Getting serious about prevention

We must first agree on the threats we face. Today, any event or process that leads to deaths on a large scale or the lessening of life chances, and which undermines states as the basic unit of the international system, should be viewed as a threat to internationals peace and security.

A world of interconnected threats

According to the panel, six clusters of threats fall under that rubric:

- economic and social threats, including poverty and deadly infectious disease;

- inter-state conflict and rivalry;

- internal violence, including civil war;

- state collapse and genocide;

- nuclear, radiological, chemical and biochemical weapons;

- terrorism;

- transnational organized crime;

Today, these threats are interconnected to an unprecedented degree, and no state acting alone can defeat them. The panel report spells out the dangers with horrifying clarity. With the amount of highly enriched uranium that could fit into six milk cartoons, a terrorist could improvise a nuclear devise to level a medium-size city. A nuclear attack on such a city in the United States or Europe would have staggering costs for the world economy. According to the World Bank, the attacks of September 11^th, 2001 cost more than $80 billion dollars and pushed 11m people in developing countries into poverty. The economic fallout from a nuclear terrorist attack would dwarf these numbers. Given the relationship between poverty and infant mortality, we could count the cost of a nuclear terrorist attack in a rich country in two terrible death tolls: in the attacked city and in poor nations all over the world.

Likewise the security of developed countries is only as strong as the ability of poor states to respond to and contain a new deadly infectious disease. As the panel notes, the incubation period for most infectious diseases is longer than most international air flights. As a result, any one of the 700m people who travel on airlines in a year could unwittingly carry a lethal virus to an unsuspecting country. The 1918 influenza epidemic killed twice as many people in one year as HIV/AIDS has killed in the past 28 years. Today, a similar virus could kill tens of millions in a fraction of the time.

So, in today's world any threat to one is truly a threat to all. This principle, once applied only to military attacks by one state against another, should be extended to all categories of threats we face. And since there are real limits on self-protection, all states share an interest in a collective-security system that commits all of them to act co-operatively against these dangers.

Given the gravity and interconnectedness of today's threats, our world needs to be far more committed to prevention. Prevention, if properly resourced and broadly supported, can be highly effective. The panel report reminds us that in 1963, many thought that 25 – 50 states would possess nuclear weapons by this year; the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has helped prevent this. The World Health Organization, which led efforts to eradicate smallpox and roll back the threat of polio, recently helped halt the spread of SARS[35] and save the lives of tens of thousands of people.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-29