Helen Clark warns in new Pacific book renewed nuclear tensions pose ‘existential threat to humanity’
David Robie also blogs at Café Pacific
From: Asia Pacific Report
Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark has warned the country needs to maintain its nuclear-free policy as a “fundamental tenet” of its independent foreign policy in the face of gathering global storm clouds.
Writing in a new book being published next week, she says “nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present.
“The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now sits at 89 seconds to midnight,” she says in the prologue to journalist and media academic David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior.
- READ MORE: 40 years on: Reflecting on Rainbow Warrior’s legacy, fight against nuclear colonialism
- Other Eyes of Fire reports
Writing before the US surprise attack with B-2 stealth bombers and “bunker-buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, Clark says “the Middle East is a tinder box with the failure of the Iran nuclear deal and with Israel widely believed to possess nuclear weapons”.
The Doomsday Clock references the Ukraine war theatre where “use of nuclear weapons has been floated by Russia”.
Also, the arms control architecture for Europe is unravelling, leaving the continent much less secure. India and Pakistan both have nuclear arsenals, she says.
“North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capacity.”
‘Serious ramifications’
Clark, who was also United Nations Development Programme administrator from 2009 to 2017, a member of The Elders group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, and is an advocate for multilateralism and nuclear disarmament, says an outright military conflict between China and the United States “would be one between two nuclear powers with serious ramifications for East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and far beyond.”
She advises New Zealand to be wary of Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States.
“There has been much speculation about a potential Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement which would see others in the region become partners in the development of advanced weaponry,” Clark says.
“This is occurring in the context of rising tensions between the United States and China.
“Many of us share the view that New Zealand should be a voice for de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific and the development
of more lethal weaponry.”
In the face of the “current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament.
Clark says that the years 1985 – the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French secret agents on 10 July 1985 — and 1986 were critical years in the lead up to New Zealand’s nuclear-free legislation in 1987.
“New Zealanders were clear – we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.”
Chronicles humanitarian voyage
The book Eyes of Fire chronicles the humanitarian voyage by the Greenpeace flagship to the Marshall Islands to relocate 320 Rongelap Islanders who were suffering serious community health consequences from the US nuclear tests in the 1950s.
The author, Dr David Robie, founder of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology, was the only journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior in the weeks leading up to the bombing.
His book recounts the voyage and nuclear colonialism, and the transition to climate justice as the major challenge facing the Pacific, although the “Indo-Pacific” rivalries between the US, France and China mean that geopolitical tensions are recalling the Cold War era in the Pacific.
Dr Robie is also critical of Indonesian colonialism in the Melanesian region of the Pacific, arguing that a just-outcome for Jakarta-ruled West Papua and also the French territories of Kanaky New Caledonia and “French” Polynesia are vital for peace and stability in the region.
Eyes of Fire is being published by Little Island Press, which also produced one of his earlier books, Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific.
- Greenpeace executive director Dr Russel Norman is launching Eyes of Fire at the Ellen Melville Centre Pioneer Women’s Hall at 6pm on the bombing anniversary, July 10, following a memorial vigil in the morning on board the current flagship Rainbow Warrior III.
- Eyes of Fire microsite (Little Island Press)
While nuclear weapons in themselves are not a threat to humanity, nuclear weapons in the hands of the zionists and their american puppets are the greatest threat humanity currently faces.
Helen Clark should expand her sources of information, as there is no prophecy saying that nuclear weapons are the major threat to humanity. The world is not going to end because of a nuclear war.
The world probably won’t end if all the oxygen is gone either
Imagine the outcry if China or Russia did any one of the myriad atrocities the US, Israel and its complicit western accomplices are responsible for. Rotten to the core, our so-called western democracies, in thrall to venal predatory capitalism, are exposed beyond the point where even the most myopic observer can ignore their self-serving duplicity, and are resorting to Fascist tyranny to stave off their ultimate destruction.
Helen Clark is correct when she writes “Nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present.” She is also correct in locating the reason why this is so in the escalating rivalries between the imperialist powers (even if she would not use that term).
We are now witnessing the build up to World War Three, just as previous generations witnessed the build up to World Wars One and Two. In both those earlier periods peace movements raised the slogan of “Disarmament,” as does David Robie here when he talks of “global nuclear disarmament.” But this is utopian.
No propertied ruling class in any country holding nuclear weapons is going to disarm and risk its own wealth and power while its competitors remain nuclear-armed. The only answer is for the working classes of the world to take these weapons out of the hands of their respective rulers. This imperative is only made the more urgent by the qualitatively greater destructive power of nuclear weapons compared to earlier armaments.
In an article written in the middle of World War One called “The Disarmament Slogan,” Lenin wrote: “Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie, will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap heap.” Another revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, wrote on the eve of World War Two: “Disarmament? But the entire question resolves around who will disarm whom. The only disarmament which can avert or end war is the disarmament of the bourgeoisie by the workers.”