Abolish nuclear weapons

Over 400 reactors in warships and nuclear submarines are still circling the globe. Some are rotting away on the bottom of the ocean or in a distant port somewhere in Russia. Accidents such as the Russian submarine, the Kursk, tragically sinking in the Barents Sea can happen every day, anywhere.

Over 2,000 nuclear weapons tests have left a legacy of global and regional contamination. People living near the test sites have suffered from cancers, stillbirths, miscarriages and other health effects -- and are still suffering today. Many had to leave their hometown or island as it became too contaminated to live there.

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The nuclear threat has quite literally scaled down in the last two decades. While the prospect of an all out exchange of arsenals between Russia and the US has receded, the 15 kilotons of destruction that obliterated Hiroshima could today be accomplished with a lunch-box sized bomb. George Bush talks openly of developing new "more useable" nuclear weapons. Even more alarmingly, the administration continues to seek approval for a programme geared toward designing more robust, more 'usable' nuclear weapons.

The prospects of a nuclear weapon actually being used are perhaps greater today than during the cold war.
 

Today, the number of countries involved in active weapons programs is increasing. A growing number of countries are lining up to join the nuclear club, increasing the chance that a nuclear catastrophe will happen somewhere on the planet. 

George Bush's war on Weapons of Mass Descruction had its first concrete result when the number of countries in the world with declared nuclear weapons increased to 8 from 7, when North Korea announced that it had built "enough nuclear weapons to deter a US attack."

Nuclear brinkmanship is inevitable in a climate of nuclear hypocrisy. Only when all countries pursue nuclear disarmament in good faith can we begin putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle by banning the use and manufacture of the nuclear materials at the heart of the bomb.

The only thing that will stop the threat is the voice of the second superpower: world opinion.