No single strategy will end war. Strategies must be layered and woven together to be effective. In what follows, each element is stated as concisely as possible. Entire books have been written about each of them, a few of which are listed in the resources section. As will be apparent, choosing a world beyond war will require us to dismantle the existing War System and create the institutions of an Alternative Global Security System and/or to further develop those institutions where they already exist in embryo. Note that World Beyond War is not proposing a sovereign world government but rather a web of governing structures voluntarily entered into and a shift in cultural norms away from violence and domination.
Common Security
Conflict management as practiced in the iron cage of war is self-defeating. In what is known as the “security dilemma,” states believe they can only make themselves more secure by making their adversaries less secure, leading to escalating arms races that culminated in conventional, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of horrific destructiveness. Placing the security of one’s adversary in danger has not led to security but to a state of armed suspicion, and as a result, when wars have begun, they have been obscenely violent. Common security acknowledges that one nation can only be secure when all nations are. The national security model leads only to mutual insecurity, especially in an era when nation states are porous. The original idea behind national sovereignty was to draw a line around a geographical territory and control everything that attempted to cross that line. In today’s technologically advanced world that concept is obsolete. Nations cannot keep out ideas, immigrants, economic forces, disease organisms, information, ballistic missiles, or cyber-attacks on vulnerable infrastructure like banking systems, power plants, stock exchanges. No nation can go it alone. Security must be global if it is to exist at all.
Demilitarizing Security
Conflicts typical of the contemporary world cannot be resolved at gunpoint. They require not a recalibration of military tools and strategies but a far-reaching commitment to demilitarization.
Tom Hastings (Author and Professor of Conflict Resolution)
Shift to a Non-Provocative Defense Posture
A first step toward demilitarizing security could be non-provocative defense, which is to reconceive and reconfigure training, logistics, doctrine, and weaponry so that a nation’s military is seen by its neighbors to be unsuitable for offense but clearly able to mount a credible defense of its borders. It is a form of defense that rules out armed attacks against other states.
Can the weapon system be effectively used abroad, or can it be only used at home? If it can be used abroad, then it is offensive, particularly if that ‘abroad’ includes countries with which one is in conflict. It if can only be used at home then the system is defensive, being operational only when an attack has taken place.1
(Johan Galtung, Peace and Conflict Researcher)
Non-provocative defense implies a truly defensive military posture. It includes radically reducing or eliminating long-range weapons such as Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, long-range attack aircraft, carrier fleets and heavy ships, militarized drones, nuclear submarine fleets, overseas bases, and possibly tank armies. In a mature Alternative Global Security System, a militarized non-provocative defense posture would be gradually phased out as it became unnecessary.
Another defensive posture that will be necessary is a system of defense against futuristic attacks including cyber-attacks on the energy grid, power plants, communications, financial transactions and defense against dual-use technologies such as nanotechnology and robotics. Ramping up the cyber capabilities of Interpol would be a first line of defense in this case and another element of an Alternative Global Security System.2
Also, non-provocative defense would not rule out a nation having long-range aircraft and ships configured exclusively for humanitarian relief. Shifting to non-provocative defense weakens the War System while making possible the creation of a humanitarian disaster relief force that strengthens the peace system.
Create a Nonviolent, Civilian-Based Defense Force
Gene Sharp has combed history to find and record hundreds of methods that have been used successfully to thwart oppression. Civilian-based defense (CBD)
indicates defense by civilians (as distinct from military personnel) using civilian means of struggle (as distinct from military and paramilitary means). This is a policy intended to deter and defeat foreign military invasions, occupations, and internal usurpations.”3 This defense “is meant to be waged by the population and its institutions on the basis of advance preparation, planning, and training.
It is a “policy [in which] the whole population and the society’s institutions become the fighting forces. Their weaponry consists of a vast variety of forms of psychological, economic, social, and political resistance and counter-attack. This policy aims to deter attacks and to defend against them by preparations to make the society unrulable by would-be tyrants and aggressors. The trained population and the society’s institutions would be prepared to deny the attackers their objectives and to make consolidation of political control impossible. These aims would be achieved by applying massive and selective noncooperation and defiance. In addition, where possible, the defending country would aim to create maximum international problems for the attackers and to subvert the reliability of their troops and functionaries.
Gene Sharp (Author, Founder of Albert Einstein Institution)
The dilemma faced by all societies since the invention of war, namely, to either submit or become a mirror image of the attacking aggressor, is solved by civilian-based defense. Becoming as or more war-like than the aggressor was based on the reality that stopping him requires coercion. Civilian-based defense deploys a powerful coercive force that does not require military action.
In civilian-based defense, all cooperation is withdrawn from the invading power. Nothing works. The lights don’t come on, or the heat, the waste is not picked up, the transit system doesn’t work, courts cease to function, the people don’t obey orders. This is what happened in the “Kapp Putsch” in Berlin in 1920 when a would-be dictator and his private army tried to take over. The previous government fled, but the citizens of Berlin made governing so impossible that, even with overwhelming military power, the takeover collapsed in weeks. All power does not come from the barrel of a gun.
In some cases, sabotage against government property would be deemed appropriate. When the French Army occupied Germany in the aftermath of World War I, German railway workers disabled engines and tore up tracks to prevent the French from moving troops around to confront large-scale demonstrations. If a French soldier got on a tram, the driver refused to move.
Two core realities support civilian-based defense; first, that all power comes from below—all government is by consent of the governed and that consent can always be withdrawn, causing the collapse of a governing elite. Second, if a nation is seen as ungovernable, because of a robust civilian-based defense force, there is no reason to try to conquer it. A nation defended by military power can be defeated in war by a superior military power. Countless examples exist. Examples also exist of peoples rising up and defeating ruthless dictatorial governments through nonviolent struggle, beginning with the liberation from an occupying power in India by Gandhi’s people power movement, continuing with the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, the Soviet-backed dictatorships in Eastern Europe, and the Arab Spring, to name only a few of the most notable examples.
In a civilian-based defense all able adults are trained in methods of resistance.4 A standing Reserve Corps of millions is organized, making the nation so strong in its independence that no one would think of trying to conquer it. A CBD system is widely publicized and totally transparent to adversaries. A CBD system would cost a fraction of the amount now spent to fund a military defense system. CBD can provide effective defense within the War System, while it is an essential component of a robust peace system. Certainly one can argue that nonviolent defense must transcend the nation-state view as forms of social defense, since the nation state itself often is an instrument of oppression against physical or cultural existence of peoples.5
As noted above, scientifically proven wisdom holds that nonviolent civil resistance is twice as likely to be successful compared to movements that use violence. The contemporary knowledge in theory and practice is what makes longtime nonviolent movement activist and scholar George Lakey hopeful for a strong role of CBD. He states: “If the peace movements of Japan, Israel and the United States choose to build on a half century of strategy work and devise a serious alternative to war, they will certainly build in preparation and training and gain the attention of pragmatists in their societies.”6
Phase Out Foreign Military Bases
In 2009 the U.S. lease on an air base in Ecuador was set to expire and the president of Ecuador made a proposal to the U.S.
We’ll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami.
The British people would find it unthinkable if their government allowed Saudi Arabia to establish a large military base in the British Isles. Similarly, the United States would not tolerate an Iranian air base in Wyoming. These foreign establishments would be seen as a threat to their security, their safety and their sovereignty. Foreign military bases are valuable for controlling populations and resources. They are locations from which the occupying power can strike inside the “host” country or against nations on its borders, or possibly deter attacks. They are also frightfully expensive for the occupying country. The United States is the prime example, having hundreds of bases in 135 countries around the world. The actual total seems to be unknown; even Defense Department figures vary from office to office. Anthropologist David Vine, who has extensively researched the presence of U.S. military bases all over the world, estimates that there are 800 locations that station troops globally. He documents his research in the 2015 book Base Nation. How U.S. military bases abroad harm America and the world. Foreign bases create resentment against what is seen locally as imperial domination.7 Eliminating foreign military bases is a pillar of an Alternative Global Security System and goes hand-in hand with non-provocative defense.
Withdrawing to an authentic defense of a nation’s borders is a key part of demilitarizing security, thus weakening the ability of the War System to create global insecurity. As an alternative, some of the bases could be converted to civilian use in a “Global Aid Plan” as country assistance centers (see below). Others could be converted to solar panel arrays and other systems of sustainable energy.
Disarmament
Disarmament is an obvious step leading toward a world beyond war. The problem of war is in great measure a problem of wealthy nations flooding poor nations with weapons, most of them for a profit, others for free. Regions of the world that we think of as war-prone, including Africa and most of Western Asia, do not manufacture most of their own weapons. They import them from distant, wealthy nations. International small arms sales, in particular, have skyrocketed in recent years, tripling since 2001.
The United States is the world’s leading weapons seller. Most of the rest of international weapons sales come from the four other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany. If these six countries stopped dealing weapons, global disarmament would be a very long way toward success.
The violence of poor countries is often used to justify war (and arms sales) in wealthy countries. Many wars have U.S.-made weapons on both sides. Some have U.S. trained and armed proxies on both sides, as has been the case lately in Syria where troops armed by the Department of Defense have fought troops armed by the CIA. The typical response is not disarmament, but more armament, more weapons gifts and sales to proxies, and more arms purchases in the wealthy nations.
The United States is not just the biggest arms seller, but also the biggest arms buyer. Were the United States to scale back its arsenal, removing various weapons systems that lack a defensive purpose, for example, a reverse arms race might be kick started.
Efforts to end war are crippled by the ongoing existence and growth of the arms trade, but scaling back and ending the arms trade is a possible path toward ending war. Strategically, this approach has some possible advantages. For example, opposing U.S. weapons sales to Saudi Arabia or gifts to Egypt or Israel does not require a confrontation with U.S. patriotism in the way that opposing U.S. wars does. Instead we can confront the arms trade as the global health threat that it is.
Disarmament will require reductions in so-called conventional weapons as well as nuclear and other weapons types. We will need to end profiteering in arms trading. We will need to restrain the aggressive pursuit of global dominance that leads other nations to acquire nuclear weapons as deterrents. But we will also need to take on disarmament step-by-step, eliminating particular systems, such as armed drones, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and weapons in outer space.
Conventional Weapons
The world is awash in armaments, everything from automatic weapons to battle tanks and heavy artillery. The flood of arms contributes both to the escalation of violence in wars and to the dangers of crime and terrorism. It aids governments that have committed gross human rights abuses, creates international instability, and perpetuates the belief that peace can be achieved by guns.
The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) is guided by the vision of promoting global norms of disarmament and oversees efforts to deal with weapons of mass destruction and conventional arms and the arms trade.8 The office promotes nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, strengthening of the disarmament regimes in respect to other weapons of mass destruction, and chemical and biological weapons, and disarmament efforts in the area of conventional weapons, especially landmines and small arms, which are the weapons of choice in contemporary conflicts.
Outlaw the Arms Trade
Arms manufacturers have lucrative government contracts and are even subsidized by them and also sell on the open market. The U.S. and others have sold billions in arms into the volatile and violent Middle East. Sometimes the arms are sold to both sides in a conflict, as in the case of Iraq and Iran and the war between them that killed between 600,000 and 1,250,000 based on scholarly estimates.9 Sometimes weapons end up being used against the seller or its allies, as in the case of weapons the U.S. provided to the Mujahedeen which ended up in the hands of al Qaeda, and the arms the U.S. sold or gave to Iraq which ended up in the hands of ISIS during its 2014 invasion of Iraq.
The international trade in death-dealing weapons is huge, over $70 billion per year. The main exporters of arms to the world are the powers that fought in World War II; in order: U.S., Russia, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.
The UN adopted the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) on April 2, 2013. It does not abolish the international arms trade. The treaty is an “instrument establishing common international standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional arms.” It entered into force in December 2014. In the main, it says the exporters will monitor themselves to avoid selling arms to “terrorists or rogue states.” The U.S., which has not ratified the treaty, nonetheless made certain that it had a veto over the text by demanding that consensus govern the deliberations. The U.S. demanded that the treaty leave huge loopholes so that the treaty will not “unduly interfere with our ability to import, export, or transfer arms in support of our national security and foreign policy interests” [and] “the international arms trade is a legitimate commercial activity” [and] “otherwise lawful commercial trade in arms must not be unduly hindered.” Further, “There is no requirement for reporting on or marking and tracing of ammunition or explosives [and] there will be no mandate for an international body to enforce an ATT.”10
An Alternative Security System requires a major level of disarmament in order for all nations to feel safe from aggression. The UN defines general and complete disarmament “…as the elimination of all WMD, coupled with the “balanced reduction of armed forces and conventional armaments, based on the principle of undiminished security of the parties with a view to promoting or enhancing stability at a lower military level, taking into account the need of all States to protect their security” (UN General Assembly, Final Document of the First Special Session on Disarmament, para. 22.) This definition of disarmament seems to have holes large enough to drive a tank through. A much more aggressive treaty with dated reduction levels is required, as well as an enforcement mechanism.
The Treaty appears to do no more than require States Parties to create an agency to oversee arms exports and imports and to determine if they think the arms will be misused for such activities as genocide or piracy and to report annually on their trade. It does not appear to do the job since it leaves the control of the trade up to those who want to export and import. A far more vigorous and enforceable ban on the export of arms is necessary. The arms trade needs to be added to the International Criminal Court’s list of “crimes against humanity” and enforced in the case of individual arms manufacturers and traders and by the Security Council in its mandate to confront violations of “international peace and security” in the case of sovereign states as the selling agents.11
End the Use of Militarized Drones
Drones are pilotless aircraft (as well as submarines and other robots) maneuvered remotely from a distance of thousands of miles. Thus far, the main deployer of military drones has been the United States. “Predator” and “Reaper” drones carry rocket-propelled high explosive warheads which can be targeted on people. They are maneuvered by “pilots” sitting at computer terminals in Nevada and elsewhere. These drones are regularly used for so-called targeted killings against people in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria. The justification for these attacks, which have killed hundreds of civilians, is the highly questionable doctrine of “anticipatory defense.” The U.S. President has determined that he can, with the aid of a special panel, order the death of anyone deemed to be a terrorist threat to the U.S., even U.S. citizens for whom the Constitution requires due process of law, conveniently ignored in this case. In fact, the U.S. Constitution requires respect of everyone’s rights, not making the distinction for U.S. citizens that we are taught. And among the targeted are people never identified but deemed suspicious by their behavior, a parallel to racial profiling by domestic police.
The problems with drone attacks are legal, moral, and practical. First, they are a clear violation of every nation’s laws against murder and of U.S. law under executive orders issued against assassinations by the U.S. government as far back as 1976 by President Gerald Ford and later reiterated by President Ronald Reagan. Used against U.S. citizens – or anyone else – these killings violate the rights of due process under the U.S. Constitution. And while current international law under Article 51 of the UN Charter legalizes self-defense in the case of an armed attack, drones nevertheless appear to violate international law as well as the Geneva Conventions.12 While drones might be considered legally used in a combat zone in a declared war, the U.S. has not declared war in all of the countries where it kills with drones, nor are any of its current wars legal under the UN Charter or the Kellogg-Briand Pact, nor is it clear what makes certain wars “declared” as the U.S. Congress has not declared war since 1941.
Further, the doctrine of anticipatory defense, which states that a nation can legitimately use force when it anticipates it might be attacked, is questioned by many international law experts. The problem with such an interpretation of international law is its ambiguity—how does a nation know for certain that what another state or non-state actor says and does would truly lead to an armed attack? In fact, any would-be aggressor could actually hide behind this doctrine to justify its aggression. At the least, it could be (and is presently) used indiscriminately without oversight by Congress or the United Nations.
Second, drone attacks are clearly immoral even under the conditions of “just war doctrine” which stipulates that non-combatants are not to be attacked in warfare. Many of the drone attacks are not targeted on known individuals whom the government designates as terrorists, but simply against gatherings where such people are suspected to be present. Many civilians have been killed in these attacks and there is evidence that on some occasions, when rescuers have gathered at the site after the first attack, a second strike has been ordered to kill the rescuers. Many of the dead have been children.13
Third, drone attacks are counter-productive. While purporting to kill enemies of the U.S. (a sometimes dubious claim), they create intense resentment for the U.S. and are easily used in recruiting new terrorists.
For every innocent person you kill, you create ten new enemies.
General Stanley McChrystal (former Commander, U.S. and NATO Forces in Afghanistan)
Further, by arguing that its drone attacks are legal even when war has not been declared, the U.S provides justification for other nations or groups to claim legality when they may well want to use drones to attack the U.S. Drone attacks make a nation that uses them less rather than more secure.
When you drop a bomb from a drone… you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good,
U.S. Lt. General Michael Flynn (ret.)
More than seventy nations now possess drones,and more than 50 countries are developing them.14 The rapid development of the technology and production capacity suggest that almost every nation will be able to have armed drones within a decade. Some War System advocates have said that the defense against drone attacks will be to build drones that attack drones, demonstrating the way in which War System thinking typically leads to arms races and greater instability while widening the destruction when a particular war breaks out. Outlawing militarized drones by any and all nations and groups would be a major step forward in demilitarizing security.
Drones are not named Predators and Reapers for nothing. They are killing machines. With no judge or jury, they obliterate lives in an instant, the lives of those deemed by someone, somewhere, to be terrorists, along with those who are accidentally—or incidentally—caught in their cross-hairs.
Medea Benjamin (Activist, Author, Co-founder of CODEPINK)
Phase Out Weapons Of Mass Destruction
Weapons of mass destruction are a powerful positive feedback to the War System, strengthening its spread and ensuring that wars that do occur have the potential for planet-altering destruction. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are characterized by their ability to kill and maim enormous numbers of people, wiping out whole cities and even whole regions with indescribable destruction.
Nuclear Weapons
At present there are treaties banning biological and chemical weapons but there is no treaty banning nuclear weapons. The 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) provides that five recognized nuclear weapons states– the U.S., Russia, UK, France and China– should make good faith efforts for the elimination of nuclear weapons, while all other NPT signatories pledge not to acquire nuclear weapons. Only three countries refused to join the NPT— India, Pakistan, and Israel—and they acquired nuclear arsenals. North Korea, relying on the NPT bargain for “peaceful” nuclear technology, walked out of the treaty using its “peaceful” technology to develop fissile materials for nuclear power to manufacture nuclear bombs.15 Indeed, every nuclear power plant is a potential bomb factory.
A war fought with even a so-called “limited” number of nuclear weapons would kill millions, induce nuclear winter and result in worldwide food shortages that would result in the starvation of millions. The whole nuclear strategy system rests upon a false foundation, because computer models suggest that only a very small percentage of warheads detonated could cause the worldwide shutdown of agriculture for up to a decade—in effect, a death sentence for the human species. And the trend at present is toward a greater and greater likelihood of some systemic failure of equipment or communication that would lead to nuclear weapons being used.
A larger release could extinguish all life on the planet. These weapons threaten the security of everyone everywhere.16 While various nuclear arms control treaties between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union did reduce the insane number of nuclear weapons (56,000 at one point), there are still 16,300 in the world, only 1000 of which are not in the U.S. or Russia.17 What is worse, the treaties allowed for “modernization,” a euphemism for creating a new generation of weapons and delivery systems, which all of the nuclear states are doing. The nuclear monster has not gone away; it is not even lurking in the back of the cave—it’s out in the open and costing billions of dollars that could be far better used elsewhere. Since the not so Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1998, the U.S. has ramped up its high-tech laboratory tests of nuclear weapons, coupled with sub-critical tests, 1,000 feet below the desert floor at the Nevada test site on Western Shoshone land. The U.S. has performed 28 such tests to date, blowing up plutonium with chemicals, without causing a chain-reaction, hence “sub-critical”.18 Indeed, the Obama administration is currently projecting expenditures of one trillion dollars over the next thirty years for new bomb factories and delivery systems—missiles, airplanes submarines—as well as new nuclear weapons.19
Conventional War System thinking argues that nuclear weapons deter war–the so-called doctrine of “Mutual Assured Destruction” (“MAD”). While it is true that they have not been used since 1945, it is not logical to conclude that MAD has been the reason. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, every U.S. president since Truman has used nuclear weapons as a threat to other nations to get them to allow the U.S. to get its way. Furthermore, such a doctrine rests on a wobbly faith in the rationality of political leaders in a crisis situation, for all time to come. MAD does not ensure security against either accidental release of these monstrous weapons or a strike by a nation that mistakenly thought it was under attack or a pre-emptive first strike. In fact, certain kinds of nuclear warhead delivery systems have been designed and built for the latter purpose—the Cruise Missile (which sneaks under radar) and the Pershing Missile, a fast attack, forward-based missile. Serious discussions actually occurred during the Cold War about the desirability of a “Grand, Decapitating First Strike” in which the U.S. would initiate a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in order to disable its ability to launch nuclear weapons by obliterating command and control, beginning with the Kremlin. Some analysts wrote about “winning” a nuclear war in which only a few tens of millions would be killed, nearly all civilians.20 Nuclear weapons are patently immoral and insane.
Even if they are not used deliberately, there have been numerous incidents where nuclear weapons carried in airplanes have crashed to the ground, fortunately only spewing some plutonium on the ground, but not going off.21 In 2007, six U.S. missiles carrying nuclear warheads were mistakenly flown from North Dakota to Louisiana and the missing nuclear bombs were not discovered for 36 hours.22 There have been reports of drunkenness and poor performance by servicemen posted in underground silos responsible for launching U.S. nuclear missiles poised on hair-trigger alert and pointed at Russian cities.23 The U.S. and Russia each have thousands of nuclear missiles primed and ready to be fired at each other. A Norwegian weather satellite went off-course over Russia and was almost taken for an incoming attack until the last minute when utter chaos was averted.24
History does not make us, we make it—or end it.
Thomas Merton (Catholic Writer)
The 1970 NPT was due to expire in 1995, and it was extended indefinitely at that time, with a provision for five year review conferences and preparatory meetings in between. To gain consensus for the NPT extension, the governments promised to hold a conference to negotiate a Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone in the Middle East. At each of the five year review conferences, new promises were given, such as for an unequivocal commitment to the total elimination of nuclear weapons, and for various “steps” that need to be taken for a nuclear free world, none of which have been honored.25 A Model Nuclear Weapons Convention, drafted by civil society with scientists, lawyers, and other experts was adopted by the UN26 which provided, “all States would be prohibited from pursuing or participating in the ‘development, testing, production, stockpiling, transfer, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons.’” It provided for all the steps that would be needed to destroy arsenals and guard materials under verified international control.27
To the dismay of civil society and many non-nuclear weapons states, none of the proposed steps at the many NPT review conferences have been adopted. Following an important initiative by the International Red Cross to make known the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, a new campaign to negotiate a simple ban treaty without the participation of the nuclear weapons states was launched in Oslo in 2013, with follow up conferences in Nayarit, Mexico and Vienna in 2014.28 There is momentum to open these negotiations after the 2015 NPT Review conference, on the 70th Anniversary of the terrible destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the Vienna meeting, the government of Austria announced a pledge to work for a nuclear weapons ban, described as “taking effective measures to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons” and “to cooperate with all stakeholders to achieve this goal.”29 Additionally, the Vatican spoke out at this conference and for the first time declared that nuclear deterrence is immoral and the weapons should be banned.30 A ban treaty will put pressure not only on the nuclear weapons states, but on the governments sheltering under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, in NATO countries which rely on nuclear weapons for “deterrence” as well as countries like Australia, Japan and South Korea.31 Additionally, the U.S. stations about 400 nuclear bombs in NATO states, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Turkey, who will also be pressured to give up their “nuclear sharing arrangements” and sign the ban treaty.3233
Chemical and Biological Weapons
Biological weapons consist of deadly natural toxins such as Ebola, typhus, smallpox, and others that have been altered in the lab to be super virulent so there is no antidote. Their use could start an uncontrolled global epidemic. Therefore it is critical to adhere to existing treaties that already make up part of an Alternative Security System. The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction was opened for signature in 1972 and went into force in 1975 under the aegis of the United Nations. It prohibits the 170 signatories from possessing or developing or stockpiling these weapons. However, it lacks a verification mechanism and needs to be strengthened by a rigorous challenge inspection regime (i.e., any State can challenge another which has agreed in advance to an inspection.)
The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction prohibits the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, transfer or use of chemical weapons. States Signatories have agreed to destroy any stockpiles of chemical weapons they may hold and any facilities which produced them, as well as any chemical weapons they abandoned on the territory of other States in the past and to create a challenge verification regime for certain toxic chemicals and their precursors… in order to ensure that such chemicals are only used for purposes not prohibited. The convention entered into force on April 29, 1997. Whereas the world stockpiles of chemical weapons have been dramatically reduced, complete destruction is still a distant goal.34 The treaty was successfully implemented in 2014, when Syria turned over its stockpiles of chemical weapons. The decision to pursue that result was made by U.S. President Barack Obama shortly after he reversed his decision to launch a major bombing campaign over Syria, the nonviolent disarmament measure serving as something of a public substitute for a war measure prevented largely by public pressure.
Outlaw Weapons In Outer Space
Several countries have developed plans and even hardware for warfare in outer space including ground to space and space to space weapons to attack satellites, and space to ground weapons (including laser weapons) to attack earth installations from space. The dangers of placing weapons in outer space are obvious, especially in the case of nuclear weapons or advanced technology weapons. 130 nations now have space programs and there are 3000 operational satellites in space. The dangers include undermining existing weapons conventions and starting a new arms race. If such a space-based war were to occur the consequences would be terrifying for earth’s inhabitants as well as risking the dangers of the Kessler Syndrome, a scenario in which the density of objects in low earth orbit is high enough that attacking some would start a cascade of collisions generating enough space debris to render space exploration or even the use of satellites infeasible for decades, possibly generations.
Believing it had the lead in this type of weapons R&D, “Assistant Secretary of the United States Air Force for Space, Keith R. Hall, said, ‘With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it and we’re going to keep it.’”
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was reaffirmed in 1999 by 138 nations with only the U.S. and Israel abstaining. It prohibits WMDs in space and the construction of military bases on the moon but leaves a loophole for conventional, laser and high energy particle beam weapons. The United Nations Committee on Disarmament has struggled for years to get consensus on a treaty banning these weapons but has been continually blocked by the United States. A weak, non-binding, voluntary Code of Conduct has been proposed but “the U.S. is insisting on a provision in this third version of the Code of Conduct that, while making a voluntary promise to ‘refrain from any action which brings about, directly or indirectly, damage, or destruction, of space objects’, qualifies that directive with the language “unless such action is justified”. “Justification” is based on the right of self-defense that is built into the UN Charter. Such a qualification renders even a voluntary agreement meaningless. A more robust treaty banning all weapons in outer space is a necessary component of an Alternative Security System.35
End Invasions and Occupations
The occupation of one people by another is a major threat to security and peace, resulting in structural violence that often promotes the occupied to mount various levels of attacks from “terrorist” assaults to guerrilla warfare. Prominent examples are: Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and assaults on Gaza, and China’s occupation of Tibet. Even the strong U.S. military presence in Germany, and even more so Japan, some 70 years after World War II has not prompted a violent response, but does create resentment, as do U.S. troops in many of the 175 nations where they are now based.
Even when the invading and occupying power has overwhelming military capability, these adventures usually do not work out due to several factors. First, they are enormously expensive. Second, they are often pitted against those who have a greater stake in the conflict because they are fighting to protect their homeland. Third, even “victories,” as in Iraq, are elusive and leave the countries devastated and politically fractured. Fourth, once in, it’s hard to get out, as the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan exemplifies which officially “ended” in December, 2014 after thirteen years, although almost 10,000 U.S. troops remain in country. Finally, and foremost, invasions and armed occupations against resistance kill more civilians than resistance fighters and create millions of refugees.
Invasions are outlawed by the UN Charter, unless they are in retaliation for a prior invasion, an inadequate provision. The presence of troops of one country inside another with or without an invitation destabilizes global security and makes conflicts more likely to be militarized and would be prohibited in an Alternative Security System.
Realign Military Spending, Convert Infrastructure to Produce Funding For Civilian Needs (Economic Conversion)
Demilitarizing security as described above will eliminate the need for many weapons programs and military bases, providing an opportunity for government and military-dependent corporations to switch these resources to creating genuine wealth. It can also reduce the tax burden on society and create more jobs. In the U.S., for every $1 billion spent in the military more than twice the number of jobs at wider spectrum of pay grades would be created if the same amount were spent in the civilian sector.36 The trade-offs from shifting federal spending priorities with U.S. tax dollars away from the military toward other programs are tremendous.37
Spending on a militarized national “defense” is astronomical. The United States alone spends more than the next 15 countries combined on its military.38
The United States spends $1.3 trillion dollars annually on the Pentagon Budget, nuclear weapons (in the Energy Department budget), veteran’s services, the CIA and Homeland Security.39 The world as a whole spends over $2 trillion. Numbers of this magnitude are hard to grasp. Note that 1 million seconds equals 12 days, 1 billion seconds equals 32 years, and 1 trillion seconds equals 32,000 years. And yet, the highest level of military spending in the world was unable to prevent the 9/11 attacks, halt nuclear proliferation, end terrorism, or suppress resistance to occupations in the Middle East. No matter how much money is spent on war, it does not work.
Military spending is also a serious drain on a nation’s economic strength, as pioneering economist Adam Smith pointed out. Smith argued that military spending was economically unproductive. Decades ago, economists commonly used “military burden” almost synonymously with “military budget.” Currently, military industries in the U.S. receive more capital from the state than all private industries combined can command. Transferring this investment capital to the free market sector either directly by grants for conversion or by lowering taxes or paying down the national debt (with its huge annual interest payments) would inject a huge incentive for economic development. A Security System combining the elements described above (and to be described in following sections) would cost a fraction of the present U.S. military budget and would underwrite a process of economic conversion. Furthermore, it would create more jobs. One billion dollars of federal investment in the military creates 11,200 jobs whereas the same investment in clean energy technology would yield 16,800, in health care 17,200 and in education 26,700.40
Economic conversion requires changes in technology, economics and the political process for shifting from military to civilian markets. It is the process of transferring the human and material resources used to make one product to the making of a different one; for example, converting from building missiles to building light rail cars. It is not a mystery: private industry does it all the time. Converting the military industry to making products of use value to society would add to the economic strength of a nation instead of detracting from it. Resources presently employed in making weapons and maintaining military bases could be redirected to many areas of domestic investment and foreign aid. Infrastructure is always in need of repair and upgrading including transportation infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and rail network, as well as energy grids, schools, water and sewer systems, and renewable energy installations, etc. Just imagine Flint, Michigan and the many other cities where citizens, mostly poor minorities, are poisoned with lead-contaminated water. Another investment area is innovation leading to reindustrialization of economies that are overloaded with low-paying service industries and far too dependent on debt payments and foreign imports of goods, a practice that also adds to the carbon loading of the atmosphere. Airbases, for example, can be converted to shopping malls and housing developments or entrepreneurship incubators or solar-panel arrays.
The main obstacles to economic conversion, apart from the corruption of government by money, are the fear of job loss and the need to retrain both labor and management. Jobs will need to be guaranteed by the state while the retraining takes place, or other forms of compensation paid to those currently working in the military industry in order to avoid a negative impact on the economy of major unemployment during the transition from a war to a peacetime status.
To be successful, conversion needs to be part of a larger political program of arms reduction. It will require national level meta-planning and financial assistance and intensive local planning as communities with military bases envision transformation and corporations determine what their new niche can be in the free market. This will require tax dollars but in the end will save far more than is invested in redevelopment as states end the economic drain of military spending and replace it with profitable peace time economies creating useful consumer goods.
Attempts have been made to legislate conversion, such as the Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion Act of 1999, which links nuclear disarmament to conversion.
The bill would require the United States to disable and dismantle its nuclear weapons and to refrain from replacing them with weapons of mass destruction once foreign countries possessing nuclear weapons enact and execute similar requirements. The bill also provides that the resources used to sustain our nuclear weapons program be used to address human and infrastructure needs such as housing, health care, education, agriculture, and the environment. So I would see a direct transfer of funds.
(Transcript of July 30, 1999, Press Conference) HR-2545: “Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion Act of 1999”
Legislation of this sort requires more public support to pass. Success may grow from a smaller scale. The state of Connecticut has created a commission to work on transition. Other states and localities may follow Connecticut’s lead. Some momentum for this grew out of a misperception that military spending was being reduced in Washington. We need to either prolong that misperception, make it a reality (obviously the best choice), or persuade local and state governments to take the initiative anyway.
Reconfigure The Response to Terrorism
Following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the U.S. attacked terrorist bases in Afghanistan, initiating a long, unsuccessful war. Adopting a military approach has not only failed to end terrorism, it has resulted in the erosion of constitutional liberties, the commission of human rights abuses and violations of international law, and has provided cover for dictators and democratic governments to further abuse their powers, justifying abuses in the name of “fighting terrorism.”
The terrorist threat to people in the Western world has been exaggerated and there has been an over-reaction in the media, public and political realm. Many benefit from exploiting the threat of terrorism in what now can be called a homeland-security-industrial complex. As Glenn Greenwald writes:
…the private and public entities that shape government policy and drive political discourse profit far too much in numerous ways to allow rational considerations of the Terror threat.41
One of the end results of the over-reaction to the terrorist threat has been a proliferation of violent and hostile extremists such as ISIS.42 In this particular case, there are many constructive nonviolent alternatives to counter ISIS which should not be mistaken for inaction. These include: an arms embargo, support of Syrian civil society, support of nonviolent civil resistance,43 pursuit of meaningful diplomacy with all actors, economic sanctions on ISIS and supporters, closing the border to cut off the sale of oil from ISIS controlled territories and stop the flow of fighters, and humanitarian aid. Long-term strong steps would be the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region and ending oil imports from the region in order to dissolve terrorism at its roots.44
In general, a more effective strategy than war would be to treat terrorist attacks as crimes against humanity instead of acts of war, and to use all the resources of the international police community to bring perpetrators to justice before the International Criminal Court. It is notable that an incredibly powerful military was unable to prevent the worst attacks on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor.
The world’s most powerful military did nothing to prevent or stop the 9-11 attacks. Virtually every terrorist caught, every terrorist plot foiled has been the result of first-rate intelligence and police work, not the threat or use of military force. Military force has also been useless in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Lloyd J. Dumas (Professor of Political Economy)
A professional field of peace and conflict studies scholars and practitioners is continuously providing responses to terrorism which are superior to the so-called experts of the terrorism industry.
Nonviolent responses to terrorism
Arms embargoes
End all military aid
Civil Society Support, Nonviolent actors
Sanctions
Work through supranational bodies (e.g. UN, ICC)
Ceasefires
Aid to refugees (relocate/improve proximal camps/repatriate)
Pledge no use of violence
Withdrawal of military
Nonviolent conflict workers
(Transitional) Justice Initiatives
Meaningful diplomacy
Conflict resolution framework
Inclusive good governance
Confront violence supporting beliefs
Increasing women’s participation in social and political life
Accurate information on facts
Separate perpetrators from support base – addressing the grey area
Ban war profiteering
Peacebuilding engagement; reframe the either/or us/them choices
Effective policing
Nonviolent Civil Resistance
Information gathering and reporting
Public advocacy
Conciliation, arbitration and judicial settlement
Human rights mechanisms
Humanitarian assistance and protection
Economic, political and strategic inducements
Monitoring, observation and verification
Long-term nonviolent responses to terrorism45
Stop and reverse all arms trade and manufacture
Consumption reduction by rich nations
Massive aid to poor nations and populations
Refugee repatriation or emigration
Debt relief to poorest nations
Education about roots of terrorism
Education and training about nonviolent power
Promote culturally and ecologically sensitive tourism and cultural exchanges
Build sustainable and just economy, energy use and distribution, agriculture
Dismantle Military Alliances
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