Some of you may know that Ronald Reagan was strongly opposed to nuclear weapons. Reagan called for the abolition of “all nuclear weapons,” which he considered “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilisation.”



The strategy of defending the manufacture and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, as an effective deterrent to others, is now recognized as a flawed argument. If they were once justified, as a means of American-Soviet deterrence, they are no longer. Nuclear weapons were considered essential to maintaining international security during the cold war, but that is no longer the case.

Mohammed El-Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was quoted as saying, “We need to treat nuclear weapons the way we treat slavery or genocide. There needs to be a taboo over possessing them.”

But it is not only that our governments are violating international agreements that they themselves signed. They are also acting with arrogance and carelessness when it comes to handling the weapons they have already. Even the supposedly most advanced nations can be alarmingly lax when it comes to the security precautions in place for nuclear weapons.

Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the unbelievable US Army security failure last August, in which six nuclear warheads were inadvertently removed from their bunkers and flown from North Dakota to Louisiana, “unprecedented”.  Owing to “a lack of attention to detail and lack of adherence to well-established Air Force guidelines, technical orders and procedures”, for thirty-six hours, no-one knew where the warheads were, or even that they were missing.

Each of the warheads contained ten times the yield of that dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War. No breach of nuclear procedures of this magnitude had ever occurred before. Surely it is only a matter of time before an error like this becomes a disaster. Commentators have blamed this failure on the US Army’s reduced nuclear focus in recent years. Why, I would argue, not go the whole way? Why not do away with nuclear weapons altogether?

The tolerance for error when it comes to nuclear weapons is very low – in fact, it is zero. But zero tolerance cannot realistically be achieved, which is another reason why immediate and worldwide disarmament is such an important, and a pressing, priority. Governor Schwarzenegger said, “Mistakes are made in every other human endeavor. Why should nuclear weapons be exempt?”

My good friend David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, noted in an article earlier this year that “even Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb, recognized, ‘Sooner or later a fool will prove greater than the proof, even in a foolproof system.’”

We have come to the point where something has to give. South Africa is to be heartily applauded for its total disarmament, which was officially declared in 1994, following an inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In order to affect real change globally, we now need one of the major powers to follow suit.

The question has now become: “Who’s going to give them up first?” When they consider their responses to our pleas, politicians would do well to keep in mind the words of two men.

The first is Dwight D. Eisenhower, who pledged America’s determination “to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”

The second is a man who knows as much about nuclear weapons as anyone, Mikhail Gorbachev. He said that “that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason.”

But nuclear weapons are not the only thing making the world unsafe.

Climate Chaos

Now, I would like to address the problem of climate change – or, as is more accurate, climate chaos. The problem of climate chaos touches every area of our lives: peace, security, human rights, poverty, hunger, health, mass migration, and economics. Climate change is not an isolated environmental issue any more.

At the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change in Bali last December, I spoke of climate chaos in terms of global justice. That is how I see the issue: we need to fight climate change along with global inequality if we want to find lasting and sustainable solutions. To attempt to address the causes of climate change, we must not overlook the developing countries of the world.

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary,” George Orwell once said.

Despite the clear and urgent alarms sounded by our most respected scientists, the developed world continues to feed its out-of-control oil addiction. We are locked into an inefficient, pollution-based economy, which is undermining public health and the environment, aggravating inequality and turning us into oil predators.

Rather than face the pressing challenges of the 21st century, some world leaders continue to systematically eliminate vital environmental protection laws and regulations. In the U.S., for example, the Environmental Protection Agency has been gutted. And, as you know, the Bush administration refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, whilst focusing on oil and natural gas production. Representatives of the military-petroleum complex have been defining Washington’s economic policies. Their undeniable aim is to dominate the world’s energy resources; oil and natural gas.

As consumers of oil, we must realize that oil consumption is effectively destroying the environment and communities, especially in places inhabited by indigenous populations and marginalised groups who have little or no economic and political power to defend themselves.

I would like to quote a passage from “View of Dusk at the end of the Century, from Eduardo Galeano, 1998.

Poisoned is the earth that inters or deters us. There is no air, only despair; no breeze, only sleaze. No rain, except acid rain. No parks, just parking lots. No partners only partnerships. Companies instead of nations. Consumers instead of citizens. Conglomerations instead of cities. No people only audiences. No relations, except public relations. No vision, just television. To praise a flower, say “It looks plastic…”

There is no denying it: the rich world is causing climate change and the poor world is suffering. The industrial countries that have pioneered fossil fuel technology are primarily in the cold north, while the warmer countries of the south still use far less oil, gas and coal. As climate change kicks in, the tropical and subtropical countries of Africa, South Asia and Latin America will heat up more and more, with temperatures becoming increasingly intolerable. Droughts will affect large parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Melting glaciers will flood river valleys and then, when they have disappeared, unprecedented droughts will occur. Poor, low-lying countries such as Bangladesh will find it much harder to cope with sea level rise than Holland or Florida.

If current trends are allowed to continue, hundreds of millions of people in the poorer countries will lose their homes as well as the land on which they grow their crops. And then there is the threat of diseases: By the end of the century 182 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone could die of diseases directly attributable to climate change, according to Christian Aid.

We must therefore insist on a dramatic change in direction that goes way beyond the actions currently taken by governments.

The rich countries need to dramatically reduce their use of fossil fuels. At the present time, we are burning a million years worth of fossil fuel deposits every year. This makes the unprecedented standards of living of a large portion of people in the rich countries possible. Meanwhile rapid economic growth is also disproportionately increasing the living standards of minorities in developing countries. But all this is possible only because we are running down the earth’s capital assets, and particularly its fossil fuel resources, at an unprecedented rate whilst damaging the earth’s atmosphere in the process.

From a speech delivered to the Channel City Club of Santa Barbara on April 14, 2008