Antinuclear

Weasel words at UN working group Malcolm Turnbull is getting accused of many things as he heads towards the first anniversary of his snafu-prone prime ministership. But aiding and abetting the planning of genocide, ecocide and even omnicide (that is, the destruction of everyone and all living things)?

Well, yes. The University of Sydney was recently the venue for an international people’s tribunal, a kind of volunteer court, in which the leaders of the nine nuclear powers were on trial for planning the above crimes through their explicit threats to use their weapons. Turnbull, as our current leader, was up for facilitating the use of American weapons. The judges were New Zealand’s former disarmament minister Matthew Robson and Sydney politics academic Keith Suter, who duly found the accused guilty, in absentia of course.

They ruled that nuclear weapons violate the accepted principles of international humanitarian law in wartime because they cannot discriminate between military and civilian targets; go far beyond proportional response and military objectives; don’t protect non-combatants; cause unnecessary suffering by spreading poison, disease and genetic damage; cause massive environmental damage; threaten future generations; threaten death on a scale amounting to genocide; and involve massive collateral damage to neutral countries.

The United States, France, Russia, Pakistan and Britain refuse to rule out first use of their nuclear weapons, “but all indicted leaders have military plans and exercises that demonstrate that they are ready to use nuclear weapons if they deem it necessary”, the tribunal found. …….

The gesture comes as nuclear powers are expanding or modernising their arsenals. India and Pakistan are in a nuclear arms race: even use of 100 Hiroshima sized-bombs in that theatre would plunge the Earth into its coldest climate for a thousand years, University of Missouri expert Steven Starr told the tribunal. An exchange between the big powers would, aside from the immediate casualties, create a new Ice Age and result in most surviving humans and large animals dying of starvation……

Nuclear ‘weasels’

Australia has steadily retreated from the push for universal nuclear disarmament that Bill Hayden, notably, inserted into policy when he was foreign minister in the Hawke government to provide moral balance to the alliance with the US.

As we’ve noticed before, the new Defence White Paper this year dropped all that. “Australia’s security is underpinned by the ANZUS Treaty, United States extended deterrence and access to advanced United States technology and information,” it stated. “Only the nuclear and conventional military capabilities of the United States can offer effective deterrence against the possibility of nuclear threats against Australia.”

Some might argue that joint facilities such as the space warfare facilities at Pine Gap and Geraldton would be first targets of a nuclear opponent seeking to disable the US command network. China says it would not use its weapons against a non-nuclear power. But would a country that hosts nuclear war-fighting facilities count as one?

Julie Bishop is all for nuclear weapons, gushing that “the horrendous humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons are precisely why deterrence has worked”. In Geneva, her diplomats have been hard at work trying to derail efforts for a United Nations ban on nuclear weapons…..

As the working group headed for its conclusive vote on August 19, it seemed that a suitably weasel-worded consensus resolution had been agreed upon to send to the UN General Assembly: a recommendation for a start on negotiations for a nuclear weapons ban treaty, with a note of the umbrella states’ dissenting view.

Then Australia baulked at the consensus and declared on behalf of 14 umbrella states that the text was not acceptable, and forced a vote.Lennane said it was felt Australia had acted in bad faith “by using the prospect of a consensus report to extract concessions and negotiate a weaker text, and then when others thought all was agreed, pulling the rug from under them and calling for a vote”. Canada, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Norway were among the umbrella states that refused to join Australia and voted for the resolution. It was passed, but with much bad will towards Australia. Bishop can be sure of brownie points in Washington, no doubt.

Maybe the Sydney tribunal will be more than a futile gesture against this kind of thing. ………. .https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/world/north-america/2016/08/27/peoples-tribunal-finds-australia-guilty-over-nuclear-weapons