Abstract
President Barack Obama has outlined an impressive arms control agenda, but he will need informed and active people throughout the world to help him realize it.
Recently, President Barack Obama publicly announced his goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. While past U.S. presidents may have privately expressed their deep reluctance ever to use nuclear weapons, Obama is the first to make their elimination a major building block of U.S. security policy. In his joint statement with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and in a speech in Prague on April 5, Obama forcefully mapped out a plausible path to safety away from the horrors of nuclear destruction. For example, in their April letter, Obama and Medvedev proposed reductions in a first phase that would bring each of their arsenals to 1,500 deployed weapons. (In the final phases, arsenals would be brought to zero.) More important than the number of bombs, however, is Obama and Medvedev's emphasis on international cooperation and institutions to control and verify implementation of agreements about nuclear weapons and technology.
Since 1945, even before the United States and the Soviet Union began the deadliest arms race in history, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists supported the international control of nuclear energy–the only way to assure all countries that uranium and plutonium would be used for peaceful energy-generating purposes rather than for military weapons. Assurance could be provided by sharing information about the new technology and by cooperating to develop energy sources and medical applications that would benefit all people. The Bulletin's founders felt that competition and secrecy would only feed suspicion and fear, leading to misperceptions and a desire to have even more powerful weapons–and always to be one step ahead of the other.
The United States and the Soviet Union did not act on those early proposals for international control and, unfortunately, the early atomic scientists' prediction came true. Citizens in the United States, Soviet Union/Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and elsewhere have paid a heavy price in taxes, foregone opportunities for economic and educational development, and abrogation of their civil rights–all to build enormous nuclear arsenals that can destroy civilization and all living things on Earth. It is time to try another path–to use cooperation and openness to achieve nuclear security. On this count, we believe President Obama is leading us in the right direction.
Elements of his plan are particularly promising. First, he views nuclear weapons as a problem that requires international cooperation to address. And he agrees that this technology–because of its overwhelming destructive power–produces weapons of genocide that have no place in military strategy and war-fighting, and indeed, that have no place at all.
Second, he has tapped Rose Gottemoeller (a former member of the Bulletin's Science and Security Board) to serve as chief negotiator with Russia on nuclear arms reductions. With this appointment, Obama has signaled the seriousness of his intent to make rapid progress. Gottemoeller is well-known and well-regarded by her Russian counterparts, fully knowledgeable about nuclear weapons and energy, and possesses extensive contacts within Russia's nuclear weapons labs, military, and nuclear power industry. So far, the meetings have gone well and even included discussion of weapon delivery systems as well as U.S. national missile defense. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov commented very favorably at the conclusion of an April U.S.-Russian meeting in Rome, and Obama is set to meet with Medvedev in July to review the progress of these historic negotiations.
Third, Obama has proposed an ambitious timetable for completing a joint agreement–a negotiated pact by December, before the expiration of the current U.S.-Russian arms control agreement (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START). Pressing for rapid progress will focus the officials of both countries, leaving less time for maneuvering and bureaucratic infighting. We are now well past the Cold War and ideological hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union. Each country has already declared that they have “excess nuclear weapons,” and they have been cooperating for more than 15 years to dismantle their weapons and to secure dangerous fissile materials in their respective countries through the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. While a new treaty will provide for ambitious new levels of reductions and for measures to verify that each side has lived up to its end of the bargain, Russia and the United States each have the skilled technical personnel and expert arms control negotiators to make rapid progress.
Fourth, Obama has placed the goal of nuclear weapons elimination within a comprehensive framework. That framework includes honoring obligations to pursue nuclear weapons disarmament that both governments agreed to when the United States and Soviet Union ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in the late 1960s. It includes actions to deepen trust between the two countries through educational and citizen exchanges, as well as through ongoing official discussions. The framework also includes U.S. assistance to Russia in attaining membership in the World Trade Organization. These all underscore a burgeoning collaboration between our two governments that forms the basis for trust and the possibility of nuclear disarmament.
Finally, the initial commitments to a new relationship between Russia and the United States come at a time of gathering support for a nuclear-weapon-free world from former statesmen in the United States, Germany, and Britain; from military, political, and cultural leaders working with a new organization called Global Zero; and from faith groups such as the Two Futures Project.
But even before these recent efforts, citizen organizations worked tirelessly to stop the madness of the nuclear arms race and bring about the abolition and prohibition of nuclear weapons. During the past six decades, nuclear disarmament movements have pressed leaders to provide for a safer world. The early scientists movement of the late 1940s, of which the Bulletin was a part, opened informal channels between the United States and the Soviet Union and helped prevent preemptive nuclear attacks during the tense early days of the Cold War. A decade later, nuclear disarmament movements helped make the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty possible. And those calling for a halt to new nuclear weapons development in the United States in the 1980s successfully stopped such work; those same movements in Europe helped bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989 and end the Cold War in the early 1990s.
Courageous political leaders can effect breathtaking policy changes when they bring broad understanding, skill, and new frameworks to seemingly intractable problems. But even on issues of international security, often thought to be the exclusive domain of experts and insiders, leaders need the pressure of galvanized and informed public opinion to pursue and sustain sensible policies that ensure our safety and security.
With President Obama and his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, we once again have an opportunity to make enormous progress on nuclear disarmament. But he will need our help.