by Robert Koehler<\/p>\n
Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. And . . . as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo today, I state clearly and with conviction America\u2019s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n
Uh . . .<\/p>\n
These words, the core of President Obama\u2019s first major foreign policy speech,delivered in Prague<\/a> in April 2009, now resonate with nothing so much as toxic irony \u2013 these pretty words, these words of false hope, which disappeared into Washington\u2019s military-industrial consensus and failed to materialize into action or policy.<\/p>\n James Carroll<\/a>, writing at Mother Jones in 2013, describes what happened in the wake of this extraordinary policy declaration:<\/p>\n \u201cIn order to get the votes of Senate Republicans to ratify the START treaty, Obama made what turned out to be a devil\u2019s bargain. He agreed to lay the groundwork for a vast \u2018modernization\u2019 of the US nuclear arsenal, which, in the name of updating an aged system, is already morphing into a full-blown reinvention of the arms cache at an estimated future cost of more than a trillion dollars. In the process, the Navy wants, and may get, 12 new strategic submarines; the Air Force wants, and may get, a new long-range strike bomber force. Bombers and submarines would, of course, both be outfitted with next-generation missiles, and we\u2019d be off to the races. The arms races.\u201d<\/p>\n And the cause of global nuclear disarmament, once a dream with geopolitical cred, may wind up entombed in eternal apathy. As Carroll put it: \u201cNuclear abolition itself is being abolished.\u201d<\/p>\n But I refuse to believe that. What I do believe is that change of such magnitude simply cannot emerge from the actions of top-down leadership, even sentimentally sympathetic leadership like Obama\u2019s, until a counterforce for disarmament is able to stand eyeball to eyeball with world decision makers and the military-industrial matrix in which they operate.<\/p>\n Say hello to the Marshall Islands<\/a>, the tiny, heroic island nation in Micronesia, with a population just over 70,000. This former U.S. territory, which still bears the terrible scars of 67 aboveground nuclear blasts between 1946 and 1958, when this country used it as an expendable nuclear test site, has engaged the United States \u2013 and, indeed, all nine nations that possess nuclear weapons \u2013 in lawsuits demanding that they comply with the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and begin the process of negotiating global nuclear disarmament.<\/p>\n Specifically, the lawsuits \u2013 filed both in the International Court of Justice in the Hague and US federal court \u2013 are demanding compliance with Article VI of the treaty, signed by the US in 1970, which reads: \u201cEach of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith 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.\u201d<\/p>\n General and complete disarmament . . .<\/p>\n Do these words actually have meaning? Right now the Marshall Islands stand alone among the nations of Planet Earth in believing that they do.<\/p>\n The US suit was filed in the April 2014 and dismissed as \u201cspeculative.\u201d This ruling was appealed, the appeal was contested, and last month the attorneys for the Marshall Islands filed their reply brief, challenging, among other things, the US government\u2019s contention that an international treaty is the province of the Executive Branch to comply with (or ignore) as it chooses.<\/p>\n The brief is demanding that the Judicial Branch assert itself in this matter and rule on the island nation\u2019s claims that A) as a signatory to the treaty, it is owed US compliance to negotiate disarmament in good faith and dismantle its own nuclear weapons cache rather than upgrade it; and B) US failure to do so creates a \u201cmeasurable increased risk of nuclear danger\u201d for the Marshall Islands (and, of course, everyone else on the planet).<\/p>\n There\u2019s no clear time frame for what will happen next, but at some point a three-judge panel in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will either uphold the case\u2019s dismissal or call for oral arguments to proceed.<\/p>\n