Waging Peace: The Challenge of Nuclear Stewardship

Waging Peace: The Challenge of Nuclear Stewardship

Waging Peace
Two of the most enduring symbols of the apparently contradictory quest for peace and strength are the sword and the plowshare. The prophet Isaiah said, “...they shall beat their swords into plowshares ... neither shall they make war anymore.”

Swords to Plowshares
The photograph shows a bronze statue, reflecting the sword to plowshare theme, sculpted by Evgeniy Vuchetich that was donated by the then-Soviet Union to the United Nations in New York in 1959.

Ancient Arms Control
In about 1100 B.C.E., at the turning point between the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Philistines restricted the use of iron by the Israelites. In 546 B.C.E., following the first recorded arms control conference, a “cessation of armaments” ended seventy-two years of hostilities in China’s Yangtse River Valley. Athens and Sparta agreed to dismantle fortifications and demobilize part of their fleets after the Peloponnesian War in the fourth century B.C.E. Plato’s Republic quotes Socrates as forbidding the use of poisoned weapons or poisoned water. In addition, India’s third-century B.C.E. Book of Man forbade weapons concealed in wood, barbed and poisoned points, and points “blazing with fire.” One of the best known of the ancient arms control agreements was negotiated between Rome and Carthage following Scipio Africanus’s victory over Hannibal in the Battle of Zama in 202 B.C. This treaty required the Carthaginians to surrender all of their war elephants and all but ten of their much-feared triremes.

This photo shows a 16th-century tapestry depicting the Battle of Zama and is used with permission of the Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, Spain.

Medieval Arms Control
In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church attempted to regulate warfare throughout Christendom. Augustine formulated the criteria for “just war” in The City of God in about A.D. 410.

Between 950 and 990 the Peace of God imposed rules of war to protect classes of individuals and certain types of property.

In 1139, the Twenty-Ninth Canon of the Second Lateran Council prohibited the use of crossbows as well as bows and arrows. Appearances of humanity to the contrary, the use of these weapons was prohibited only against Christians and was actually encouraged for use against the “infidels” against whom the Crusades were being waged.

With the introduction of gunpowder, cannons, and other firearms, the destructive capabilities of war and weaponry became even more pressing. Jurists, theologians, and politicians returned to the concept of the “just war.”

The crossbow known as the “Western Bow” was popular, and it appeared all over Western Europe from the 11th through the 16th centuries. It is simple and rectangular in section, with a quarrel (bolt) groove and metal sideplates. It is one of the most widely depicted crossbows in medieval manuscripts and paintings.

The Dawn of Modern Arms Control
Mirroring Socrates and the Book of Man, Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace, published in 1625, suggested banning the use of poison or deliberate pollution of drinking water. Agreements in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries attempted to control or dismantle the fortifications that dotted the European countryside.

In 1868, the St. Petersburg Declaration condemned “400-gram projectiles with fulminating or flammable substances” as being “contrary to the laws of humanity.” Between 1899 and 1907, The Hague Peace Conference banned dum-dums (hollow-point projectiles), the use of poison gas, and the discharge of projectiles and explosives from balloons or by other “new methods of a similar nature.”

On the road to Arras, France, in August 1918, American artist John Singer Sargent observed a field dressing station to which victims of mustard gas were being taken. His evocative painting of the scene, “Gassed,” has been described in part as follows:

“Under a sky whose color is reminiscent of the gas, a line of blindfolded soldiers staggers toward the tent on the right…Yet it is the central tableau of nine sightless men, still carrying their gear and their guns, that rivets our attention. They are being helped along by two orderlies, one of whom warns of a small step, and in response the third soldier, in a gesture that marks this as a moment frozen in time, lifts his foot to exaggerated height to avoid tripping. ...no other work of art conveys more powerfully both the fury and fortitude of World War I.”

Reacting to the catastrophic casualties from the use of chemical warfare in World War I, the 1922 Washington Treaty reemphasized The Hague Conference’s ban on the use of “noxious gases.” In 1925, the Geneva Convention generalized this to a ban on the use of all chemical weapons. In addition, between 1920 and 1926 the International Commission of Control, created by the Treaty of Versailles, attempted (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to prevent German rearmament by a comprehensive system of surprise inspections at the armament factories that soon were to support Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Sargent’s painting measures 20 feet by nine feet and is owned by the Imperial War Museum, London. It is reproduced here with their permission.

Princeton Professor Theodore Rabb’s descriptive comments above are quoted from Military History Quarterly, copyright 1999 by Cowles History Group, Inc., d/b/a PRIMEDIA Enthusiast Publications, 741 Miller Drive SE, Suite D-2, Leesburg, VA 20175 (Subscriptions: 800-827-1218; outside the US: 740-382-3322). Used with permission.

Naval Accords
The United States has a long history of naval arms control. In fact, the 1817 Rush-Bagot Agreement with Great Britain that demilitarized the Great Lakes is the longest-standing arms control agreement to which the United States is a party. Between 1921 and 1939, a set of agreements collectively known as the Washington Naval Limitation System specified detailed restrictions on the size, number, and armament of warships belonging to the world’s leading naval powers.

Near the end of the 1930s as the world lurched once again toward war, the fabric of arms control began to unravel, and the era of naval arms control came to an end. The capital ships seen here represent the major navies of the world in this period.

Germany
The Bismark and the Tirpitz:
The Bismark and its sister ship the Tirpitz were technically in compliance with the Washington Treaty System. The ships were not considered to be in violation of the treaty because Germany had initially adopted the treaties only “in principle,” and their final accession to the Anglo-German Naval Treaty contained a size escalation clause that made capital ships under 45,000-tons “legal.”

The Bismark:

The Tirpitz:

The Bismark was sunk by British forces in the mid-Atlantic on May 27, 1941. The Tirpitz was sunk in the Norwegian Tromso fjord on November 11, 1944. Photos courtesy Naval Historical Center, Washington, DC.

Japan
The Yamato and the Musashi:
These huge Japanese battleships, with near 70,000 tons of displacement and 18.1-inch main batteries, were the largest such vessels ever constructed. Like the Bismark and Tirpitz, they met the letter but not the spirit of the Washington Naval Accords.

The Musashi:

The Yamato:

The Musashi was sunk entirely by aircraft on October 24, 1944 during the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea. The Yamato was also sunk by carrier aircraft on April 7, 1945 as it headed towards Okinawa on a suicide mission.

Photos courtesy Naval Historical Center, Washington, DC.

United States
USS Washington (BB-47):

This US battleship never was commissioned and was sunk as a target in 1922 to meet the requirements of the Washington Naval Treaties. Photo courtesy Naval Historical Center, Washington, DC.

France and Italy
The French Richelieu and the Italian Duilio:
The French and Italian governments also participated in the Washington Naval Limitation System, and these particular vessels met the requirements for tonnage and armament imposed by the Agreements.

The Richelieu:

The Duilio:

Photos courtesy Naval Historical Center, Washington, DC.

England
The British Queen Elizabeth I:
This World War I vintage British battleship met all the requirements of the Washington Naval Limitation Systems. The Queen Elizabeth saw action during World War II in the Mediterranean and Far East. It was finally decommissioned and sold for scrap in 1948.

The Acheson-Lilienthal Report
When the United Nations was formed at the end of World War II, an international forum was established in which the question of atomic energy could be addressed. Then Secretary of State James F. Byrnes appointed a committee to develop an American policy on the international management of atomic energy. Its chair, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, realized his committee needed assistance from a board of consultants with the necessary time and skills to work this large issue.

The Board of Consultants was lead by David Lilienthal, head of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Other members included Chester Barnard, a senior leader from the world of business; Charles A. Thomas of Monsanto Chemical; Harry A. Winne of General Motors; and the already legendary J. Robert Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project. Published in 1946, this report was America’s first effort to define a policy on the control of atomic energy.

The Report On The International Control Of Atomic Energy (informally known as the “Acheson-Lilienthal” Report) was published March 16, 1946. It was America’s first effort to define a policy on the control of atomic energy. Its premise, which was enthusiastically endorsed by Acheson’s committee, was that there should be an international “Atomic Development Authority” which would have worldwide monopoly over the control of “dangerous elements” of the entire spectrum of atomic energy. This included mining of materials such as uranium, through research and development, to manufacturing.

The report proposed international cooperation and control rather than outlawing atomic weapons or establishing some unworkable means of inspection. It was felt this approach would promote and reinforce energetic research and development in a constructive form. The first US proposal to the United Nations on international controls on nuclear material, named the Baruch Plan for its author Bernard Baruch, drew heavily on the information in the Acheson-Lilienthal Report.

Satellite Monitoring of Arms Control Agreements
The adversarial relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War meant that the U.S. needed assurance that the Soviet Union was complying with the provisions of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty.

To accomplish the challenging task of remotely monitoring Soviet weapon testing, a family of satellites, code-named “Vela,” was launched, later to be replaced by the Defense Support Program (DSP) and Global Positioning System satellites (GPS) still in use today.

Star Chart
Since satellite monitoring of atmospheric nuclear testing was originally a classified program, the Department of Defense assigned it a code name, “Vela.”

Prior to the 1750s, astronomers had identified a huge constellation, Argo Navis. It represented Argo, the mythological ship used by Jason and the Argonauts in their quest for the golden fleece. In the 1750s, a French astronomer subdivided Argo Navis into several smaller constellations, one of which was Vela (the sails of the ship). The intriguing explanation that the name Vela might have come from the Spanish verb velar—to maintain a night watch or vigil—is incorrect.

Global Positioning System (GPS) Satellite Model
Multi-functional satellites such as this one began being used in 1989.

Bhangmeters
Detection devices called bhangmeters are part of the evolution of optical sensing. All satellites used for atmospheric nuclear detonation monitoring incorporate a detection device called a bhangmeter. Bhangmeters detect and record the distinctive double-humped optical signature of an atmospheric nuclear detonation. The name bhangmeter originated with some of the early skeptics who did not believe such sensing was possible. “Bhang” is a variation of Indian hemp that is smoked for its hallucinogenic impact. Apparently some thought that anyone who believed such an approach feasible must have been smoking hallucinogens.

Titan IIIC
A vehicle such as this placed the last six Vela satellites into orbit.