Disarmament

, Netanyahu began to talk about Iran going nuclear in a few years and being a threat to Israel and the world. This should also be the year in which Israel’s nuclear weapons come into international focus. One cannot feel safe with perhaps 200 nuclear weapons being at the disposal of a person operating on unreal enemy images and what is now known in Israel and internationally as flip-flopping on his policies and statements from one day to the next. It’s time to implement – seriously – the Middle East as a zone free of nuclear weapons. 161 countries in the UN general Assembly is for it; and Israel is the only state in the region refusing to become party to the Treaty. And it is time to treat Israel as a normal state with a duty like everybody else to adhere to international law, to end its out-of-proportion international...

President Richard von Weizsäcker passed away 31 January and was very much celebrated in Germany for his brilliant presidency to normalize a Germany with a troubled past, even divided on top of that. But, by and large leaving out his global perspectives mentioned below. His brother Car Friedrich was a nuclear physicist turned peace activist with a wonderful peace program, in one word: Weltinnenpolitik, world domestic policy (well, it depends on the country, some domestic policies are better than others; I would go for a Swiss coalition governance, federalism, direct democracy). The president’s nephew Ernst Ulrich is an energy-environment leader, in Germany and through the UN in the world. I have/had the privilege of knowing them all, and my tribute to Carl Friedrich when he passed away is an editorial dated 2 July 2012. Richard kindly sent greetings to the symposium on “Peace Studies and World Domestic Policy” on the...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] On March 3, 2015, The Telegraph and a few other major news surces broke the quite extraordinary story that the chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee – the body that decides who is awarded the Prize – former Norwegian PM Thorbjoern Jagland had been demoted; it’s the first time it has ever happened. It was during his chairmanship the will of Alfred Nobel was ignored most systematically – e.g. by awarding the world’s allegedly most prestigious prize to President Obama, the EU and Chinese human rights (but pro-war) Liu Xiaobo. It’s about 7 years ago that a small group of Scandinavian scholars decided to investigate how this prize is managed. The basic research can be found in a book by Norwegian lawyer and author, Fredrik S. Heffermehl, The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted which was the first major result of the group’s work. It documents how...

By Gunnar Westberg A memory: Russia as a candidate for NATO membership Members of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW, have for many years regularly visited the NATO Headquarters in Brussels. We also had good contacts with Russian military officers and Foreign Office politicians. In the middle of the nineties members of NATO’s commission on Nuclear Weapons asked if we could arrange a meeting in Moscow, “because we meet the Russians only under very formal circumstances”. Some open discussions over the vodka were hoped for. We arranged the meeting and got a group of leading Russian military brass and politicians on the participant list. But NATO hesitated. We were told they could not afford the trip… Finally only one officer, a Canadian, came from Brussels. So there we were with a group of disappointed Russian officers. The NATO representative in Moscow showed up for a couple of...

Considering the year that is about to end is a time to pause long enough to take stock of what went wrong. In the United States not much went right aside from Barack Obama’s surprising initiative to normalize relations with Cuba after more than 60 years of hostile and punitive interaction. Although the sleazy logic of domestic politics kept this remnant of the worst features of Cold War diplomacy in being for a couple of extra decades, it is still worth celebrating Obama’s move, which when compared to the rest of his record, seems bold and courageous. As well, Obama exhibited a strong commitment to doing more than previously on climate change, using his executive authority to circumvent Congressional unwillingness to act responsibly. Obama’s immigration reform proposals also seem on balance to be positive, although whether they will be implemented remains an open question. Drifting Toward Cold War II: Remembering...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] Tehran Dec 9, 2014 The First Conference on ”World Against Violence and Extremism” is inaugurated here in Tehran this morning by President Rouhani. His idea was endorsed unanimously by the UN General Assembly last year. This PressInfo was written before I came to Iran. The last round of negotiations between Iran and the Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council + Germany about the future possibility that Iran would acquire nuclear weapons should have resulted in no agreement but a 7 months postponement. It is a waste of everybody’s time in one of the most urgent issues on the international agenda. An a-symmetric conflict Here are 5 countries bristling with thousands of nuclear weapons themselves and planning to spend trillions of dollars on more and more sophisticated nukes – unanimous in telling a country that does not have nukes to not acquire them: ”What we can’t live without...

TFF wants to express its gratitude to Yoshikazu Sakamoto who served for many years as TFF Associate. Prefatory Note This post is dedicated to my remembrance of Yoshi Sakamoto who died recently. Yoshi was a deeply valued friend and an important public intellectual in Japan who exerted a strong influence on the post-war generation. His political orientation, rejecting extremes of right and left, while questioning the militarist premises of the Cold War and Japan’s willingness to become America’s Asian poodle, gave him a distinctive political profile. I am sharing these words of appreciation, and hope that anyone from Japan who comes across this text will contact me, especially if they have a way of putting me in touch with either Yoshi’s family or Japanese media. I would like to believe that ‘an American appreciation’ of Professor Sakamoto would be of interest to those who knew and admired him. I first...

By TFF’s Board Lund, Sweden August 6, 2014 – Hiroshima Day The Nuclear Age – risk of omnicide and our new responsibilities Nuclear weapons came into the world and were used for the first time in 1945. Their specific feature as weapons of mass destruction and “omnicide” – able to kill us all – has changed what it means to be alive on this earth and to be responsible for its existence. Until nuclear weapons, human beings could not decide whether or not to end project humankind and project planet earth. Today we know that the arsenals and missile projection methods are such that a few decision-makers, or a technical malfunction, could blow up enough of the world to make the living – if any – envy the dead. We live in the Nuclear Age. It means living with the permanent daily threat of extinction.

/10/janoberg.jpg”> Both NATO and the EU has just announced that their members will now invest more in the military. It’s indicative of the lack of creativity in both organisations, it is self-defeating and counter-productive. But have you seen it put on top of any agenda and debated? You haven’t, it is so normal – and the argument is that we are threatened. That’s called fearology: Making tax payers pay even more by making them scared. The military sector is a parasite on society The military sector produces much less employment than the civilian per invested dollar. It’s a huge burden on the economy because it swallows creativity, research and development badly needed to solve humankind’s real problems. Weapons don’t belong to a market, there is no competition – the state is the only buyer – and thus tax payers must cover the systematic cost overruns. We are told that there...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> War is all over the place. It seems. Not just Syria and Iraq but now inside Pakistan. Not to mention Somalia and Sudan. Yet paradoxically there has never been less war. Sweden’s Uppsala University Conflict Data program is about to publish its results for 2013. It reports that the number of conflicts in the world increased by one between 2012 and 2013 – pace all the press and TV coverage which sometimes gives the impression that half the world is going up in smoke. Since the Cold War ended the number of conflicts claiming more than 1,000 deaths has declined by 50%. There were 15 conflicts of this size in the early 1990s. Today there are only seven. In 2013 six peace agreements were signed – which is two more than the year before. The number of democratic countries was 69 at the end of the Cold War. Today...

B Pretoria, South Africa, Keynote Governance is politics, power–political-economic-military-cultural; decisions-carrots-sticks-ideas. Politics is about problems of realizing one goal; about conflicts realizing incompatible goals. Contradiction = danger+opportunity; the art of the impossible. Answer: Good Governance GG = CC Creative Conflict-transformation. This includes diagnosis, who are the parties, their goals and the incompatibilities; prognosis, from frustration to aggression/apathy, from prejudice-discrimination to hatred-violence; therapy, conflict solution-transformation, proposing creative visions of a new reality where the goals are compatible and new conflicts more easily handled. Two examples of creative, good governance from Norway and Europe:

Toluca, Estado De México; Workshop on Drug Traffic and Violence Background 300.000 kg of cocaine to USA via Mexico annually; 60% of marijuana producers had lived in misery, US$ 2/day; the drug traffic profit in Mexico was US$ 59 billion, 5% of GNP; 80% was spent on corruption; 125,000 were arrested since 2006; with an impunity of 98%. Background 2,000 weapons from USA to Mexico daily; 5.5 million legal and 20 million illegal arms in Mexico; 100,000 have died in the “war on drugs” from 2006; 30,000 disappeared; 42+ journalists killed (more than in Afghanistan); 50,000 military troops involved by 2006, 130,000 by 2009, 50,000 in 2012, 32,000 in 2013; US$ 16.6 billion spent on insecurity and violence, 1.34% of GNP. Conclusion Due process of law and violence did not reduce drug traffic and violence; a drug-arms-violence-police-military complex had evolved. No general prevention, maybe not even individual prevention. A discourse-change...