Joschka Fischer on nuclear nonproliferation

Joschka Fisher and his wife Minu Barati

I just belatedly discovered that former German Foreign Minister and Green Party leader Joschka Fischer now does a regular Monday column for Die Ziet Zeit. His latest is Blind in die Atomkrise? 10.03.2008 (Blind into the atomic crisis?).

Fischer emphasizes the significance of the Wall Street Journal op-ed by "elder statesmen" George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn, A World Free of Nuclear Weapons 01/04/07 (the linked version at the Friends Committee on National Legislation Web site says it was updated 01/17/08).

The current German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier recently raised the need for new emphasis on nonproliferation. But, Fischer says, so far his intervention has generated little interest among German leaders.

But Fischer calls attention to the WSJ op-ed, not because the ideas in themselves are new or innovative, but because the signers had not previously been advocates of complete nuclear disarmament. One of the current risks is that the US and Russia are still pointing nuclear missiles at each, which still carries real risks. The joint US-Russian nuclear weapons have been reduced since the end of the Cold War from around 65,000 to around 26,000, a number which Fischer rightly calls still "beyond any rationality". Other nuclear powers have around 1,000 nuclear powers, which presumably would include several hundred in Israel.

And present developments are potentially making the situation more dangerous than the superpower confrontation of the Cold War. He gives a catalogue of examples, including the potential for a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, which is bringing with it what he calls "a new definition of state sovereignty as 'nuclear sovereignty'." Having heard him speak last year in San Francisco, I know he sees Iran as pushing toward nuclear weapons ultimately with their peaceful nuclear energy program, which he pointedly calls "legal" in this column. But he wasn't the least supportive of Cheney's war threats against Iran.

And the existing nuclear nonproliferation regime, built around the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), is in danger of coming apart. "The Bush government bears the greatest responsibility for this," he writes, because of their abrogation of the ABM Treaty and their general indifference to nuclear proliferation.

Fischer stresses that the intiative for a renewal of nuclear nonproliferation efforts will have to come the two powers with by far the most nukes, the US and Russia. He considers it critical to save the current NPT and also to broaden its features. The existing nuclear powers have to make much greater efforts to dismantle their own nuclear weapons. And the NPT arrangement has to be broadened to deal with situations like that in Iran, where a country can legally develop peaceful nuclear energy capacities to the point that "only one further political decision" could convert it into an advanced nuclear weapons program.

Tags: joschka fischer, nonproliferation, nuclear nonproliferation