it, and claim that the other goal must not be pursued simultaneously. There are unshakeable devotees, emotionally, irretrievably committed to, or advantaged by, one goal and opposed to the other, even if the two are in fact compatible.
A nation that must be prepared for war while trying to keep peace is faced with all this and more. War usually wins, because to prepare for peace seems inconsistent. To remove causes of war and enforce peace would weaken the nation. War always is there first, commanding money and emotion, enlisting war veterans, the business establishment, the misinformed and uninformed, arousing excitement, dreams of glory, and entertaining the populace.
You hear about peace mostly after peace has been lost. Peace necessitates law creation, adjudication, enforcement, and the politics that will deliver the power to create them. It is easier to build missiles, planes and tanks. They cost more but create profits and jobs and provide spectacle.
This argues for mounting peace efforts through some other vehicle than nations. Yes, peace must be between nations, more or less by definition. But let us stop expecting nations to carry the peace burden. Let us design peace and enlist the citizens of the nations to demand peace, through the cities and towns of the world, which, after all are the targeted, terminal victims of the next war, whether started with missiles or suitcase terrorist devices.
It would be relatively simple for a few cities and towns in a handful of countries to hold a security conference every year. They could legitimize the effort by putting a slot on their municipal ballots to elect representatives to the conference.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Targets of the World, Unite!
Of all affronts no one should tolerate, none is worse than having one’s city targeted by nuclear armed ICBMs. How many of the millions around the world who live in such cities are aware they are targeted, or think about it? Five percent? Probably fewer.
Mutual targeting by the U.S. and Russia, twenty years after the Cold War, is no secret. Presumably, the U.S. and China also target each other, but we don’t target our “allies” Britain, France, and Israel. Presumably, Israel targets Iran and Syria to deter a conventional weapons attack.
In many countries, not identified but I see figures between 30 and 40, people live under the American nuclear “umbrella.” They refrain from acquiring nuclear arms on the promise that the U.S. will retaliate on their behalf against a nuclear attack. Do these folks wonder whether in fact the U.S. would risk a nuclear attack on American cities by retaliating against an attack on another country? Do Americans wonder whether they are exposed to attack by enemies of other countries because the U.S. has pledged to retaliate against such an enemy although not attacked itself?
How great is the danger of a frame-up, of an attack by terrorists, for instance, that looks like an attack requiring U.S. retaliation on behalf of an umbrella nation? One can go on with scenarios in which millions of peaceful humans serve as hostages to a war system that they could end if they marshaled their cities on behalf of enforced law over endless war.
A timely first step would be for Americans and Russians to cause their city governments to promote ratification and accelerated implementing of the new START Treaty. For starters, many cities and towns in states whose Senators are considered undependable for ratification of START, belong to a global organization of three thousand plus “Mayors for Peace” cities. These cities are listed on the Mayors of Peace website. Elected officials and citizen delegations from those cities should be in instant, continuous communication with their Senators about ratifying START.
Mutual targeting by the U.S. and Russia, twenty years after the Cold War, is no secret. Presumably, the U.S. and China also target each other, but we don’t target our “allies” Britain, France, and Israel. Presumably, Israel targets Iran and Syria to deter a conventional weapons attack.
In many countries, not identified but I see figures between 30 and 40, people live under the American nuclear “umbrella.” They refrain from acquiring nuclear arms on the promise that the U.S. will retaliate on their behalf against a nuclear attack. Do these folks wonder whether in fact the U.S. would risk a nuclear attack on American cities by retaliating against an attack on another country? Do Americans wonder whether they are exposed to attack by enemies of other countries because the U.S. has pledged to retaliate against such an enemy although not attacked itself?
How great is the danger of a frame-up, of an attack by terrorists, for instance, that looks like an attack requiring U.S. retaliation on behalf of an umbrella nation? One can go on with scenarios in which millions of peaceful humans serve as hostages to a war system that they could end if they marshaled their cities on behalf of enforced law over endless war.
A timely first step would be for Americans and Russians to cause their city governments to promote ratification and accelerated implementing of the new START Treaty. For starters, many cities and towns in states whose Senators are considered undependable for ratification of START, belong to a global organization of three thousand plus “Mayors for Peace” cities. These cities are listed on the Mayors of Peace website. Elected officials and citizen delegations from those cities should be in instant, continuous communication with their Senators about ratifying START.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The Terror Response - What’s Missing
It looks as though the technology of travel, communication, and weaponry may lend themselves more readily to disruption and cruelty than to order and peace. It is fine to seek safety in watch lists and body scanners. In the long run, though, defensive measures will not be enough to avoid the worst results of a nuclear arms race overlaid with non deterrable terrorism. To achieve order and peace we had better make greater effort to employ the ease of communication and travel to reaching a closer knit world.
The worst delusion that might beset our generation is that humans unavoidably and irrevocably must split into warring tribes. If we join Samuel Huntington and his legion of professors and generals who settle for perpetual war, end-time nuclear disaster will prove inevitable. The alternative is to bring people together, reduce grounds for cross-cultural hatred, and restrict weaponry to law enforcement that governs all nations and peoples and regulates the creation and ownership of weapons.
A ready-made medium exists for starting the long process to achieve this - the cities and towns of the world. Their populations are the ultimate targets, both of terrorism and war. They house the achievements of civilization. Their politics and governments, unlike most of the national governments including our own, are within the political reach of ordinary citizens. And, a huge amount of cross border relationships between cities and towns already exists, through trade, tourism, cultural and educational exchanges, and organizations like Sister Cities International and Mayors for Peace.
Targeted citizens, which in the nuclear age is all of us, world-wide, should emulate the courageous airliner passengers who have attacked suicide bombers hand-to-hand. They should move across borders with ballots, organization, communication, and travel. If a dozen citizens in three or four cities and towns in each of a few countries took a simple step, the effort could be underway within a year. That step would be to put a slot on the municipal ballot to directly elect a local representative to an international municipal security congress.
A global security congress, empowered by the ballot, with a single assignment, the security of populations, would quickly insist upon the essentials of security, which are enforced global law kept accountable by cross border democracy. Fully realized, it might take fifty years, but the impact on the roots of terrorism would start right away. And, compared to the sixty-five years since Hiroshima that have brought us to this perilous time, it is not long at all.
High on the agenda would be pressure on national governments to eliminate nuclear weapons. Sixty-five years without effective action reflects the fact that people who run national governments have more on their minds than the safety of populations, which, in the end, is all that matters. National governments answer to the stockholders and employees of their missile makers, to generals and admirals, to economic, ideological, and ethnic voting blocks, to excitable media. World order under law is not even close to the top of the list.
A global security congress of elected city representatives could make national governments put first things first - war prevention ahead of war fighting, enforced law ahead of profits, security ahead of sovereignty, cooperation ahead of tribalism, communicating and understanding ahead of competing patriotisms.
The worst delusion that might beset our generation is that humans unavoidably and irrevocably must split into warring tribes. If we join Samuel Huntington and his legion of professors and generals who settle for perpetual war, end-time nuclear disaster will prove inevitable. The alternative is to bring people together, reduce grounds for cross-cultural hatred, and restrict weaponry to law enforcement that governs all nations and peoples and regulates the creation and ownership of weapons.
A ready-made medium exists for starting the long process to achieve this - the cities and towns of the world. Their populations are the ultimate targets, both of terrorism and war. They house the achievements of civilization. Their politics and governments, unlike most of the national governments including our own, are within the political reach of ordinary citizens. And, a huge amount of cross border relationships between cities and towns already exists, through trade, tourism, cultural and educational exchanges, and organizations like Sister Cities International and Mayors for Peace.
Targeted citizens, which in the nuclear age is all of us, world-wide, should emulate the courageous airliner passengers who have attacked suicide bombers hand-to-hand. They should move across borders with ballots, organization, communication, and travel. If a dozen citizens in three or four cities and towns in each of a few countries took a simple step, the effort could be underway within a year. That step would be to put a slot on the municipal ballot to directly elect a local representative to an international municipal security congress.
A global security congress, empowered by the ballot, with a single assignment, the security of populations, would quickly insist upon the essentials of security, which are enforced global law kept accountable by cross border democracy. Fully realized, it might take fifty years, but the impact on the roots of terrorism would start right away. And, compared to the sixty-five years since Hiroshima that have brought us to this perilous time, it is not long at all.
High on the agenda would be pressure on national governments to eliminate nuclear weapons. Sixty-five years without effective action reflects the fact that people who run national governments have more on their minds than the safety of populations, which, in the end, is all that matters. National governments answer to the stockholders and employees of their missile makers, to generals and admirals, to economic, ideological, and ethnic voting blocks, to excitable media. World order under law is not even close to the top of the list.
A global security congress of elected city representatives could make national governments put first things first - war prevention ahead of war fighting, enforced law ahead of profits, security ahead of sovereignty, cooperation ahead of tribalism, communicating and understanding ahead of competing patriotisms.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
