Marshall Islands sues to hold nations to nuke pact
What if words like this actually meant something?
This is Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of NuclearWeapons, which the United States signed in 1970. It continues: “... on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
The treaty’s preamble also calls for “the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery. ...”
What if these words could stand up to the geopolitics of cynicism and military-industrial profit? What if the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of NuclearWeapons — the NPT — weren’t simply a verbal coffin in which hope for humanity’s future lay interred? What if it could come to life and help reorganize global culture?
I ask such questions only because I suddenly believe it’s possible, thanks to an unlikely player in the geopolitical realm: a nation with a population of about 70,000 people. The Republic of the Marshall Islands has filed suit in both the International Court of Justice in the Hague and U.S. federal court against the five NPT signatories — the United States, the U.K., China, Russia and France — that possess nuclear weapons, demanding that they comply with the treaty they signed.
For good measure, the lawsuit demands compliance from the other four nuclear nations as well — Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea — on the grounds of international law and, well, sanity.
Here’s the thing. This audacious lawsuit is a disarmament wedge.
The Marshall Islands, a tiny nation of coral reefs in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and once a U.S. trust territory, was the site of 67 above-ground nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958. These tests, so cynically perpetrated on an “expendable” people, turned much of the area into radioactive wasteland, wrecked a way of life and created terrible health problems for the residents, which they are still struggling with two generations later.
In the case in U.S. federal court, which challenges only the U.S. arsenal, the Marshall Islands are claiming injury in two ways: 1. As a signatory of the treaty themselves, they are owed U.S. participation in disarmament negotiations, as per its agreement. 2. Without that participation, as the U.S. continues to upgrade and enhance its nuclear arsenal and maintain hundreds of weapons on hair-trigger alert, the Marshall Islands — and all the rest of the Planet Earth — are in “a measurable increased risk of grave danger” from nuclear weapons use, either intentional or accidental.
Oral arguments in the U.S. case are likely to begin sometime next year. There’s no telling what will happen, of course. But this is not mere powerless, symbolic protest of a great wrong. The Marshall Islands suits challenge the nuclear states at a level that could yield real, not symbolic, victory and change.
As the website Nuclear Zero puts it: “The Republic of the Marshall Islands acts for the 7 billion of us who live on this planet to end the nuclear weapons threat hanging over all humanity. Everyone has a stake in this.”
You WASHINGTON— probably never knew of the federal funding of museums commemorating America’s long-gone whaling industry. The funding existed for 10 years, until 2011, because almost no one knew about it. A mohair subsidy continues six decades after it was deemed a military necessity in the context of the ColdWar. The subsidy survives because its beneficiaries are too clever to call attention to it by proclaiming it necessary, which of course it isn’t.
To understand these two matters is to understand how American government functions. And why James Madison, whose flinty realism is often called pessimism,