The Road To 'Global Zero': An Interview With Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan
by Plutonium Page
Sun Feb 07, 2010 at 10:00:39 AM PST
Last week, a rather extraordinary summit took place in Paris. Over 200 leaders and experts in the field of nuclear arms control and national security gathered to discuss the threat of nuclear proliferation and terrorism, and a plan to:
...end the nuclear threat once and for all by setting the world on the course to the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
Presidents Obama and Medvedev sent statements to the summit; Ellen Tauscher, the US Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security, even spoke at the conference, as did UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.
This initiative is called "Global Zero". The list of signatories includes veterans of Reagan-era Cold War arms control negotiations, heads of think tanks, peace activists, former national security advisors, and top military commanders.
So, as you can see, this is a rather serious initiative that is gaining momentum.
No one understands this better than Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan, who was a founding member of the Global Zero group in 2008. I had the wonderful opportunity to interview her last week. My questions are in boldface, and her replies follow. I've inserted links/references wherever appropriate.
Introduction and Background
How did you get interested in the Global Zero effort, and nuclear disarmament, nuclear elimination in general?
The absurd "duck and cover" under rickety wooden desks in elementary school was the beginning of my awareness of this state of mutually assured destruction, if you will, during the Cold War -- that mindset. That existential terror was with me for years. Plus, the images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the shame of that, of civilian casualties on such a scale, and such destruction, as well as the environmental catastrophe and dangers posed by these weapons.
I have lived in the Middle East for the past thirty-five years, in a region that has been a crossroads of conflict and tensions, not only during the Cold War, but also through today, with the highest per capita military spending in the world, and the least security and striking lack of human security in terms of (average) 40% poverty, and 40% illiteracy, and the highest unemployment rate in the world.
The issue of weapons, and the extraordinary expenditures, and the lack of security that that generates (in fact, the opposite, the greater insecurity that there is) we feel that on a daily basis, in our region.
So, that has been a motivating factor as well. I've added to my previous interest, anti-personnel landmines and cluster bombs, with this initiative of Global Zero, and what appears to be this growing international consensus, among former architects of nuclear programs, in the nuclear states. Both officials and the public in nuclear and non-nuclear states, this growing consensus that we have to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons, or we cannot live in security, and that nuclear weapons are in fact an antiquated notion of security, and a deterrent, or any kind of defense "shield", if you will, for a state.
So many experts who have worked in this field, almost from the start, really believe this is possible, a very difficult road to follow, but that it is possible. And then my becoming a founding member of Global Zero then was followed after our launch in 2008 in Paris, by these Obama-Medvedev statements that have given hope to, I think, a great many people, this historic commitment to work together for the total elimination of nuclear weapons.
