NUCLEAR WEAPONS LEGAL ACTION
"A conservative strategy toward radical ends" — Edward McWhinney

Years of arms control negotiations and treaties have not succeeded in halting or reversing
the arms race. There are now well over 50,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled, and they have
the power to destroy our whole world many times over. Meanwhile the U.S. has
abandoned the SALT II treaty and is pushing ahead with Star Wars. These developments
endanger the future of arms control and portend the beginning of an unbridled nuclear arms
build-up into the next century.

Despite a new round of negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the nuclear
mountain continues to grow, and to spread to other countries. The ability to build and
deploy nuclear weapons is Spreading to other, far less stable nations such as Israel, South
Africa, and Pakistan. Nuclear weapons are becoming more automated, smaller, easier to
hide and ever more dangerous.

With the ongoing, confrontational jostling between the world's nuclear blocs, nuclear
weapons threaten the very existence of the human race. On the transient politics of the day,
we are gambling the entire future and wonderful promise of a million generations of
humanity to come. Even if an intentional war is never declared, the chances of a disastrous
accident are rising as we depend more and more on the faultless operation of computers —
Russian and Chinese computers, as well as those on our side —- to keep the missiles in
their place.

The treaty on intermediate nuclear forces (INF) recently signed by the United States and the
Soviet Union is an important symbolic step in the other direction, but the INF category
accounts for less than 3 per cent of the worid's nuclear arsenals. Moves are already being
made to replace these weapons with weapons in other categories. Moreover, the treaty
leaves 4,000 nuciear weapons in Europe, uume of them up to five times as powerful as the
one that destroyed Hiroshima.

NATO's Policy of "First Use"

The dangers of nuclear weapons are compounded ali the more by the preparations being
made to use them. NATO has hada long-standing policy of "flexible response," which
translates roughly as “anything goes," including the first use of nuclear weapons.

NATO's policy, which Canada unconditionally supports, maintains that nuclear weapons
should be treated like any other fighting weapon. The policy would give NATO
commanders licence to use nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear attack — licence
to Start a nuclear war — as they saw fit.

When our soldiers play war " games," they practice fighting with nuclear weapons. In the
game NATO may win; in real life the result would more likely be unspeakable horror for
millions and the loss of all we hope to defend.

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