Nuclear Weapons-free World the Right Goal, Best Way to Serve American Ideals

Related subjects: Arms Proliferation, China, Diplomacy & Politics, Europe, India, Iran, J.E. Robertson, Middle East, Obama administration, Opinion, Pakistan, Security & Surveillance, The Russian Federation, U.S. Politics, United Kingdom, World Leader Pretend Comments (2)

5 July 2009 :: J.E. Robertson

Barack Obama has been observing, researching and critiquing nuclear weapons policy for three decades. He seeks to put in motion the most ambitious global denuclearization effort ever conceived, grounding his approach in a hard pragmatist awareness of what drives the build-up of ever more destructive weapons arsenals. He has said throughout this year that his plans would never remove the US nuclear deterrent capability while any nuclear threat remains in the world. Now, he goes to Russia to seek a bilateral strategic arms reduction treaty.

The New York Times today reports that Obama’s 1983 Columbia University essay “Breaking the War Mentality” criticized the dangerous logic of the limitless Cold War weapons build-up and warned that policy-makers who sought to find ways to champion the fighting and winning of nuclear war might be inviting destruction and chaos. In that article, written for the Columbia newspaper Sundial, the young Obama called for steps to bring about “a nuclear free world”, as the only “decent” choice.

Obama was at that time writing during the massive build-up of the most destructive weapons the world had ever seen, as top Reagan advisers like Richard Perle —whose policies won him the honorific “the prince of darkness”— argued for a first-strike capability designed to eliminate the entire Soviet Union from existence. The popular “nuclear freeze” movement sprung up, with millions demonstrating in the streets of New York and other cities, decrying the devotion to a weapons regime that could wipe out all life on Earth.

Catholic bishops banded together to release a pastoral essay denouncing nuclear war as a great evil. The nuclear freeze movement was so successful —and was in part driven by nuclear accidents at peaceful facilities on Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania, and later at Chernobyl, in Ukraine— that no new nuclear plants have been built in the US since then. Pres. Ronald Reagan was persuaded, by the potential catastrophic destruction that would result from nuclear war, to promote and achieve, in cooperation with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbechev, the most aggressive denuclearization treaties ever undertaken.

Now, as the world enters what could be a new nuclear weapons age, with 9 nations —the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea— proven or thought to possess nuclear weapons, the student has become the teacher, in a sense, and he seeks to re-orient the prevailing global nuclear policy toward total denuclearization.

While old hands like Perle —despite having been proven wrong by history on nearly every count of their nuclear policy advice— continue to argue that only the naïve would favor the elimination of nuclear weapons, brazenly siding with the most sinister rogues on the world stage, it is hard to imagine how anything allowing the continued proliferation of new nuclear devices among the 9 nuclear nations would help prevent proliferation to those who seek to join the club. Obama’s goals are bold, but they are the most appropriate for long-term global nuclear strategy.

There are concrete, measurable steps being undertaken to move the US and the world toward a reduced nuclear future: the cancellation of development of new nuclear weapons —which could spur a global arms race of unprecedented proportions—, locating and sealing all “loose” nuclear material around the world, new strategic arms reduction treaties (StART), strengthening the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and reducing abrogation or cheating, and a global ban on the production of weapons-grade fissile material, which would put an upper limit on the number of weapons that could be built.

Each of these points would make for measurable means of regulating or restricting outright the production of nuclear weapons, making it easier for a global regime of inspections to detect even the slightest variation from the arms reduction protocols. Taken together, these proposals would make the intelligence game more precise and more effective the work of preventing even accidental nuclear detonation or release.

He was critical not only of the spread of nuclear weapons, but of the facile and tempting doctrines of confrontation and cynicism that aided in promoting their proliferation. He wrote of “the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country” in his 1983 article and has consistently warned that giving in to such attitudes undermines both the security of the United States and its allies and the values on which American democracy is founded.

Obama, who has remained committed to global denuclearization throughout his course of study and career in public life, took on the issue immediately upon entering the United States Senate. He has observed that “The United States has far more nuclear weapons than it needs,” adding that “any attempt by the U.S. government to develop or produce new nuclear weapons only undermines U.S. nonproliferation efforts around the world”.

He developed under-reported but very heavyweight international arms control credentials when he sponsored and piloted through the Senate a major new arms control initiative, related to securing nuclear weapons-related materials. He traveled to Russia to study nuclear deactivation and containment efforts, including the complicated work of retrieving all proliferation-potential materials from now independent former Soviet republics, some of which have too little funding or too lax a regime of controls to keep the valuable science and materials under lockdown.

Sen. Richard Lugar, Obama’s Republican backer in the nuclear security initiative, says “When we got there, he was clearly all business — a very careful listener and note taker and a serious student”. Obama visited nuclear facilities and deactivated nuclear silos, studying the virtues and the perils of Russia’s existing activities to contain or scale back its own nuclear arsenal, giving him more hands-on insight into the problem than most Washington policy-makers.

During the presidential campaign, Obama continued to ramp up his efforts to build consensus for an aggressive non-proliferation and denuclearization policy, aligning himself with such heavyweights as Henry Kissinger, George Schultz (both Cold War era Republican secretaries of State), William Perry (a Clinton Defense secretary) and fmr. Sen. Sam Nunn, who has fought persistently for aggressive non-proliferation policy.

Obama has been relentless in pushing his belief in the virtues of deeper and more informed imagination in policy-making, constantly highlighting and criticizing the failures and the risks of intellectual inertia and ungrounded thinking about the virtues of militarism. He has demonstrated both with his record of public service, his legendary campaign of innovation and his immensely productive first year in the White House, that talent and drive can do more than doctrinaire cynicism, and he now takes that spirit of possibility and efficacy to Russia, to show that both former Cold War enemies can see immediate, real-world benefits to spurring a new age of non-proliferation.

• There is No Button to Push, Thankfully
• Reports Say DPRK has Launched More Missiles, Abandoned Armistice
• North Korea Has Tested a Nuclear Device
• The Radical Naïveté of Newt Gingrich
• Taliban Foothold in Buner Severe Risk to Pakistan/Regional Security
• Against the Good Nukes / Bad Nukes Fallacy, or: David Frum’s Prophecy Problem
• Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons More Realistic than Selective Non-proliferation
• Bush-era Policies Have Put Nuclear Weapons within Reach of Taliban
• ‘6 Powers’ (including US) invite Tehran to Denuclearization Talks
• Obama Calls for Coordinated Global Effort to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons
• Obama Prague Speech on Global Denuclearization (video + transcript)
• US, Russia to Discuss Improving Ties in Geneva Meeting