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Three truths – the future matters,nuclear weapons are eviland life is a miracle We are at the beginning of a new century and millennium. If there was ever a time for reflection, this should be it. In the spirit of Ernest Hemingway, who said that he always wrote about the truest things that he knew, I would like to make three points that I believe are true, obvious, and seriously under-appreciated. The future matters First, the future matters. Life is not only for today. We are linked to all that has preceded us and to all that will follow. What we do today will affect the future. If we live only for ourselves, we cut off possibilities for the future. If we think only about ourselves, we will undoubtedly shortchange the future. If the future matters, we must live as though it matters. We must live with concern for those...

LONDON- The last century found, willynilly, it had goals aplenty. There was always the social goal of ending unemployment, a purpose that fired people as varied as John Maynard Keynes and Adolf Hitler. There was the goal of spreading capitalism or building socialism, depending on which side of the fence you were on. Later there was the goal of defeating fascism and later still communism. Then there was the goal of ending war and the creation of a United Nations. Not least there was the goal of spreading democracy and, hard on its heels, ending colonialism. Finally, and most recently, there was the goal of spreading human rights. It was appropriate that just before the century ended on July 17th 1998, 120 nations voted (but not the U.S., China, India and Israel) to adopt a statute creating an International Criminal Court to try war crimes. What goals are left for this...

For as long as there have been wars there have also been plans to stop them. There have been saints who have preached nonviolence, leading political figures and academics who have advocated various grandiose plans to achieve world peace through alliances, world government or international armies, and people who have put their lives on the line, by physically placing their bodies between disputing parties to try to end conflicts, or by taking risks in order to try to end oppression. And while bloody conflicts and injustice exists, even in far away places, there will always be people of good will who will cross borders, often at great personal risk, to intervene as peacekeepers, peacemakers or peacebuilders. And now the world is watching. Innumerable wars and armed conflicts rage or simmer in different countries or neighbourhoods around the planet, viewable from television sets or doorsteps depending on one’s location. Humanitarian aid...

The outcome of the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which begins April 24, 2000 at the United Nations in New York, will play a significant role in determining the security of humanity in the 21st century. Your personal commitment to a successful outcome of this Review Conference is essential to strengthening nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament efforts, and thus to humanity’s future. The nuclear perils to humanity are not sufficiently widely recognized nor appreciated. In the words of writer Jonathan Schell, we have been given “the gift of time,” but that gift is running out. For this reason vision and bold action are called for. General George Lee Butler, a former Commander in Chief of all US strategic nuclear weapons, poses these questions: “By what authority do succeeding generations of leaders in the nuclear weapons states usurp the power to dictate the odds of continued life on our planet? Most urgently,...

The Cold War was generally interpreted as an encounter between nuclear superpowers that led opposed alliances and sustained their respective identities by reference to antagonistic ideologies. Such an image of the global setting lent support to the argument that international politics could be best understood from a perspective of bipolarity. Since the end of the Cold War a decade ago, and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, it is more difficult to find an illuminating image to capture the essence of world order. The two main claimants have been “globalization” and “unipolarity.” Neither image helps us grasp the changing role of the sovereign state nor the preoccupation during the 1990s with intrastate violence and conflict, a class of instances that Mary Kaldor has helpfully dubbed “new wars.” Partly these concerns reflect a perceived threat to world order that derives from unexpected sources in recent years. The main...

“The Battle of Seattle” that occurred during the recent meeting of the WTO in Seattle needs to be understood as the first crisis of globalization that poses a political challenge. The Asian financial crisis more than two years earlier was mainly a regional crisis of an economic character despite its wider reverberations in Japan, Russia, Brazil. The control mechanisms proved reasonably effective, and an Asian recovery is underway without any pressure for deep substantive reforms. We hear less and less talk about “a new financial architecture” in the last several months. Perhaps, there is more awareness of the importance of sound banking systems and a less dogmatic attitude toward fiscal policy on the part of the World Bank and IMF to avoid the sort of social trauma that especially befell Indonesia after 1997. But Seattle was a different and shriller alarm bell. It occurred in the city of Microsoft, Starbucks,...

Anyone who pretends that India’s decision to cross the nuclear weapons threshold openly has made no difference to its international standing is either lying or living in fantasy. Of course, the official reaction in the West was one of anger, and disappointment. India with nuclear weapons inevitably meant that Pakistan would soon follow. It was a major setback for the American-led effort to sustain the non-proliferation regime, and it appeared to make the world more dangerous, especially in the setting of Indo-Pakistan relations. Perhaps, more troubling for the West than the strategic implications of an Indian bomb, was the public enthusiasm that greeted the news in India. Indeed, most commentators tried to reassure the world that Delhi’s decision to go nuclear was driven by domestic politics, especially by the BJP’s declining popularity. When the Indian Defense Minister, George Fernandes, contended that the bomb was intended mainly to improve India’s security...

In 1945, the UN was founded to prevent interstate wars like Hitler’s march into Poland 1939 that started World War II. Despite a lot of criticism of the UN, it has been amazingly successful in achieving this goal. There are still many wars, but almost all of them today are civil wars. Of 39 wars in 1995, all were civil wars. The Gulf War in 1990 was the last war of aggression, and it was decisively repelled by an international force in 1991. The UN was explicitly prevented from doing anything to stop civil wars by the provision in its current Charter that it should not interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign member states. In the second half century of its existence, the UN needs to be strengthened, so that it can also help prevent or end civil wars. When people talk about UN reform, they usually mean to...

It is perhaps a peculiar quality of human beings that we like to count things, and we seem to become particularly excited when our numbers end up with several zeros at the end. Such is the case with the year 2000, even though it is not exactly the turning of the millennium, which will take place as the year turns from 2000 to 2001. It is close enough, however, and it has its own set of problems, which have been characterized by the expression “Y2K.” I will return to that, but first I would like to offer a few observations to provide perspective on the past as a prologue to our current situation. First, life has existed on Earth for some 4 billion years. Second, humans have existed on Earth for only some 3 million years, less than 1/1000th of the existence of life on Earth. Third, civilization and recorded...

By Roswitha and Peter Jarman* An elderly Ingush showed Roswitha his portacabin in the makeshift settlement where he had lived since the local civil war of 1992. She admired the neat order he had created around his hand-made bed. ”My wife is ill in hospital, do you have some medicine?’, he asked. Roswitha, having none, tried to give him fifty dollars. “No”, he said, “I cannot take money”, so she slipped the notes into his pocket. Tears poured down his cheeks. ”What have I done to deserve this?’, he asked, ‘I fought against the Fascists and received war medals. We Ingush were all deported by Stalin in 1944 to Kazakhstan and had to start there with nothing. When we returned here in 1957 I built a house for my family and then came this war. Who is responsible for it? I have no space in this cabin for my five...

Abolition 2000 is rapidly approaching the year 2000, a moment of truth for the global Network. General Lee Butler, a powerful advocate of abolition, offered these observations:“Turning specifically to the agenda, tactics and timetable of the abolition community, I see a widening gulf between its aspirations and their prospects, especially in the near term. That disparity is most immediately obvious in the disjunction between the name of the umbrella organization, Abolition 2000, and the self-evident reality that its implied goal is not yet in sight, much less in hand. That is a real Y2K problem that must be addressed to ensure that the vitality of the ongoing work of the organization is not diminished by the intimations of a failed strategic objective.” When Abolition 2000 was initiated in 1995, it seemed reasonable to set as our primary goal a treaty by the year 2000 calling for the phased elimination of...

Setting the Stage: Understanding Security Recent events have shown the failure of traditional approaches to security and security guarantees. Conventional conceptions of security, focussing upon the security of the ‘State’ and freedom from the threat or use of force, have proved inadequate to address the diverse range of challenges faced by the world community at the dawn of the 21st Century. From environmental devastation– resulting in wide-spread flooding, deforestation, and depletion of the ozone layer–to limitations upon the human rights and freedoms of individuals and communities and the rising number of intra-state wars, new security issues are constantly arising. Though what is actually considered a ‘security’ issue varies widely depending upon the approach and perspective taken, the fact that the concept of security used during the era of the Cold War is no longer suf ficient for the world of today cannot reasonably be denied. While many of the factors...