Do you believe that fighting wars is an innate characteristic of human society and that war will be with us forever? Or do you believe that the human beings who fight wars can also act together to make armed conflict increasingly rare and infrequent?

The past century was the most lethal in human history. There were 250 wars, including two worldwide wars and a cold war, with more dead than in all previous wars of the past two thousand years. Over six million more have died even after the cold war ended, when things should have changed for the better.

This situation must not continue into this new century and it does not have to: The countries of the world already have the resources and the knowledge that can drastically cut the level of armed violence in the world and make war increasingly rare. What has been missing is a program for the worldwide, systematic and continuing application of these resources and knowledge.

Global Action to Prevent War offers such a program, and it is building a worldwide coalition of interested individuals, civil society organizations, and governments to carry it out. Global Action supplements existing programs of conflict reduction with a unified, integrated approach aimed at a specific goal – making war infrequent instead of a daily occurrence. Step-by-step, Global Action would establish a comprehensive world security system composed of a well-financed UN with its own readiness forces, pro-active in conflict prevention, of a fully developed network of regional security institutions, each with their own conflict prevention and peacekeeping capability, and a more accessible system of international courts. This strengthening of the capability of international institutions for conflict prevention and peacekeeping and of the rule of law would take place parallel with reductions in national armed forces, both nuclear and non-nuclear (conventional), and with a binding commitment not to send armed forces beyond national borders except under the auspices of the UN or regional security organizations.

This Global Action program will help prevent all types of war and armed conflict: For internal conflicts, including terrorism, which usually has local beginnings, it proposes a broad array of conflict prevention measures to be applied by the UN, regional security organizations, and international courts. For conflicts between neighboring states, it proposes force reductions, defensively-oriented changes in force structure, and a set of confidence-building measures and of constraints on force activities tailored to each situation. It reduces the possibility of conflict among the major powers through fostering their cooperation in preventing smaller wars and through step-by-step cuts in their conventional and nuclear forces, eliminating their capacity to attack each other with any chance of success. If this program -- or something along these lines -- is carried out, it can prevent the tragic loss of millions of lives and the vast waste of productive resources which the armed conflicts of coming decades will otherwise surely bring.

To combat terrorism, Global Action believes UN member states should focus on bringing individual suspects to justice before the appropriate national or international tribunals. UN member states should use military force as a last resort and only for the purpose of bringing to justice persons suspected of terrorist acts or to prevent further terrorist acts and must avoid indiscriminate actions, including the use of force that affects broad populations. To deal with underlying causes of terrorism, there should be expanded programs to improve governance, economic development and job creation, family planning and secular education, including education for girls and women.

Global Action’s conflict prevention and conventional disarmament measures will further nuclear disarmament. The nuclear cuts it suggests will in turn promote conflict prevention and conventional disarmament. Achievement of nuclear disarmament will very probably require both reduced levels of conflict worldwide and some effective and acceptable way to cut back the conventional forces of the major powers, especially their force projection capability with naval and air forces. Countries like China, Russia and India are not likely to relinquish their nuclear weapons if the main effect of doing so is to enhance the already large conventional superiority of the United States. On the other hand, governments are unlikely to be prepared to drastically reduce their conventional armed forces unless there is evidence that nuclear weapons are on their way to elimination.

By intent, Global Action to Prevent War focuses on violent armed conflict and mass killing. The world also faces fundamental crises of poverty, human rights violations, environmental destruction, and discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity, and religion. All of these challenges must be met before human security and a just peace can be fully achieved. To meet these challenges, many efforts must be pursued; no single campaign can deal with all of them. But efforts to address these global problems can and should complement and support one another.

Further stages of disarmament would make substantial worldwide cuts in armed forces and military spending (up to two-thirds of the largest forces) and in arms production and trade. At the same time, UN and regional conflict resolution and peacekeeping capabilities and the international courts would be further strengthened.

Global Action proposes that, at an appropriate stage, the international community’s ability to prevent war be strengthened through a watershed commitment by participating nations (including the major powers) not to deploy their armed forces beyond national borders except in operations that take place under the auspices of the reformed UN or its regional counterparts. This commitment, a more specific version of existing UN Charter commitments, will test global and regional institutions while participants still have sizable national forces as a fallback. Action would be taken in this phase to store and immobilize all nuclear forces.

If the test period has been successful, the authority and capability for armed intervention to prevent or end war and genocide would be permanently transferred to the reformed UN and regional security organizations. All-volunteer armed forces at the disposal of the UN and regional organizations would be expanded and there would be another round of deep cuts in national armed forces. The remaining national forces, at most one-third the size of today’s largest forces, will be limited to defense of national territory, and will be restructured to focus exclusively on this role. Nuclear arms would be completely eliminated.

1) Establish a corps of 50 professional mediators at the disposal of the Secretary General and the Security Council. Today, when the Secretary General wants to send out a conflict-preventing mediation mission to head off building tension, he has to identify and borrow personnel from member states. A small corps of professionals trained in conflict prevention and resolution would provide an immediate conflict avoidance resource.

2) Establish a Conflict Prevention Committee in the UN General Assembly. This open-ended committee of General Assembly members would be a less formal, more flexible conflict prevention group than the Security Council. It would not be subject to the veto and would set its own agenda. The Conflict Prevention Committee would serve as a rapid-action conflict prevention and early warning institution. It would send teams to possible conflict sites and invite witnesses to New York. It would give the UN, the world public, and national governments and legislatures comprehensive and balanced information on the disputed issues and propose possible solutions. The General Assembly already has charter authority to establish such a committee.

3) Establish a standing volunteer police force at the UN, initially consisting of 2,000-5,000 men and women. A ready police force can carry out many preconflict and post-conflict peacekeeping tasks without raising the same issues of national sovereignty with host countries as peacekeeping units from armed forces. Moreover, its establishment on an experimental basis would be cheaper and encounter less resistance than standing military forces, which could come later.

4) Promote effective entry into force of the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, making government officials individually accountable for abusive human rights treatment of their citizens when local courts fail to act and provide a suitable international tribunal for suspected terrorists.

5) Deal effectively with terrorism. The use of military force should be limited to bringing suspected terrorists to justice or preventing further acts of terrorism. To deal with the sources of Mideastern terrorism, we support improved governance, job creation and family planning. The emphasis should be on modern secular education, including education for girls and women. We propose establishment of a large UN foundation with endowment of at least $50 million, staffed by Arabic-speaking educators, to provide free, modern, nonreligious, education in Arabic at all levels for both sexes to all Mideastern countries desiring it.

6) Impose a peacekeeping surcharge on air tickets or departures in the country where flights originate, or on international financial transfers in the country of origin, and donate the proceeds to the UN to finance conflict prevention and peacekeeping. This procedure would be based on voluntary agreement among participating countries, not on a treaty or on UN dues, so it could not be blocked in national legislatures.

7) Strengthen the effectiveness of the Security Council to prevent armed violence through informal agreement to use the veto sparingly. The five permanent members of the Security Council should be exposed to concentrated pressure from other UN governments and the world public to reach informal understanding among themselves to use the veto sparingly.

8) Initiate a worldwide freeze on armed forces and a 25 percent cut in production and trade of major weapons and small arms. All UN member governments should commit themselves not to increase the overall size of their armed forces, defense budgets, or arms holdings for a ten-year period while negotiations on reductions take place; and they should agree from the outset to cut both production and international transfers of major weapons and small arms by 25 percent. To support these measures, governments should begin by publishing the data on the components of their armed forces currently requested for the UN Conventional Arms Register, the proposed small arms register, the UN report on military spending, and the CFE and OSCE exchanges of military information.

9) As a step toward the complete elimination of nuclear weapons called for in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States and Russia should reduce their nuclear forces, both strategic and tactical, to 1,000 warheads each, destroying all reduced warheads. All other states with nuclear weapons should implement a verified freeze on their weapons and delivery systems. Comprehensive data on nuclear weapons should be added to the UN Register now.

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