Rebecca Johnson, Executive Director Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy

Yesterday I spoke at the WILPF Conference about the practice and effectiveness of active feminist nonviolence. Today I’ve been asked to address this question of costs, wars weapons and conflict prevention, and I also want to talk about the opportunity costs and alternatives to the current insanity and obsession with war, whether called wars on terror or wars on neighbors. 

First I draw attention to the 1998 Brookings Institution’s atomic audit, which concluded that 5 trillion US dollars had been spent since 1940 on building, using, making, keeping nuclear weapons. Just US nuclear weapons. Add that to what the Soviet Union - now Russia - must have spent on their nuclear arsenals.... and then the UK, France, China and also of course now Israel, Pakistan, India and we should not forget the attempts by the North Korean regime to make and test nuclear weapons, while their people were starving. How many trillion dollars and waste of resources altogether?

Recently the Nobel Economist Joseph Stiglitz calculated that the 2003 war on Iraq – still continuing - would cost some 3 trillion dollars. Again, multiply this by all the other wars, many still described as civil wars, though there is nothing civil about the rape and carnage that usually characterize such conflicts. 

So having established the dollar costs, I want to look more particularly at nuclear weapons, as this is an important subject on the CD’s agenda and the work at the Palais des Nations. As Felicity said, the relevance of feminist analysis to small arms is more obvious.  With regard to nuclear weapons, the connections need to be teased out a little more and I’d like to draw your attention to an excellent article in Disarmament Diplomacy 80, published in 2005 and free on the web, on “The relevance of Gender for Eliminating WMD”. It’s by Carol Cohn with Felicity Hill and Sarah Ruddick.

Over 200,000 were killed by just two relatively small (by today’s standards) nuclear weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, but in counting the human costs we have to add the uncounted thousands killed or harmed by radiation in the nuclear weapon states themselves and pristine places they abused in the Pacific and the Arctic - the hidden causalities from uranium mining to plutonium separation to nuclear testing – the human and environmental costs at every stage of the nuclear weapon production cycle. 

So while these trillions are spent and casualties created by nuclear weapons, which cannot and must not be used again and not forgetting the trillions on wars and all the cluster bombs, mortars, missiles, and the guns of all descriptions and sizes.  The opportunity costs are therefore huge, as this money and these resources are stolen from what should be spent on education, health, eradicating poverty and dealing with the most serious challenges of our time, such as human induced climate change. Yet research all shows that these, and especially greater opportunities for the education of girls and women, would bring us much more security both now and through longer term sustainable security than weapons and war will ever do or ever could. So how could it happen that patriarchal societies have so insanely come to equate threats and defence with military power and deadly weapons with security when the evidence throughout history is to the contrary? The evidence shows that the more weapons, the more insecurity; the more education, food and human rights, the more peace and security.  I am afraid that in order to understand this bizarre and deeply embedded and instutionalised denial of the relationship between violence and the instruments/weapons of violence and insecurity, we have to analyze masculinity.  Felicity has talked about that. By masculinity, I do not mean biological maleness. This is not about biological determinism but rather constructions of masculine values and power, dominance, control through coercion and all the trappings of patriarchy.  Of course we are familiar with the Margaret Thatcher syndrome, of the women who patriarchy allows into leadership positions, precisely because they will carry through in the interests of the dominating patriarchy and interests. So this is not about biology.  We also know of many men who are far more sensitive and cooperative in the ways of working than some of the women we know.  Our analysis is not based on biological determinism or even some simplistic idea that women are naturally more peaceful; nor does it stem solely from the fact that most violence is perpetrated by men, whether they use machetes, guns, rape or weapons of mass destruction.  Our feminist analysis goes beyond male and female bodies to question masculine and feminine roles.  At the core however is the recognition that women experience a continuum of violence, a continuum of gender-based violence, and that from domestic life to war, male violence is generated, sustained and related in patriarchal cultures. 

All national militaries are dominated by patriarchal structures and concepts of masculine honor that include male bonding and notions about honor, loyalty, obedience to authority and contempt for weakness, which is portrayed as womanish.  Our language is imbedded with these images that equate masculinity with strength and reason, and femininity with weakness and emotion. Dividing reason from emotion is part of the problem, and the solutions will need them to be brought back together.  It is no accident that when I looked at Microsoft Thesaurus it gave the following alternatives to the word emasculate: weaken, enfeeble, render impotent, reduce, render powerless, make ineffective. 

Weapons in patriarchal cultures are fetishised and sexualized.  Until the early 1990s, one US army training rhyme involved pointing first to the rifle and then to the crotch, saying: “This is my weapon, this is my gun, this is for killing, and this is for fun.”  Not surprisingly, with these attitudes, sexual violence against women and girls continues to be a feature of war. Raping women serves both as the ultimate tool of occupation and a reward for military success. Quite literally ramming home the humiliation of the vanquished.  Individually men may be the victims of these cultures of violence, but collectively they keep building and sustaining the institutions and norms on which this version of power depends, including heavy reliance on the manufacture, trade, and control of weapons and the political and economic reliance on military-related industrial infrastructures.

Such connections are not new. The linkage between nuclear weapons and gender may be less familiar.  Nuclear weapons with their capabilities to destroy life on a massive scale and threaten the very survival of our mother, planet earth, are the ultimate weapon and thus the apex of coercive killing power. As a political instrument of power projection and status, they also carry a peculiarly masculine symbolism that does not derive solely from their shape. The Hiroshima and the Nagasaki bombs were nicknamed “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” respectively. India’s nuclear test and subsequent declaration that it had become a nuclear weapon state in May 1998 was justified by Hindu nationalist leader Balasaheb Thackeray, who said, “We had to prove that we are not eunuchs.”  Even more crudely in the 1980s, a vigilante group opposed to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp published a grotesque cartoon in the local newspaper that depicted a cartoon ‘peace camper’ atop (or rather skewed by) a sexually enhanced cruise missile in a cross between a rape and a ride. 

Now, if the costs of all the weapons and wars is greater poverty, environmental degradation, and insecurity, what are the alternatives? Well the first one is to listen to women for a change.  If you want security, build the resources and institutions that will provide for it. Weapons are a symptom of a deep illness. We do need to reduce the symptoms but we must prioritise treating the illness, and that means transforming patriarchal principles and values and the distortion of masculinity. It means weakening and ultimately overturning the military-industrial growth model of development and the way that this distorts social, political and economic development around the world. One of the great things about UNSC Resolution 1325 is that it did not simply cast women as victims, though it is true, as Felicity has told us, that man disproportionately make, hold and use the weapons of all kinds and women are disproportionately killed, manned and harmed.  But the real importance of 1325 is that it identified that women are agents of change for building peace and security – that involving greater numbers of women with greater varieties of skills across a spectrum from early-warning conflict indicators to conflict prevention and reconstruction, will change how these security tasks are done and increase the effectiveness at all levels. 

So I want to come now to my conclusions.

With respect to nuclear weapons, the world is now coming to realize what the non-aligned movement has known and said for years, which is that the best way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons is to eliminate and abolish them. We know there are many important and very useful plans, programmes and ideas on the table for the steps that need to be taken to bring nuclear disarmament about, including the important consensus agreements by NPT parties in May 2000 on the so-called 13 Steps.  But we also see governments - including my own - getting very bogged down on the technical and verification hurdles. These are important, but as the Blix International WMD Commission said, these technical and verification problems can all be resolved. The fundamental thing is that the world has to decide that nuclear weapon use is completely beyond the pale.  We have to be clear that no civilized or sane person, leader, country, would choose -  would use - nuclear weapons for any purpose. Not for preemption, not for retaliation... that nuclear weapons are not a useful tool of deterrence. In other words, by reducing the salience of nuclear weapons, by dealing with the salience of nuclear weapons and the continued value attached to nuclear weapons, whether for status, for deterrence, for regional or international  power projection etc., we would be creating the condition - the fundamental first condition - that would give us the time to deal with the physical weapons that are there. Of course we do need to keep reducing these weapons and take them all off alert, and they need to be dismantled, and the radioactive and toxic chemicals must be dealt with as safely and securely as possible.  We need time to do that, but we can as a first step choose to “outlaw” nuclear weapons, and particularly to outlaw the use of nuclear weapons. To put the use of such weapons beyond the realm of what is acceptable to humanity is achievable much sooner than the complete elimination of the physical weapons. Outlawing use, for example, is a political and legislative act that could be done rather quickly, rather directly through, for example, a Security Council resolution.  Security Council resolution 1325 really changed how the role of women has been looked at and laid the conditions for work on making its vision happen. Similarly UN Security council 1540 was used to require governments to apply the WMD treaties and obligations to deal with non state actors.  So, we need the political and legislative act to take nuclear weapons out of military and security concepts in order for us to bring together the resources and will to negotiate a nuclear weapons convention and to deal with all the technical details of verifiably eliminating and abolishing nuclear weapons.

The second point I want to make is with respect to conflict prevention. Not only to listen to women,  but also to listen to civil society and the nongovernmental organizations, an increasing number of which, like IANSA, are women led.  Many of these NGOs are working on stopping trafficking in all kinds of weapons. I was so heartened by the partnership between civil society and government that brought about the ban on landmines, and I’m encouraged by what’s happening over cluster bombs now.  But we also need to provide greater resources to education and community projects around the world, making sure that women are involved in leadership and organizational roles at every hand.  And we have to learn more and make use of non violent theory and practice creating more alternatives and developing different values, economic and political structures.

And my third point in concluding is to remember that reason and evidence help us to persuade but emotion and action effect the change. All the most successful efforts recently to bring about disarmament have been built on partnerships between civil society and governments and on the cooperative, mutually respecting and mutually energizing work of experts and activists, mobilizing and informing; and women have been at the forefront (even though we have seldom been at the forefront when credit is being claiimed).  And we must continue to be at the forefront, opposing the weapons directly and also challenging and transforming the institutions that support, build, fetishize and perpetuate the weapons and the drivers of violence and war.

The best way to resolve conflict is to head it off, in other words to deal with causes and prevent conflict through education, justice and a much fairer and more sustainable allocation of the world’s food, land, water and resources.  This is our fundamental security task.