Hey â?? remember the cold war? Itâ??s over right? When a war ends it would be nice if the warring factions could pick up all their stuff and move it back to were it belongs. Despite this (obvious?) point the US maintains 480 nuclear weapons in Europe (Germany, UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey). Formally these are NATO but they are owned and controlled by the US. It would be really nice if the US would take them back home.
The weapons are placed on European soil and if anything goes wrong the damage will be carried by Europeans. They were designed as a deterrent â?? at least that was what we where told the arms race was for. So now that there is no major power to deter (if there ever was a need for nuclear deterrent) please take the crap off our front lawn.
Why not do something really wild and make Europe a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone?
Greenpeace has more information and also a fun video â??Nato Big Brotherâ?? â?? after the video you are asked to vote whom should leave.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) released its report entitled Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms read about the report launch here.
Commission Chairman Dr. Hans Blix presented it [the report] to the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the UN Headquarters in New York, and thereafter to the President of the United Nations General Assembly, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Sweden, Mr. Jan Eliasson, to whom Dr. Blix expressed his and the Commissionâ??s gratitude to the Swedish Government for having established and assumed the main financial responsibility of the WMDC.
The report calls for (amongst other things) the removal of nuclear arms in Europe.
The report clearly states that the nuclear weapon states are in breach of their Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitment to disarm and “no longer seem to take their commitment to nuclear disarmament seriously – even though this was an essential part of the NPT bargain, both at the treaty’s birth in 1968 and when it was extended indefinitely in 1995.”
That’s the kind of thing we have been saying for decades – but which rarely features in the UN Security Council, dominated as it is by the five permanent members, all of whom possess nuclear weapons. Far from disarming, they’re actually upgrading their arsenals.
The report also observes:
While the reaction of most states to the treaty violations was to strengthen and develop the existing treaties and institutions, the US, the sole superpower, has looked more to its own military power for remedies. The US National Security Strategy of 2002 made it clear that the US would feel free to use armed force without authorization of the United Nations Security Council to counter not only an actual or imminent attack involving WMD but also a WMD threat that might be uncertain as to time and place.
Download and read the full report here.
(via Real Peter Forsberg)
