Welcome to all, to the NPT delegates, distinguished panelists, UN staff, and my NGO colleagues from around the world: thank you for coming.
 |
|
(L-R): Rhianna Tyson, Christie Brinkley, Gareth Evans, Henrik Salander, Hideo Hiraoka |
|
My name is Rhianna Tyson, I am a Senior Officer with the Global Security Institute based here in New York. I have the tremendous honor of chairing this very special event with this incredibly dynamic panel of speakers. We have a former foreign minister, a pop culture icon, a senior lawmaker and one of the most influential diplomats in the area of disarmament and non-proliferation in this decade. What a mix!
It is precisely such a diverse mix of actors that has brought us to this prescient moment today, a moment marked by an American President vowing to pursue nuclear abolition as a priority of his government, and a Secretary-General offering one of the most comprehensive proposals on how to achieve a nuclear weapons-free world. These men, as courageous and important as their leadership on this issue is, didn’t come up with the idea to abolish nuclear weapons on their own. They are part of a long history of a movement, a movement that has existed as long as the weapons themselves have existed. From the Russell-Einstein Manifesto and the start of the Pugwash Conferences, to the politicization of mothers in the 1960s who fought for the end of nuclear testing through to the millions of people who marched in the 1980s calling for a nuclear arms freeze, the path to a nuclear weapons-free world is not the product of a single institution or individual. It isn’t a monolithic or linear path; it’s a rising wave of sentiment that evolves into action, constituting a growing demand for change. It takes a broad diversity of actors pursuing a wide range of objectives. This perhaps is where the brilliance of the Secretary-General’s five point proposal lays. More than an action plan, or a list of steps to be pursued—first you achieve A, and then B, to be followed by C—Secretary-General Ban, on October 24, put forth a variety of suggestions to be pursued by a variety of actors: the P5, the Security Council, the Conference on Disarmament, and so forth. Like a social movement, each course of action will serve to buttress and reinforce the efficacy of other courses of action, pursued by other actors.
In this movement of ours, some of us are addressing the causes of our global insecurity and others are addressing its symptoms. That North Korea pulled out of the NPT is a symptom of our problem. That some Member States are weary about Iran pursuing its own nuclear capability is a symptom of the weaknesses of our international security regime.
The cause, of course, is the existence of nuclear weapons. That the perceived source of “security” for some is denied to others constitutes a system of apartheid, of haves and have-nots. Glaring inequality based on the threat of annihilation is unsustainable. Nuclear weapons, as the President of my organization is wont to say, creates walls where bridges of cooperation must be built. This is where our organization, the Global Security Institute, is hard at work: addressing the causes, building those bridges and engendering the cooperation that is needed to address all of the most pressing challenges in the 21 st century. Others in this room are working hard to ameliorate the symptoms, to bring North Korea back into the regime, to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and right they should be. If a patient gets cancer, you shouldn’t ignore it and solely pursue the elimination of carcinogens.
Just like President Obama said in the statement of the US delegation yesterday, we should not focus on our differences in approaches, but on our common commitment to undertake the work that is necessary to strengthen our international security regime. Thankfully we have a forum such as this to bring our different ideas and strategies to the table and look at how we can coordinate together to make our world a safer, saner place for us all.
And that’s the purpose of this event, for these different, dynamic individuals to talk about their respective approaches to the common challenge facing us all: the threat of nuclear weapons.
|
 |
