Imagine… a world without nuclear weapons

‘‘Imagine’’ is also a famous John Lennon song. Music lovers around the world commemorated, on December 8, the 25th death anniversary of this Beatles star and one of 20th century’s most adored peace artists.

Imagine…
Nothing to kill or die for,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace…
Imagine…
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

Sadly, we live in times when it’s become difficult to imagine that a peaceful world is possible, that our beautiful planet would some day have no weapons of mass destruction. Our inability to envision a better future for mankind has made us believe that things will never change. Actually, with deadlier war machines being built and newer nations raring to acquire nuclear weapons, things are changing for the worse. Pessimism is in the air. And a false notion that globalisation will somehow sort things out. It will not.

Elbaradei, an Egyptian, said it well: ‘‘The globalisation that has swept away the barriers to the movement of goods, ideas and people has also swept with it barriers that confined and localised security threats.’’ All the major threats facing the world, which the UN has grouped in five categories — (i) Poverty, infectious disease, environmental degradation; (ii) Armed conflict within and among nations; (iii) Organised crime; (iv) Terrorism, including the threat of terrorists acquiring n-weapons; (v) Weapons of Mass Destruction — are ‘‘threats without borders’’. These have made traditional notions of national security obsolete. The only effective response to these threats is ‘‘greater multinational cooperation’’.

Elbaradei’s prescription is blunt: ‘‘If we hope to escape self-destruction, then nuclear weapons should have no place in our collective conscience, and no role in our security.’’ They must be regarded as a taboo and a historical anomaly — ‘‘like slavery or genocide’’. As a first step, ‘‘we must ensure — absolutely — that no more countries acquire these deadly weapons’’. Simultaneously, countries that already possess them ‘‘must accelerate disarmament efforts’’.

This message takes me down memory lane. Back in the early ’80s, disarmament was one of the main planks of global politics and campus activism. As members of the Group for Nuclear Disarmament (GROUND) in Bombay, my friends and I pasted posters, held rallies, screened anti-war films, and, since we were communists, staged demonstrations outside the US consulate. On the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima, we organised a human chain from Hutatma Chowk to Azad Maidan, where we later lay down on the ground to make a huge peace sign. Our leader was my communist friend Dr Vivek Monteiro, whose dedication to many worthy causes I continue to admire. A scientist at the prestigious Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, he quit his job to go and live in a slum and work for the CPI(M) trade union. I later came to realise the mistake in our unabashedly pro-Soviet stance on the nuclear question. Nevertheless, I am proud of the idealism that permeated all our disarmament activities.

How does this square with the Pokharan II action of the Vajpayee government, for which I worked for six years? My honest answer: India had to do it purely as a self-defensive measure, a minimum deterrent response to the inescapable realities of the security environment around us. It wasn’t an easy decision for Atalji to take. One can imagine the moral pangs experienced by a poet-statesman who, as late as in 1995, wrote a moving poem on Hiroshima after his visit to that city. I’ll keep a detailed explanation of India’s nuclear journey to another column. But Elbaradei is absolutely right in insisting that ‘‘we must put in place a security system that does not rely on nuclear deterrence.’’ No matter which party or coalition rules India, I have no doubt that it’ll fully back a non-discriminatory global security system that eliminates all nuclear weapons, including India’s.

Elbaradei deserves our gratitude for urging us to ‘‘imagine’’ that a nuclear weapons-free global security system is possible. Because imagining is the source of all believing, and believing is the cause of all achieving. If you are a doubter, turn to Lennon’s song:

You may say I’m a dreamer,
but I’m not the only one,
I hope some day you’ll join us,
And the world will live as one.

Write to sudheenkulkarni@expressindia.com