The world should seek inspiration from past successes and aim to for global disarmament by 2020. It can be done, says Dan Plesch. From openDemocracy. By Dan Plesch for openDemocracy (20/12/07)
"Peace on Earth" is a seasonal wish at this time of year. It also one of the themes in Stanley Kubrick's excoriating satire of militaristic madness, Dr Strangelove. But whether the message is taken sincerely or cynically, it is no fantasy. For peace on earth - in the form of world disarmament - is practical by 2020. This article suggests how.
Disarmament has virtually disappeared from the political agenda. In the west it has become the word that dare not speak its name. In particular, the media and establishment politics in the United States and the Britain ignore it. Yet disarmament is arguably as important to sustainable human survival as global warming or world poverty - in some ways even more so.
The urgency of the problem of armaments is clear in almost every news bulletin: massacres in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the fear of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists, Star Wars deployments in Poland and Britain (and Vladimir Putin's warnings of their risks), the destruction caused by cluster-bombs and small arms - these are only a few of countless examples.
Between them, the United States and Russia possess 5,000 missiles that really are ready to fire in "45 minutes." Such a scale of threat would in any other period have placed disarmament at the centre of international politics - as it was since the end of the "great war" in 1918 until the mid-1990s. US presidents from John F Kennedy to Ronald Reagan were judged in large part on their achievements in the field of arms control and disarmament.
In the last decade, however, the marginalization of disarmament has been led by the same ultra-conservative forces in the US that propelled George W Bush into the presidency.
