Mohamed ElBaradei offers a way towards nuclear disarmament

In this new book, ElBaradei reports on a deeply disturbing development — a scramble by numerous nations, driven by fear and insecurity, to obtain nuclear weapons or to maintain their own privileged nuclear status….

Mohamed ElBaradei’s The Age of Deception, HUFFINGTON
POST, Lawrence Wittner, 29 Sept 11, Can international diplomacy cope with the nuclear dangers that now threaten global survival? In The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times (Metropolitan Books, 2011), Mohamed ElBaradei makes the case that it can — if national governments would make a good faith effort to support it.

ElBaradei served from 1997 to 2009 as Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations entity charged with preventing the use of nuclear energy for military purposes. He and the IAEA shared the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. He was also a leader in the recent pro-democracy uprising in Egypt.

This scramble clearly contravenes the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Signed in 1968, the NPT represents a bargain between the nuclear weapons nations and the non-nuclear weapons nations. Under its provisions, the nuclear nations are required to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons and the non-nuclear nations are required to forgo developing them. If these provisions were followed, we would today have a nuclear weapons-free world. Instead, of course, we have a world in which nine nations continue to maintain over 20,000 nuclear weapons (about 95 percent of them possessed by the United States and Russia), other nations lay plans to join the nuclear club, and terrorist groups plot to obtain nuclear weapons from national arsenals……

ElBaradei has some harsh words for what he calls the “double standard” of nuclear-armed nations. The United States, Britain, France, China, and Russia not only dealt ineffectively and inconsistently with other nations suspected of developing nuclear weapons, but, through “their own failure to disarm contributed directly to proliferation itself.” When British foreign secretary David Miliband asked ElBaradei why Iran wanted to have nuclear weapons, the IAEA official was tempted to reply: “Why does the United Kingdom?”

In this treacherous context, ElBaradei’s prescription for dealing with the nuclear menace is to have the international community “develop an alternate system of collective security, one perceived not as a zero-sum game for a given country or group of countries, but as a universal imperative rooted in the notion of human security and solidarity.” This new system “must be, in every respect, equitable and inclusive. We must develop strategies to share the wealth of the planet more equally.” Furthermore, “a multinational security paradigm must rest on strong, responsive multinational institutions” — not only a strengthened IAEA, but a UN Security Council placing “far greater emphasis on peacekeeping and peacemaking.” Ultimately, he writes, “we are a single, conjoined human family; like it or not, we are in this together.”