Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev gave philanthropist and media mogul Ted Turner the 2005 Alan Cranston Peace award last week for his work on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, but neither man spent much time discussing Turner's contributions.

Instead, they used the occasion to stress the importance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which will be reviewed at UN headquarters next month, and called for an immediate global civil society campaign to support it.

"The NPT is the only global arms treaty with importance," Gorbachev said at the award ceremony. "We cannot afford to lose this treaty."

For years, the leaders of both the United States and Russia have maintained a system whereby nuclear weapons could be unleashed within 15 minutes of a nuclear attack warning, a system that has been called "the most dangerous element of our force posture" by Sam Nunn, a former US senator and head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), of which Turner is a co-chair.

"The huge arsenals of 30,000 nuclear weapons that both Russia and the United States still have pointed at each other on hair trigger alert could be launched at a moment's notice and destroy the world in an afternoon," Turner said. "I think that's the most important threat we face."

"We're running out of time," Turner said. "We've been lucky that something hasn't gone wrong."

The NPT was created in 1970 and was extended indefinitely in 1995. It is signed by every country in the world except Israel, Pakistan and India, and was used to force Iraq to terminate its nuclear programme in the early 1990s.

Under the treaty, non-nuclear powers agree not to pursue nuclear weapons and in exchange, nuclear powers agree to gradually reduce their arsenals to zero.

Trust and cooperation

While the five official nuclear powers, the US, Great Britain, France, Russia and China, have taken steps towards fulfilling parts of the treaty, in recent years they have neglected or even moved away from the goal of disarmament.

Although the five-year review of the NPT will take place here in just two weeks, the agenda for the conference has still not been set, Turner said. Both Gorbachev and Turner said that cooperation between the US and Russia was needed to spark re-commitment to the treaty.

"First of all you need trust," Gorbachev said, "then you need cooperation. I think Russia is ready to cooperate. The question is, is the United States ready to do this? I think not, myself."

The George W Bush administration, besides being reluctant to scale down its nuclear arsenal, has said that it will not allow either India or Pakistan to join the NPT before they get rid of all their nuclear weapons.

"The US is sick," Gorbachev said. "It suffers from the disease of being the victor and it has to cure itself of this disease."

"Our two leaders need to come up with some joint initiative, some new approach. When you look at new centres of power that are emerging I think you realise we need to stand together - we don't have to kiss each other, but on a human and political level we have to work together and be partners. This can happen."

Balance of power

One major problem, according to Turner, is the US's double standard of demanding that other states disarm and cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons while Washington continues to develop its own arsenal.

"It's easy to understand why other countries say 'if they can have nukes, why can't we?' It seems that either everybody has them or nobody has them," Turner said.

He recommended that all nuclear powers simultaneously reduce their stockpiles by 10 percent every year. That way the balance of power could remain the same while achieving global disarmament in 10 years.

Turner is the founder of the 24-hour broadcast news giant CNN and is the biggest shareholder in Time Warner, the largest media company the world. He told IPS that the media had an important role to play in putting pressure on governments to enforce the NPT.

Unlike the UN, which shames countries into meeting their obligations, Turner said the media should use positive reinforcement.

"You don't shame people into doing things, you inspire them," he told IPS. "If you believe people are trustworthy, lots of times they'll be more trustworthy. If you say they are an 'axis of evil', that just makes them mad," he said.

"The media has to inform people, but it has a short attention span. We need to get this (the NPT) on the top of the agenda and get some action."

Global communication

Turner's award is named after a champion of nuclear disarmament efforts, the former Senator Alan Cranston, and honours leaders who take action to further global security, nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

It is given by the Global Security Institute (GSI), a group that includes former leaders of governments, Nobel Peace Laureates, religious leaders, as well as disarmament and legal experts. GSI works primarily on increasing international cooperation on security issues using the rule of law.

Turner was selected because he was the first entrepreneur to realise the capacity of global communication, and for his "unwavering commitment to reducing threats posed by nuclear weapons and supporting efforts for their elimination," GSI's president, Jonathan Granoff, told IPS.

Turner spent a billion dollars to create the UN Foundation, which focuses on peace and security. In 2001, he helped bring nuclear weapons issues back onto the radar after the Cold War by urging Sam Nunn to join him in founding the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit that tries to strengthen security by stopping the spread of WMDs.

At the ceremony last Wednesday, Gorbachev said that the UN was the premier body to push for nuclear disarmament and identified political will and a change of military doctrines in those countries that accept the use of nuclear weapons as the two most crucial factors in moving forward on the NPT.

He urged a "global glasnost" and return to the understanding he reached with US President Ronald Reagan in 1985 in Geneva that "nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought" - and cautioned that the use of force in dealing with nuclear activity in Iran or North Korea would have "extreme consequences."