Rev. 14

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The twentieth century has seen over 250 wars, including two world wars and a cold war, with more dead than in all previous wars over the past two millennia. Over six million more have died since the cold war ended, when things should have changed for the better.

This situation must not continue–and need not. The countries of the world already have the resources and the knowledge needed to drastically cut the level of armed violence 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 the Global Action International Network is developing a worldwide coalition of interested individuals, civil society organizations, and governments to carry out that program.

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. Global Action is the only program with this specific aim. Step-by-step, Global Action would establish a comprehensive world security system comprising a well-financed UN with its own readiness forces, pro-active in conflict prevention, and a fully developed network of regional security organizations, with their own prevention and peacekeeping capability. This strengthening of international institutions for conflict prevention would take place in parallel with reductions in national armed forces; and ultimately, it would lead to a commitment by all countries not to send armed forces beyond national borders except under the auspices of the UN or one of the regional security organizations.

This program will help prevent all main types of war: For internal conflicts, it offers 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 force changes, a prescribed set of confidence-building measures, and constraints on force activities. The remote possibility of conflict among the major powers is further reduced by fostering cooperation among them in preventing smaller wars and through step-by-step cuts in 'conventional' and nuclear forces, eliminating their capacity to attack each other. 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 the next century will otherwise surely bring.

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 undoubtedly require reduced levels of armed conflict worldwide and an agreed way to reduce the conventional forces of the major powers, especially their air and naval force projection capability. Countries like China, Russia and India will not relinquish their nuclear weapons if the main effect of doing so is to enhance the already large conventional superiority of the United States. At the same time, national armed forces cannot be drastically reduced unless nuclear weapons are on their way to elimination.

Global Action's current program is described on the next page. This program is an evolving work in progress, incorporating many suggestions from participants, and your suggestions are welcome. Though its component measures are practical and effective, the goal of Global Action is ambitious and cannot be achieved quickly. But sustained, coordinated efforts can stop the killing.

Global Action is an integrated program for conflict reduction which derives its strength from its package approach. Moreover, many of Global Action’s proposed measures would require treaty commitments from world governments and implementation over a decade or more. That is why we are urging a treaty-based approach. However, this does not mean that all components have to enter into effect simultaneously or that all of them must be treaty-based. Many individual components of the Global Action program can be put into effect separately and soon, allowing participants in different places to focus on the issues that are most important in their own societies.

Global Action is organized in five successive phases:

Phase I. Reduce internal warfare by greatly strengthening a reformed UN and universal-membership regional security organizations, giving them improved capabilities for conflict prevention and resolution, peacekeeping, and defense against aggression and genocide. Strengthen institutions to protect human rights and enforce the rule of law. Begin talks on cuts in military forces and spending and in arms holdings, production, and trade, with a commitment to provide open information on these elements, and not to increase them for ten years unless reduction talks produce earlier results; i.e., a ten-year worldwide freeze on armed forces with full transparency.

Phase II. Further reduce the risks of major war by making substantial worldwide cuts in armed forces and military spending (up to one-third of the largest forces) and in arms production and trade. At the same time, continue to strengthen UN and regional conflict resolution and peacekeeping capabilities and the international courts. Those countries willing to do so will be encouraged to take individual action to levy a surcharge on passenger air tickets to finance expanded peacekeeping. Progress in these two phases of the Global Action program and in the subsequent phases will boost progress toward nuclear disarmament and vice versa.

Phase III. Strengthen the international community’s ability to prevent war 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. Take actions in this stage to cut and immobilize all nuclear forces (see #7 next page).

Phase IV. Permanently transfer to the reformed UN and regional security organizations the authority and capability for armed intervention to prevent or end war and genocide, while expanding individually-recruited all-volunteer armed forces at the disposal of the UN and regional organizations and making another round of deep cuts (up to one-third, compared with today’s levels) 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.

In a final phase of change, expected to evolve later, national armed forces will be cut back to air defense, defense of coastal waters, and border guards. Forces maintained by the UN and regional security organizations will have the police functions of guarding against re-armament and transnational violence by terrorists or criminal syndicates. If this point can be reached, it would be fair to say that war will have been abolished.

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. He does not have the personnel or financial resources to position these part-time mediators for weeks or months at the crisis site to permit them to identify important local participants and to establish working relationships with them. 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 job of the Conflict Prevention Panel would be to 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. Its job would be to give the UN, the world public, national governments and legislatures, comprehensive and balanced information on the disputed issues and to propose possible solutions. The General Assembly already has authority to establish such a committee.

3. Establish a standing volunteer police force at the UN, initially consisting of 10,000 men and women. A ready police force can carry out many preconflict and postconflict peacekeeping tasks without raising the same issues of national sovereignty as peacekeeping units from armed forces.

4. Promote the worldwide ratification 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. Include in all newly concluded treaties provision for compulsory referral of unresolved disputes to the International Court of Justice.

5. To finance the above activities, the United States and other dues delinquents must pay their UN dues. It is futile to call for an improved UN while withholding already obligated payments. To avoid this situation in future, individual UN member states could decide to impose a peacekeeping surcharge on air tickets in the country where the flight originates. This procedure would not be based on an international treaty, so it could not be blocked in national legislatures.

6. To launch the first steps toward worldwide "conventional" disarmament, governments, led by the major powers, should exchange comprehensive data on main components of their armed forces; and they should commit themselves not to increase the overall size of their armed forces, defense budgets, or arms production and to cut arms transfers by 50 percent for a ten-year period while negotiations on reductions take place.

7. To eliminate surprise attack or accidental use of nuclear weapons and to move decisively toward total nuclear disarmament, de-alert nuclear arsenals and reduce them to small immobilized stocks of nuclear warheads, separating warheads from delivery systems and storing both under international monitoring. This would be done by all nuclear weapon states -- United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan and Israel.