For more than 30 years, a group of activists have kept watch over a tiny shrine outside the gates of the White House, dedicated to calls for peace and a world without nuclear weapons. It has become a fixture in the nation’s capital – a tiny, tarp-covered hut surrounded by signs depicting graphic consequences of nuclear war, adorned with pithy quotes like, “LIVE BY THE BOMB DIE BY THE BOMB.” Its central message to “BAN ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS OR HAVE A NICE DOOMSDAY,” has been viewed by millions of tourists every year.
On Friday, however, despite its own sympathies with the fixture across the street, the White House signaled that it’s not ready to work toward embrace a world bereft of atomic weapons of mass destruction.
Speaking to Japanese institute in Tokyo, a senior state department official torpedoed international efforts to ban all nukes, and instead advocated for a “verification and monitoring” regime to govern global arsenals, 90 percent of which belong to the United States and Russia.
“We know there are voices out there calling for the negotiation of a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. The United States cannot and will not support such efforts,” said Anita E. Friedt, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary with the state department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance.
Last December, at an international conference in Vienna focused on the humanitarian toll of nukes, dozens of nations including more than 30 Latin American and Caribbean countries, alongside African, Asian, and Middle Eastern states, pledged support for a global nuclear weapons ban.
But Friedt cautioned against the move. “A divisive, amorphous nuclear weapons convention or the false hope of a fixed timeline for the elimination of all nuclear weapons will not result in the actual elimination of nuclear weapons,” she said.
Instead, the US is calling for a more technocratic, incremental, and reversal approach to nuclear arms reduction. Friedt called for the “creation of verification and monitoring tools,” and announced a meeting next month in Washington, DC, between “experts from both nuclear and non-nuclear weapons states” to “better understand the technical problems of verifying nuclear disarmament agreements, and to develop solutions.”
The United States and Japan’s sordid history with nuclear weapons went unmentioned in the remarks. Friedt noted that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, but declined to note that the war concluded with the dropping of atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians—acts that have been lambasted as wholly unnecessary, by some historians. Friedt, instead, spoke about the “decades-long partnership that’s followed” since.
Speaking about US-Japanese security cooperation, Friedt veered away from disarmament, and toward militarism, talking vaguely about nations that “cling ever more tightly to their nuclear arsenals” and the need for the US to maintain and “effective nuclear arsenal.
“The United States remains fully prepared and capable of defending ourselves, Japan, and the peace and security of the region, with the full range of capabilities available, including the deterrence provided by our conventional and nuclear forces,” Friedt said.
Although deterrence may have played a role in staving off nuclear war for the last sixty years, many doubt the effectiveness of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction as a permanent solution. Last month, at a UK Parliamentary briefing recapping discussions from last year’s Vienna conference, Labour MP Paul Flynn (Newport West) said the current status quo of a small number of nations being allowed to possess their weapons, including the UK, are anathema to disarmament efforts, and actually encourage other nations to develop weapons of their own.
In a message to Vienna conference-goers, Pope Francis also cautioned against preserving a nuclear world governed by deterrence.
“Nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction cannot be the basis for an ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence among peoples and states,” the head of the Catholic Church said.
He spoke about the “misallocation of resources” that comes with maintaining, even reduced, nuclear arsenals. Money that, according to the Pope, “would be far better invested in the areas of integral human development, education, health and the fight against extreme poverty.”
According to recently released estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, the US will spend upwards of $350 million maintaining its nuclear force over the next decade.
Despite comments made by President Obama about working toward a nuclear weapons-free world, the State Department’s strong opposition to a prohibition on nuclear arms is consistent with prior positions on international weapons controls. As The Sentinel noted earlier this month, the US is part of a slim minority at the UN that opposes an international effort to ban the weaponization of space.
