"If the most powerful nation on the planet needs nuclear weapons, why wouldn’t every country need them?"

"I don’t [believe human beings are warlike by nature]. Humans have a fight-or-flight instinct that resides in the reptilian portion of our brains. When threatened or trapped, we can go berserk. But the vast majority of the time we don’t behave this way. We must be taught to be warlike. It isn’t easy to get humans to kill each other in war. It requires considerable training, the primary goal of which is to get young people to identify with their fellow soldiers. It also takes considerable societal propaganda to dehumanize the enemy. Militarized societies take advantage of the loyalty and trust of recruits and turn them into killers."
طبعا ,به نظر نویسنده این سطور, داشتن اسلحه های هسته ای از طرف تمامی دولت ها محکوم میباشد و نابودی تمامی آنها میبایست با فشار عمومی افکار جهانی در دستور کار قرار بگیرد .
پیمان پایدار
 
by Leslee Goodman
مصاحبه کامل در آدرس صفحه مجازی مجله خورشید در بالا
complete interview at above link
[1st of 4 pages:]
Goodman: How many nuclear weapons are there in the world today?
Krieger: Far too many. Nine countries have a total of almost twenty thousand nuclear weapons. More than 90 percent are in the arsenals of the United States and Russia. The remaining weapons are divided among the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.
The U.S. has far more nuclear weapons deployed — 1,800 — than there are reasonable targets, especially considering that Russia is more than nominally our friend and China is one of our major trading partners. And we retain thousands more in reserve.
Goodman: Why so many?
Krieger: You’d have to ask the U.S. government, which has been reluctant to commit to a nuclear-weapons ban because it has found the arms useful for imposing its will on other nations. We can threaten, “Do as we say, or else.” I see this as an extraordinarily dangerous gambit, however, as we may be challenged to make good on our threat. The potential consequences of using nuclear weapons are so horrendous that any risk of their use is too high.
Goodman: The number of nuclear weapons has fallen from a peak of seventy thousand in 1986. Are the numbers still going down?
Krieger: Yes, they are still going down. The world has shed fifty thousand nuclear weapons since the 1980s. That’s a terrific accomplishment. But it’s not enough, especially given that the U.S. and its nato allies made no commitment to further nuclear-arsenal reductions when they met in 2012. And nato reaffirmed its commitment to nuclear weapons at its 2012 summit in Chicago.
The only number that is truly significant is zero, and, more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the nuclear-armed countries still have no real plan to get there.
Gandhi, when asked about the U.S. using nuclear weapons against Japan, said that we could see the effect on the cities that were destroyed, but it was too soon to know what effect the bomb would have on the soul of the nation that used it. In many respects the soul of America has been compromised. We can’t go on developing ever more powerful weapons indefinitely. Those of us born at the onset of the nuclear age are challenged in ways unknown to previous generations, because we grew up in a world in which humans have the capability to destroy everything. If the taboo on nuclear use in warfare, which has existed since 1945, is broken, the consequences could be eight thousand years of civilization coming to an end and a radio­active planet. One nuclear weapon dropped on New York City could be sufficient to destroy the U.S. as a functioning nation. But it’s not too late. We still have the capacity to walk back from the brink.
Goodman: Why is there not a greater sense of urgency today about the need to reduce nuclear arsenals?
Krieger: Nuclear weapons have been sold to the public as a necessary protection against nuclear attack. People have bought into the theory of deterrence — the idea that the fear of nuclear retaliation will keep the peace between the nuclear-armed powers. But a terrorist organization could still use a nuclear weapon and leave no way to retaliate because it has no discernible territory. And if just having nuclear weapons actually protects us, then why do we design so-called missile-defense systems to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles? We are planning for nuclear war as if it were winnable, not unthinkable. That is not rational.
Another reason for the seeming lack of concern is that too many people defer to experts. I think it is important for the public to reclaim the issue, as happened in 1982, when a million people gathered in New York’s Central Park to support a freeze on nuclear buildup.
Goodman: What is the difference between long-range nuclear weapons and tactical nuclear weapons? Are the two kinds equally important to eliminate?
Krieger: Long-range weapons are also called “strategic” nuclear weapons and have intercontinental-delivery capabilities. They can be launched from silos, submarines, or aircraft. Tactical nuclear weapons are smaller, with a limited range and generally less explosive power. Strategic weapons can do the most damage, but tactical weapons are more likely to get into the hands of terrorist organizations.
The U.S. has already eliminated most of its tactical arsenal, but it retains some 180 tactical nuclear weapons in five European countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Russia still has some three to four thousand of them. I believe that strategic and tactical nuclear weapons are equally important to eliminate. My goal is zero nuclear weapons on the planet.
http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/445/indefensible
In 1963 the prospect of war was on many Americans’ minds. The U.S. was increasing its military presence in South Vietnam and had come to the brink of a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union a year earlier, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. David Krieger was fresh out of Occidental College with a degree in psychology. Wanting to experience a foreign culture, he traveled to Japan, where he visited the sites of the World War ii atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The experience left an indelible impression on the future nuclear-disarmament activist. “In the U.S. we viewed the bomb as a technological achievement that shortened the war,” he says. “The Japanese, however, viewed the atomic bombings as humanitarian catastrophes. It brought home to me the ways in which our government — perhaps any government — develops a narrative to justify its actions.” After he returned to the States in 1964, Krieger was drafted into the army and got permission to join the reserves so that he could attend graduate school at the University of Hawaii. In 1968, having earned his PhD in political science, he was called to active duty, and a year later he was ordered to Vietnam. Convinced that the war was immoral and illegal, he applied for conscientious-objector status. When his application was denied, Krieger sued in federal court and won. It was another turning point for him. He’d learned that one could successfully challenge powerful institutions, even the U.S. government.
Krieger went on to become a professor and to work for think tanks and international organizations that supported nuclear disarmament. He also earned a law degree from the Santa Barbara College of Law in California and served as a temporary judge for the Santa Barbara County courts. In 1982 he cofounded and became president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), where he has remained for thirty years, working for a world free of nuclear weapons. The organization currently has fifty-six thousand members, and Krieger has appeared on cnn and msnbc and is a frequent contributor to national print media. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books, most recently The Path to Zero: Dialogues on Nuclear Dangers, coauthored with Richard Falk.
Although Krieger has opposed nuclear weapons primarily through educational and advocacy efforts, in February 2012 he was arrested — along with his wife, Carolee, Daniel Ellsberg, Cindy Sheehan, Father Louis Vitale, and ten other activists — for engaging in civil resistance at a test of the Minuteman iii nuclear-missile system at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Asked how he felt after his arrest, Krieger said, “Exhilarated.”
For this interview Krieger met with me at his office in a converted two-story Victorian house on a tree-shaded street in downtown Santa Barbara. In person he is disarmingly calm, even-tempered, and optimistic. Though he views current U.S. policy as a threat to humanity’s future, he reveals no bitterness, anger, or haste. He is engaged in this struggle for the long haul and believes that most people, once they understand the dangers, will join him.