'On 29 and 30 August 2007 six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads were loaded on a US Air Force plane, flown across the country and unloaded. For 36 hours no-one knew where the warheads were or even that they were missing.'
So reported a bipartisan US panel of American international relations celebrities including George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. The panel used this diabolical faux pas in the handling of nuclear weapons by their country as part of their case for a nuclear weapons free world.
The eminent Americans wrote in the Wall Street Journal on 15 January 2008 of 'the importance of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons as a guide to our thinking about nuclear policies, and about the importance of a series of steps that will pull us back from the nuclear precipice'.
I couldn't agree more.
Most Australians no longer think about the nuclear threat. Yet the editors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said in January 2007 that the minute hand of the 'Doomsday Clock' had moved from seven to five minutes to midnight.
'We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age,' they said. 'North Korea's recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran's nuclear ambitions, a renewed US emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.'
That list of reasons alone is long enough to generate profound concern. Yet there are more. The Bush Administration has abandoned commitment to the international rule of law and encouraged allies such as the former Howard Government to do the same. Only two of the nuclear weapons states — China and India — have declared a no-first-use policy.
Many of the 12,000 deployed nuclear weapons are on high alert status. Nuclear weapons are still being included in active military strategic doctrine. The bargain at the heart of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is being broken. The five nuclear powers that are party to the Treaty, who pledged 'the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals' under the NPT, are instead upgrading their nuclear weapons.
Not only do India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons but so does Israel. Iran and North Korea have apparently tried or