In January 2007 and more recently, January 2008, four prominent and experienced statesmen—Henry Kissinger, former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford; William J. Perry, former Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton; George P. Schultz, former Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State under Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; and former Senator Sam Nunn who served as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a bipartisan quartet of individuals with impeccable and impressive credentials as “Cold Warriors”—wrote two extraordinary essays for The Wall Street Journal* that called for immediate and urgent attention to be paid to the fact that, as they noted, “the world is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era.”

Summing up how we had come to this tipping point, Kissinger, Perry, Schultz and Nunn wrote, in 2007, “Nuclear weapons were essential to maintaining international security during the Cold War because they were a means of deterrence...But reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.” In 2008, expounding on the global spread of nuclear weapons, a force no longer restrained by the boundaries of the mutually assured destruction doctrine, they wrote that today, “We face a very real possibility that the deadliest weapons ever invented could fall into dangerous hands.” In that connection, it is sobering to think that in the more than sixty years since the first nuclear weapon was exploded (an occasion that moved one of its developers, Robert Oppenheimer, to famously admit that the sight made him think of the lines from the Bhagavad-Gita, ““Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”), the threat to humanity from nuclear weapons has not only resisted containment but rather morphed into new forms. Indeed, the list of those whose nuclear capabilities we must now be concerned about includes more than the traditional “nuclear weapons states” comprising the U.S., Russia, the United Kingdom, China, and France, along with India, Pakistan and North Korea, which have conducted nuclear weapons tests—as well as Israel, which is widely presumed to have nuclear weapons—but those with more recent local, regional or even international nuclear ambitions such as “non-state actors,” most alarmingly, terrorists; potential “rogue states”; and messianic groups expecting the end of the world (and perhaps not opposed to hastening it). There is also continuing concern on the part of the U.S., the European Union, China and Russia about Iran’s intentions and progress toward building a nuclear weapon.

Nuclear dangers abound on many fronts. Some quick snapshots: all told, there are currently nuclear weapons materials in more than 40 countries, some, as Sam Nunn noted in a 2007 speech, “secured by nothing more than a chain link fence.” In the U.S., there have been incidents such as one where nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto an airplane and not reported missing for many hours; in Russia, weapons- and reactor-grade nuclear materials have disappeared from the country’s atomic facilities; and Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, is reported to have sold his country’s nuclear secrets, helping to increase the proliferation of nuclear technology on a wide scale.

These and other related issues were the focus of a February 2008 international conference in Oslo on “Achieving the Vision of a World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” The gathering was convened by the Government of Norway in cooperation with the Nuclear Threat Initiative (a nonprofit organization focused on “developing and implementing projects...to reduce the dangers from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons,” which is co-chaired by Sam Nunn and philanthropist Ted Turner and is a Corporation grantee) and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and attended by over 100 international representatives. Much discussion centered on what is one of the most basic conundrums of the nuclear age: despite the many treaties aimed at limiting—and even reducing—the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, SALT I and II, and START I and II, progress toward this end has been disappointing, a conclusion shared by the foreign ministers of Australia, Chile, Indonesia, Norway, Romania, South Africa and the United Kingdom who, just a few years ago, issued a declaration calling for strengthening adherence to nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament agreements. Nevertheless, roughly 27,000 nuclear warheads remain in the arsenals of the nine states that are known to have produced weapons-grade fissile materials (with 95 percent of this material controlled by the U.S. and the Russian Federation). These stockpiles do not seem to prevent the nuclear powers from admonishing the rest of the world to refrain from joining the nuclear club—or be subject to possible sanctions—a situation that Sam Nunn has described as telling people not to smoke while you have a cigarette dangling from your mouth. This is a policy that has already failed, in part because the nuclear powers have reneged on the promise of their various treaties which, after all, were supposed to be temporary measures, meant to keep the genie in the bottle while complete disarmament was the goal down the road. If we are still journeying toward that goal, it only seems to be getting further and further away.

An additional problem is the question of nuclear fuel. In a world hungry for energy, nuclear fuel may be a necessity, but there is always the danger that the technology for creating nuclear fuel will be channeled into weapons development. One solution that has been proposed—prompted, in part, by Iran’s insistence on its right to enrich uranium as part of its plan to develop a nuclear fuel program—is the creation of an international “nuclear fuel bank,” run by the International Atomic Energy Commission, that countries could draw from rather than setting up their own program. Through the Nuclear Threat Initiative, billionaire investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett has pledged $50 million to the effort; the U.S. has contributed $50 million and Norway, which gave $5 million, plans to lead the effort to raise the rest of the funding needed.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan—who said that he wanted to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete”—and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, to discuss the elimination of ballistic missiles and, to the surprise of their aides, the possibility of banning nuclear weapons. It was a summit that failed in the short term but one that many believe still serves as a shining, symbolic moment in time when the leaders of the world’s two greatest nuclear powers nearly agreed on the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. It took great courage to even approach such a pivot point, and I believe the fact that it almost happened means that it can happen, but it will take men and women of vision and commitment to release the world from its nuclear chains. In 2008, in Oslo, there was urgency in the air and hope in every handshake that the shining moment will come again and this time, we must be ready to turn that opportunity into the reality of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Vartan Gregorian
President

* “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2007 and “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2008.

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