The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
If Barack Obama sent the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to Congress for ratification early in the new session, that would be an excellent start. Since it was signed in 1996, 148 other countries have ratified it, but it cannot come into effect until the United States does, too. And then he could get on with banning the nuclear weapons themselves, not just the tests. ThereÕs a new initiative, launched in Paris December 9 under the title Global Zero, in which more than a hundred world leaders endorse the goal of abolishing nuclear weapons completely. That may have a slightly antique ring to it Ð donÕt these people know that the Cold War ended ages ago? Ð but in fact the nuclear weapons are still there. Some 20,000 of them, in fact. And last July, at a rally in Berlin, Obama publicly adopted the same goal: ÒThis is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.Ó Admittedly, the hundred Òworld leadersÓ are mostly ex-world leaders, and they may be suffering from Òretired general syndrome.Ó All through their careers, generals loyally support the reigning orthodoxy about nuclear weapons, and are amply rewarded for it. Then they retire and some of them begin to wonder out loud if they ever really believed all that. But what makes Global Zero more than the usual empty talk is the fact that this time all the leaders of the major powers seem to be on the same page. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in March that the United Kingdom is ready to work for Òa world that is free from nuclear weapons.Ó On December 8 French President Nicolas Sarkozy also gave his support to the goal of general nuclear disarmament. Same goal Last June Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh backed the same goal, saying that Òthe only effective form of nuclear disarmament and elimination of nuclear weapons is global disarmament.Ó Pakistan and China have said explicitly that they support Global Zero. In fact, the only countries that actually own nuclear weapons that have stayed silent are North Korea and Israel. North Korea is less of a problem than it seems, because it could probably be persuaded to give up its one or two nuclear weapons in return for strong security guarantees and lots of foreign aid, especially if the United States were getting out of the nuclear weapons business, too. Israel is a knottier problem, because it doesnÕt even admit that it has nuclear weapons (several hundred of them, in fact), but for the first time it could find itself facing pressure from the one country that really has leverage over Israeli policy, the United States. One of the most striking aspects of the Global Zero meeting in Paris was the remark by Richard Burt, the man who handled the press conference, that IsraelÕs undeclared nuclear arsenal would have to be part of the process. This will have caused consternation in Israel, because while Burt currently holds no official position in the US government, he was the chief US negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) with the former Soviet Union, and he probably wouldnÕt have said it if US policy were not moving in that direction. But thatÕs the real question: is the US really ready to give up its nuclear weapons? It was the first country to have them, and it has built its grand strategy around them for the past 64 years. If it were willing to do that, and if the Russians were really willing to follow suit, then that would account for 96 per cent of all the worldÕs nuclear weapons, and it wouldnÕt be all that hard to cajole all the rest of the worldÕs nuclear powers into doing the same. It would take at least a decade to get to zero from here. First, ratify the test ban treaty. Then, in the forthcoming talks to renew or replace the START treaty between the US and Russia (which expires next year), agree on really radical reductions in American and Russian nuclear weapons. Then bring in the rest of the world for the final negotiations to outlaw nuclear weapons entirely. It still sounds like a pipe dream, but in fact the conditions have never been so promising. If Obama takes the lead, it could actually happen Ð and even in the depths of a recession, it wouldnÕt cost anything. Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist. His column appears Mondays.
