Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: global zero

  • Interview with Bruce Blair: 50 Years After Cuban Crisis, New Nuclear Dangers, Dilemmas

    President John F. Kennedy's televised speech about the Cuban Missile CrisisOn Oct. 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed millions of Americans by television to declare that Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba were unacceptable and tantamount to an act of war. Among those watching was Bruce G. Blair, a high school student in Kankakee, Illinois. Within a few years, the reality of the Cold War would become even more immediate to Blair. In the early 1970s, while in the U.S. Air Force, he volunteered for the job of strategic missile launch control officer, and for three years his vantage point to watch the Cold War unfold was deep underground at a Strategic Air Command center in Montana. As a wing commander, he had general authority to supervise the use of as many as 200 Minuteman ICBM missiles.


    In the 1980s, Blair earned a Ph.D. in operations research from Yale, and later served as a senior fellow in foreign policy studies with the Brookings Institution. In 2000, he became president of the World Security Institute, which promoted arms control to policymakers and the media. Now considered one of the foremost experts on nuclear weapons in the world, Blair in 2008 co-founded Global Zero, a world initiative that’s pushing for phased multilateral disarmament. The organization has received encouragement by President Obama, and its basic ideals are endorsed by 300 world leaders. Over 450,000 people have signed on as Global Zero members.


    In a wide-ranging interview to mark the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dr. Blair talked exclusively to NAPF about current nuclear perils facing all nations, and how certain risks have receded, grown, or changed over the past half century. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion. 


    Kazel: In terms of alert status and the speed at which war might break out, it seems remarkable that it took seven days from the time President Kennedy saw the photographs of the missiles in Cuba until SAC actually went to DEFCON 2 [just short of war]. Today we tend to think of presidents having to respond to a potential nuclear threat in about 10 minutes, correct?


    Blair: I think that we certainly did have an early-warning apparatus in place in 1962 that was designed to provide immediate warning of any attack that was underway. We had a system in place, though it was cumbersome and slow, and not at all streamlined to insure some major nuclear response to a major nuclear attack against the United States.


    We were pretty close to a hair-trigger, launch-ready configuration back in those days, but over the last many decades we streamlined the command-and-control and early-warning network and primed the weapons themselves, and the crews that manage and launch those weapons, for very, very rapid reaction…


    What’s really changed is by the 1970s, both the Soviet Union and the United States had adopted a posture that was designed to detect the first signs of preparation of nuclear weapons or their actual use, to allow the leaders of those countries to make immediate decisions on the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons, and to carry out those decisions within minutes. Or, if not preemptive, then at least…to launch [their] weapons on tactical warning of a potential incoming strike…


    There’s just been a revolution in surveillance, reconnaissance, mainly from space, and we’ve become the “surveillance country of the world.” Now, the Russian system also evolved in a very sophisticated way, but in the 1990s, as everyone knows, suffered this economic calamity and it has not yet really recovered from the loss of its capabilities in surveillance and many other aspects of nuclear force capability.


    So we today could detect a kind of set-piece [carefully premeditated] move by Russia to deploy weapons in some place like Cuba. It’s inconceivable that a country could relocate nuclear weapons to another country without detection.


    I would emphasize that certainly the United States and the Soviet Union evolved their postures to a launch-ready configuration that remains in place today despite the end of the Cold War, and that technically the two sides are entwined in a hair-trigger dynamic that is inherently dangerous. If for some reason we find ourselves embroiled in another confrontation with each other, that hair-trigger posture presents a very serious risk to both sides — and to the world — in terms of the possibility of an inadvertent or accidental or mistaken launch based on false warning.


    So the world is no safer today, certainly, than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In fact [it’s more dangerous] from the standpoint of this hair-trigger dynamic.


    What’s really dramatically deteriorated in terms of nuclear danger to the world has been the proliferation of nuclear weapons: the emergence of new states with significant nuclear arsenals, in particular Pakistan but also North Korea and growing arsenals in South Asia and Northeast Asia and potentially in the Middle East, with the prospect of these materials for the weapons, or the weapons themselves, falling into the hands of bad actors – including, possibly, terrorists.


    The set piece, the major nuclear state-to-state scenario that is of concern to me, would be between the United States and China.


    Kazel: Could you elaborate on that?


    Blair: It used to be a bipolar world of U.S.-Soviet bloc confrontation that involved large nuclear arsenals on the two sides, and the whole question for many decades during the Cold War was how stable was that bipolar relationship. It clearly turned out to be dangerous, but we survived it. Unfortunately after the end of the Cold War, we saw the Soviet Union collapse and Russia become kind of a country that was not in complete control of its nuclear arsenal. We saw China emerge as a rising power that began throwing its weight around.


    So now the United States views China as a potential replacement of Russia in the nuclear equation. There are [confrontation] scenarios  between the United States and China that you can imagine, that you can’t imagine in the U.S.- Russia case — for example, conflict over Taiwan being the clearest tinderbox in Asia between the United States and China.


    Kazel: And yet China has far fewer nuclear weapons, and the ones they do have are not on hair-trigger alert?


    Blair: Right, Chinese nuclear weapons, at least to the best of my knowledge, have not involved mating up warheads to delivery vehicles, to missiles and submarines and bombers, on a daily basis. But that would happen in a crisis, and in a crisis there are hundreds of Chinese nuclear weapons and there are plenty of scenarios in which the United States and China could be at loggerheads.


    China clearly is emerging in the Pentagon as the next designated enemy, with a great deal of planning and targeting work going on oriented to China, while the [diminished] focus on Russia has led to a fairly dramatic decrease in the number of Russian targets in our war plan compared to China.


    Kazel: How has the ascendance of China affected the willingness of U.S. military and nuclear planners to even consider de-alerting our weapons or further deep cuts in our arsenal to the point that Global Zero advocates?


    Blair: The problem with China, and frankly all the other countries that are acquiring nuclear weapons – Pakistan, India, Israel, potentially Iran, North Korea – is that we have no history of a nuclear relationship with those countries. We have no history of negotiating nuclear arms reduction agreements with them. We don’t even have any dialog with China on this question, to speak of. We have very little transparency.


    The rules of the road have not been set in the nuclear arena except with Russia, and so we are back in kind of a Cuban Missile Crisis phase in our nuclear relationships with countries like China. We have to figure out how to stabilize those relationships and engage with those countries in ways that allow us to go forward with arms reductions…


    So Global Zero, as its next highest priority in the next couple of years, calls for the United States and Russia to continue their bilateral reductions but also calls for China and the other nuclear countries to be brought into this process, so that we can begin – if President Obama is re-elected – the first-in-history multilateral negotiations to cap, freeze, proportionally reduce, and otherwise constrain the nuclear arsenals of all the countries.


    Kazel: You mentioned the possibility of future multilateral talks but you tempered it by saying “if President Obama is reelected.” I know your organization has a great ideological friend in him, although he hasn’t endorsed your specific timetable for disarmament. Mitt Romney is perceived as trying to be tougher towards Russia and has called it our “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”  Does the success of the disarmament movement hinge on having a friend in the White House?


    Blair: The history of nuclear arms reduction agreements has been a history spearheaded by Republicans. The SALT agreement was a result of Nixon’s détente with the Soviet Union, the START agreement was begun by Reagan and finished by [George H.W.] Bush, then we got the Moscow agreement under Bush 2. So there is a legacy here for Republican support.


    Now it sort of fell apart during the New START treaty deliberations in the U.S. Senate, and there has been sort of a breakdown in that legacy. Romney does seem to fall outside this tradition and seems to be under the misimpression that Russia is our No. 1 foe. He came out strongly against the New START treaty in a very flawed analysis that he published back then, and he seems to be under the influence of very hard-line figures in his orbit of consultants who have almost an innate problem in cooperating with Russia.


    But a lot of this is politics and a lot of it will have to yield to reality — and reality is that the United States and Russia have reset their relationship after it reached its low ebb in 2008. We have had growing cooperation across the board with Russia and that cooperation, that common ground, is not something that any president of the United States, Republican or Democrat, would set aside. So I would expect that if there is a President Romney that he will moderate his views, he will recognize the potential benefits of cooperation with Russia across the board, including in the nuclear arena.


    Also keep in mind the grass-roots arms control movement flourished during Republican administrations. I mean, the largest demonstration against nuclear arms occurred in the 1980s when President Reagan was running the show. There’s also the potential that Global Zero would actually gain some support and momentum in the event of a Romney presidency that ramped up nuclear tensions with Russia.


    Kazel: In your 1993 book, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, you focused largely on the danger that missiles could be armed quickly and launched quickly and how that didn’t match the political reality of the post-Cold War era. But the book didn’t really advocate or even envision a time when all nuclear forces would be abolished. How did you evolve from supporting technical changes in command-and-control structures to being an outright supporter of nuclear abolition?


    Blair: That’s a good question. I believed through the end of the Cold War that the United States would continue to maintain a nuclear arsenal in the name of strategic stability and mutual deterrence, and that the Soviet Union would do the same thing…


    The United States and Russia…had a very good relationship in the early ‘90s. I mean we were almost allies. The euphoria, particularly on the Russian side over the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the optimism of a new relationship between the two countries, was just extraordinary and very upbeat. And so I, at the end of the Cold War, came to believe that it was possible to eliminate nuclear weapons.


    But at the same time we had a long way to go and I thought we should focus on the problems of the hair-trigger posture and the continuing dangers that existed in the command-and-control system and the deficiencies of nuclear safeguards against unauthorized launch. So I worked on those issues very hard during the 1990s. But I really didn’t know how you would get to zero.  No one had taken it seriously to have worked up any kind of a technical roadmap for how you would get it to zero. There’s still not a mountain of good, solid research on how you get to zero from where we are today.


    So I thought one of the ways of getting to zero was to get weapons off alert and to put them increasingly into reserve status and to relegate nuclear weapons to the back burner of military capabilities. And when you do that, the military planners discount them in an age of growing, non-nuclear, conventional weapons sophistication. During the 1990s, I could even imagine conventional weapons would replace nuclear weapons in many of the missions. So I was sort of approaching it through the back door: Let’s downplay the importance of nuclear weapons, get them off alert, and then they will just sort of drop out of the war plans.


    [Then came] the proliferation of nuclear weapons during the ‘90s with India and Pakistan coming out of the closet, and then North Korea, and 9/11 with the obvious danger of proliferation, and “loose nukes” in Russia in the ‘90s. You know, all of that added up in my mind to a case for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. So you just had to ask the question in the 1990s and into the 2000s, certainly after 9/11, do you feel the United States would be better or worse off living in a world without any nuclear weapons?


    I think the obvious answer to that question is that yes, we would be safer. As I go around the world for Global Zero, [meeting] supporters around the world, including very senior people from governments with nuclear weapons, I find increasingly that they also answer the question with that answer – that their country would be safer without any nuclear weapons on the planet.  That includes countries like India now.


    Kazel: Having taken the position that abolition is the best way to go, have you been disappointed over the past four years over the lack of progress under the Obama administration? An analysis by Jonathan Pearl of the Strategic Studies Institute [in the U.S. Army War College] said: “Contrary to popular belief, the general approach being advanced today by the Obama administration is strikingly similar to mainstream proposals of the past 65 years: arms control and nonproliferation now, disarmament at an undetermined point in the future. Meanwhile, numerous factors continue to militate against abolition, including a growing Pakistani arsenal and new sources of instability in the Middle East. Indeed, just as the perceived need for abolition may be growing, so may the difficulty of achieving it.”


    Blair: Well, no one ever expected this to be easy, and we’re pushing this agenda at a time when there are just overwhelming problems in the world. I think that President Obama has been seriously sidetracked over the last couple of years by world events. I think in the first two years of his administration, he made step-by-step progress…moving us concretely toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. In the last two years, we’ve been sidetracked, and of course we have the political season that’s further sidetracked any bold moves in this arena.


    But I would expect that if he is reelected, that he will revive this agenda, that [he could even] convene the first-in-history multilateral negotiations involving all the nuclear weapons countries to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons. Just getting that process started would be an amazing legacy for the president.


    I think where President Obama sort of dropped the ball a bit was he really didn’t organize the government to develop a plan for the elimination of nuclear weapons. And so it remains a goal that is more rhetorical than it is concrete.


    Kazel: Even if he’s sympathetic to your goals, how can something like the Global Zero agenda coexist with the long-range plan for modernizing our warheads and delivery systems, which the government seems to be locking into place for the next 10 years? The Stimson Center says modernization will cost $352 billion or more over the next decade, including B61 nuclear bombs. How can your goals happen at the same time the administration is committing to this kind of long-term upgrade?


    Blair: (long pause) Well, I think he is going to have to come to terms with this question, because these are really 50-year decisions that are coming down the pike here for all three legs of the nuclear Triad. So we don’t want to be investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons systems that we want to scrap in the next 10 to 20 years, or whenever the time frame that the President might imagine nuclear abolition may be possible…Global Zero has called for the elimination of the land-based leg of the nuclear Triad on the U.S. side [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles], and so it’s a question that has to be confronted. If it’s not, then we will sort of drift along with business as usual.


    Kazel: Can it be argued that modernization is necessary because the command and control systems, as well as the weapons themselves, are sort of crumbling — that if we don’t modernize them, your worst fear will be realized, that these systems will be vulnerable to seizure by terrorists or that somehow they’ll break down and malfunction?


    Blair: Well, there’s obviously a certain minimum amount of investment that you have to make in maintenance and security…You identify deficiencies that need to be fixed. One area that is of profound concern to me is deficiencies in protections against cyber warfare that may leave some of our weapons and our command-and-control system vulnerable to exploitation by unauthorized people. That’s a whole brave new world that needs to be addressed, and as long as we have nuclear weapons we need to find deficiencies in their control and safety. And that takes money, obviously.


    But Global Zero supports a time frame for the elimination of nuclear weapons. We can debate how long that should be, but it’s not 100 years, OK? And, it’s not really 50 years. We think that the time frame ought to be realistically on the order of 20 years. Maybe it’s 25. But it’s not taking us out to 2080. And 2080 is the year in which the next generation of U.S. strategic submarines is supposed to last.


    So in other words, what the next administration needs to do is say to itself, let’s say it’s President Obama, “If we were to think about eliminating nuclear weapons in the next 20 to 50 years, or 20 to 30 years…what would be the implications – for our nuclear complex, for the modernization or investment in things like the plutonium factory at Los Alamos? What would be the implications for our forces, our submarines, our bombers, our land-based rockets and their modernization, and what would be the implications for arms control? Give me a plan that allows me to pursue zero [nuclear weapons] over the next 20 or 30 years with plenty of flexibility. In case we’re not able to achieve it through the arms control process and it take us longer, I need to have a plan that insures that we still have a viable nuclear arsenal during this period.”


    These are choices and trade-offs that can’t just be managed by business as usual.


    Kazel: It seems many nuclear weapons opponents think the answer to that is the U.S. and Russia participating in a Nuclear Weapons Convention, a set of agreements that would officially outlaw nuclear bombs and create an agenda for how that can be achieved. Is that a dream, or something that can happen someday?


    Blair: A Nuclear Weapons Convention would be a phase of the Global Zero [plan]. The first step is to get all the relevant countries into a dialog and negotiation. So the first goal would be to have multiple countries decide the size of their arsenals, and other characteristics of their arsenals, let’s say five years from now. They negotiate where they would be five years after that. And then at some final stage they would agree to a Nuclear Weapons Convention that would have a requirement to go to zero. It would be a universal agreement applying to all countries, and would have mechanisms of verification and enforcement built into it that really have teeth. So I see a Convention as being essential at some stage.


    Kazel: Have you heard of any officials, any politicians on any side, who support a Convention?


    Blair: None that come to mind. But we do hear politicians – [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin, [Prime Minister Dmitry] Medvedev, and the Obama Administration have all talked about how the next phase of nuclear arms reduction should be multilateral. So that’s the first big step into that arena.


    Kazel: On another point, how quickly and how effectively can the superpowers communicate with each other during a crisis? You make the point in your writings that all bets are off during a crisis, that the usual logic and expectations of what any side might do can’t be predicated accurately then. The “Hotline” was established during the Cuban Missile Crisis and then it was expanded during the Reagan years, but other proposals to really ramp up communications mechanisms between the U.S. and Russia seem to have fallen by the wayside.


    Blair: This isn’t the area that needs our primary attention. This issue, of miscommunication, of lack of adequate emergency mechanisms [for] communications and consultations – these are problems that largely are huge problems in other parts of the world. For example, India and Pakistan have a long way to go. The United States and China have a long way to go because we don’t have any tradition of transparency in arms control.


    There’s big opportunities for misunderstanding between the United States and China, and all these other countries that are acquiring nuclear weapons are in the very early stage of evolving these kinds of mechanisms between themselves and their primary adversaries, whether it’s in the Middle East or South Asia or Northeast Asia…I think that Israel and Iran, for example, could easily get into a nuclear war if Iran got nuclear weapons, because of this [communication] problem.


    Kazel: What represents a greater danger, Iran getting nuclear weapons or Israel attacking those weapons?


    Blair: Well, if Israel attacks those weapons it will be a conventional attack. If Iran gets those weapons, the possibility of actual use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East grows exponentially. I think [that is] just an unacceptable outcome.


    But I also believe that Iran is committed to getting nuclear weapons, because as long as regime change is its most serious worry, it feels it needs nuclear weapons as the ultimate deterrent. So there’s a long way to go with diplomacy with Iran to reach a stage where Iran feels it doesn’t need nuclear weapons.


    It’s a very complex picture in all of these regions that are [acquiring nuclear weapons]: how to come to terms with their security concerns without nuclear weapons. So that’s the agenda of Global Zero. We think that the universal elimination of nuclear weapons is really the only solution. So that if Iran has to give them up, Israel gives them up, as well. And if Israel gives them up, then by gosh, Iran also has to give them up, in the context of a broader disarmament process.

  • Cartwright Report Calls for Nuclear Reductions and Elimination of US Land-Based ICBM Force

    This article was originally published by Truthout.


    David KriegerGen. James Cartwright chaired a recently released report by the nuclear disarmament group Global Zero on “Modernizing U.S. Nuclear Strategy, Force Structure and Posture.” General Cartwright is a retired vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and former commander of the US Strategic Command. In the latter capacity, he was in charge of all US nuclear weapons.


    The Cartwright report argues for reducing the number of US nuclear weapons, taking deployed weapons off high alert and eliminating all land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The report proposes an illustrative nuclear force of 900 total nuclear weapons, half deployed and half in reserve. The report recommends that, of the 450 deployed weapons, 360 be submarine-based and 90 carried on bombers. The deployed weapons would be de-alerted so that they would require 24 to 72 hours to be made launch-ready.


    This is a proposal based upon a thorough review of current US nuclear strategy and posture. It calls for reducing the number of deployed nuclear weapons to 450 by 2022 and reinforces the belief that current US nuclear policy, which the report critiques, remains stuck in the cold war era despite the world having moved on in the 21st century.


    The report finds that, “ICBMs in fixed silos are inherently targetable and depend heavily upon launch on warning for survival under some scenarios of enemy attack.” It goes on to state that the current ICBM rapid reaction posture, “runs a real risk of accidental or mistaken launch.” Thus, the report calls for elimination of the US ICBM force and for reliance for deterrence upon the invulnerable submarine and bomber forces instead.


    The report’s call for eliminating the US ICBM force elicited a bizarre response from the Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz, who said that the plan “introduces the likelihood of instability in the deterrence equation, which is not healthy.” Schwartz continued: “Here’s the reality: Why do we have a land-based deterrent force? It’s so that an adversary has to strike the homeland.”


    Why would any country need or want to maintain such land-based weapons, which provide an attractive target for an adversary in a time of high tension? It would make far more sense for US military leaders to be thinking about how to prevent potential adversaries from striking the US with nuclear weapons.


    The dangers of General Schwartz’s convoluted concept of deterrence can best be understood by reference to the reflections of former commander of the US Strategic Command, Gen. George Lee Butler. In 1999, General Butler wrote, “Nuclear deterrence was and remains a slippery intellectual construct that translates very poorly into the real world of spontaneous crises, inexplicable motivations, incomplete intelligence and fragile human relationships.” In other words, the heavily flawed theory of nuclear deterrence is subject to failure in the real world. General Schwartz’s concept of deterrence “so that an adversary has to strike the homeland” shows how deterrence itself can be more focused on strategy than on people and can undermine security.


    The Cartwright report gives backing to President Obama’s call for US leadership to achieve “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” It should be noted, though, that atmospheric scientists have modeled a “small” nuclear war between India and Pakistan, in which each side uses 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons on the other side’s cities. As a consequence of such a war, soot from the burning cities would rise into the stratosphere, where it would remain for a decade, blocking warming sunlight, shortening growing seasons and causing crop failures, leading to global famine and potentially 1 billion deaths from starvation worldwide.


    This “nuclear famine” study suggests that even a reduction to 450 deployed nuclear weapons by both the United States and Russia would still leave too many nuclear weapons. Since these 450 thermonuclear weapons would be far more powerful than the Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons modeled in the nuclear-famine study, they could potentially do far more damage than a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, as terrible as that would be.


    The Cartwright report provides a fresh look at US nuclear policy and is a valuable contribution to the debate on necessary next steps in moving toward the urgent goal of achieving zero nuclear weapons on the planet.

  • Nuclear Zero: Getting to the Finish Line

    This article was originally published by Truthout.


    David KriegerAlmost five decades ago, I first visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It was 18 years after the atomic bombings flattened the cities, and the cities had returned to a kind of normalcy.  At the memorial museums, though, a very different perspective on nuclear weapons was presented than that taught in American schools.  It was the perspective from below the bombs – that of the victims – not the technological perspective of having created and used the bombs.


    Nuclear weapons are not simply a technological achievement, as the West has tended to portray them.  They kill indiscriminately – children, women and men.  They are not weapons of war; they are tools of mass annihilation.  No matter what we call them, they are not truly weapons, but instruments of unbridled mass destruction.  Their threat or use is illegal under international law.  Surely, their possession, like chemical or biological weapons, should be as well.  They are immoral, as has been concluded by all the world’s great religions.  And they have cost us dearly, in financial and scientific resources and in compromises of the soul.


    Three decades ago, in 1982, we founded the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  Its vision is a just and peaceful world, free of nuclear weapons.  The Foundation’s mission is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders.  So we educate, advocate and empower – that’s what we do.  We speak out.  We are a voice of conscience.  We advocate for sane policies and for leadership to achieve a world without nuclear dangers.  Our goal is to educate and engage millions of people to move the world to nuclear disarmament and peace.


    We challenge bad theory, such as the theory of nuclear deterrence, a theory that justifies reliance on nuclear weapons, but has many faults.  For nuclear deterrence to work successfully, leaders of nuclear-armed states must be rational at all times and under all circumstances, particularly under conditions of stress when they are least likely to be rational.  Also, nuclear deterrence cannot deter those who have no territory to retaliate against or who are suicidal.  Thus, nuclear deterrence has no possibility of success against terrorist organizations.  To see one of many ways that deterrence can fail, I encourage you to watch the 1964 movie, Fail-Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet, based upon the 1962 novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler.


    The Foundation also challenges bad nuclear policies, including those that tolerate a two-tier structure of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots.”  We believe that the ultimate consequence of this two-tier structure will be nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war.  We also advocate for nuclear policies that reduce risks and move us toward a world without nuclear weapons, policies such as security assurances to non-nuclear weapon states of: no first use of nuclear weapons; no launch on warning of nuclear attack; lowering the alert status of nuclear weapons; a comprehensive test ban treaty; and a fissile material cut-off treaty.  These are all elements of the critical goal of nuclear weapons abolition and must be viewed in that context.


    Scientists tell us that even a small nuclear war with an exchange of a hundred Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons, destroying cities and sending smoke into the stratosphere, could result in blocking sunlight and lowering the earth’s temperature, leading to massive crop failures and famine, resulting in some one billion deaths.  This would be the kind of nuclear war that could occur in South Asia between India and Pakistan.  A larger-scale nuclear war, fought with a few hundred thermonuclear weapons, the kind that could occur between the US and Russia, could destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human species and most other forms of complex life on the planet.  We all share a responsibility to assure there are no small- or large-scale nuclear wars, but as long as nuclear weapons exist in any substantial numbers, the possibility of nuclear war also exists.


    In October 1962, the world held its collective breath as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded.  The world was poised on the brink of a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR.  John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev managed to navigate those dangerous currents, but many of their advisors were pushing them toward nuclear war.  Decisions on all sides were made with only partial knowledge, which could have resulted in disaster.  Robert Kennedy’s eye-witness account of the crisis, Thirteen Days, is sobering reading.


    In 1982, the year the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was created, there was considerable concern in the world about nuclear dangers.  There were more than 60,000 nuclear weapons, nearly all in the arsenals of the US and USSR.  More than one million people gathered in Central Park in New York calling for a nuclear freeze.  Of course, they were right to do so.  The nuclear arms race was out of control, and the leaders of the US and USSR were not talking to each other.  An uncontrollable nuclear arms race coupled with a failure to communicate were and are a recipe for disaster.


    By 1986, the nuclear arms race reached its apogee with over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, nearly all in the arsenals of the US and USSR.  But by this time Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power in the USSR and was talking about abolishing nuclear weapons by the year 2000.  Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, who shared Gorbachev’s view about nuclear weapons, came heartbreakingly close to agreeing to abolish their nuclear arsenals at a summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986.  Their attempt to find their way to zero nuclear weapons foundered on the issue of the Strategic Defense Initiative, now commonly referred to as missile defense.  Reagan wanted it; Gorbachev didn’t.


    So, in 1986 there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world.  Since then, we have made progress in substantially reducing nuclear arsenals to the current number of under 20,000 worldwide, having shed some 50,000 nuclear weapons.  Of the 8,500 nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, about 3,500 are awaiting dismantlement and fewer than 2,000 are deployed, about the same number deployed in Russia.  The US and Russia have agreed that they will each reduce their deployed strategic weapons to 1,550 by the year 2017.  Neither country has conducted an atmospheric or underground nuclear weapon test since 1992 (other than underground subcritical nuclear tests in which the nuclear material does not reach the criticality necessary for a nuclear chain reaction). 


    We have made progress.  We are now on relatively positive terms with Russia, since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Through solid US negotiating, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus agreed to give up the nuclear arsenals that the former Soviet Union had left on their territories and to give these weapons over to Russia for dismantlement. 


    A significant event occurred in 1996 when US Secretary of Defense William Perry met with the Russian and Ukrainian Defense Ministers at a former missile base in Ukraine to plant sunflowers.  Secretary Perry said on the occasion, “Sunflowers in the soil instead of missiles will ensure peace for future generations.”  We adopted the sunflower as a symbol of a nuclear weapons-free world.  The sunflower symbolizes everything that a nuclear-armed missile is not, being natural, nutritious, healthy, beautiful, grounded in the earth and powered by the sun.


    We have come a long way, but we haven’t reached the finish line, which is a world without nuclear weapons.  The issue we face now is to educate decision makers and the public that the dangers of nuclear weapons have not gone away.  There are still many flash points of nuclear danger in the world: India-Pakistan, North Korea, the continued possession of nuclear weapons by the UK and France, the possession of nuclear weapons by Israel and the incentive for nuclear proliferation this creates in the Middle East, and the relationship of the nuclear energy fuel cycle to nuclear proliferation.


    The greatest problem related to nuclear weapons is not that Iran might develop such weapons.  It is that the countries with nuclear weapons are not taking seriously enough their obligations to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity and achieve nuclear disarmament.  Nuclear weapons do not make their possessors more secure.  When a country has nuclear weapons or seeks to acquire them, that country will also be a target of nuclear weapons.  This goes for both the US and Iran, and for all other countries with nuclear weapons or seeking to develop them.  Nuclear weapons turn cities and countries into targets for mass annihilation.


    What shall we do to advance to zero?  In the spirit of Gorbachev and Reagan, the US and Russia must lead the way. They still possess over 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world.  It was recently revealed that President Obama has requested a study of reductions of deployed strategic nuclear weapons to three levels: 1000 to 1,100 weapons; 700 to 800 weapons; and 300 to 400 weapons.  This is significant.  It is worth advocating for US leadership to reduce the US nuclear arsenal to the lower level, to 300 nuclear weapons, as a next step.  But, of course, this would not be the desired end result.  First, it is not low enough; it is not zero.  It still would be more than enough to destroy civilization and potentially cause the extinction of complex life on the planet.  Second, it is unilateral; it must be bilateral and moving toward multilateral.


    At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we have never called for unilateral nuclear disarmament.  Going down to 300 deployed strategic nuclear weapons would be a significant reduction, but it should be a joint endeavor with Russia. To get Russia to join us in this next step will require the US to move its missile defense installations away from the Russian border, so that Russia does not feel threatened by these defenses, particularly at lower levels of offensive weapons.  US officials tell Russia not to worry about these missile defense installations, but the Russians are wary.  It is easy to understand this, if one imagines the Russians placing missile defense installations on the Canadian border and telling the US not to worry.  Missile defenses, if they are needed, must be a joint project, just as reductions in the numbers of offensive nuclear weapons must be a joint project.


    The US and Russia must cooperate on continuing to pare down their nuclear arsenals for their own security and for global security.  At the level of 300 deployed strategic nuclear weapons each, they would then be in a position of rough parity with the other nuclear weapon states and in a position to effectively negotiate a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.  The number that matters most in the nuclear disarmament arena is zero. It is the most secure and stable number of nuclear weapons.  It must be achieved carefully and in phases, but it must be achieved for the benefit of our children, grandchildren and all future generations.

  • Countdown to Zero Neglects the Greatest Nuclear Danger of All

    The greatest nuclear danger today is not Countdown to Zero‘s nuclear “accident” or “miscalculation” or “madness.” The greatest nuclear danger today, still, like 65 years ago, is nuclear war.

    Two weeks before the 65th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed just six days later by the end of the Second World War, Magnolia Pictures released a new film, Countdown to Zero. It was made by some of the same people who made An Inconvenient Truth, and the filmmakers unapologetically expressed the hope that it would change the game on nuclear disarmament much as their previous film did on climate change.

    The film quite shrewdly bases its argument on a single sentence, uttered by President John F. Kennedy nearly half a century ago. In his first speech before the United Nations, on September 25, 1961, the president said, “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.”

    (Damocles was a court sycophant to the 4th Century BC tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse. When Dionysius invited him one day to come and sit on his powerful throne, Damocles noticed, to his horror, a deadly sword suspended directly above, point down, held only by a single strand of the hair of a horse. In this way, Damocles learned the truth about the life of a ruler in the ancient world — or, as JFK wisely discerned, the life of everyone in the nuclear age.)

    Countdown then, quite persuasively, details how, nearly half a century later, those three nuclear dangers remain quite imminent.

    It reveals just how close both the United States and the Soviet Union came, more than once, to launching not just one, but perhaps 101 nuclear-tipped missiles — utterly by accident. (The filmgoer is left to guess the likelihood that we can dodge that particular nuclear bullet indefinitely in a world of nine nuclear-armed nations, with perhaps soon more.)

    It examines episodes like the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 (and others almost wholly unknown to the public), when miscalculation, misinformation, or misunderstanding brought us to the brink of a civilization-ending nuclear war. (The filmgoer can perform the same exercise here.)

    And it illuminates just how many efforts have already been made, by non-state terrorists, to obtain or build a nuclear weapon, transport it to a major world city, and set it off — and just how likely it is that, eventually, somebody is going to pull that off.

    However, Countdown neglects to mention a fourth scenario by which the actual detonation of nuclear weapons might come about sometime in the next century, or the next decade, or the next year.

    Don’t get me wrong. The film is excellent, especially as a vehicle for growing the nuclear disarmament movement, and preaching beyond the choir. This is a sin of omission, not commission.

    But during this week when we commemorate the 65th anniversaries of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the end of the Second World War, one is compelled to point out that the scenario the film omits is, ironically, another Hiroshima. Another Nagasaki. Another conscious, intentional launching of a nuclear weapon. Another calm, sober initiation of nuclear war.

    Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were instantaneously obliterated by the American atomic bombs “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” on August 6th and 9th, 1945 (devices perhaps a hundred times less powerful than many of the nuclear weapons deployed in arsenals today), were not, of course, atomic attacks carried out by the “madness” of non-state terrorists. Nor were they “accidents.” Nor were they “miscalculations.”

    The White House was not in a panic in August 1945. The orders to dispatch the B-29’s carrying the atomic bombs were not issued in error. President Harry S. Truman and his advisors were not rushed into hurriedly deciding that if we didn’t immediately launch a nuclear attack upon the Japanese, Tokyo would launch a nuclear attack (or, indeed, any kind of an attack) on us.

    No, the United States government made a cool, composed, calculated decision that it could bring about a precisely-defined political aim by employing nuclear weapons as an act of war.

    And that kind of nuclear eventuality, today, may be at least as likely as the three others described in Countdown to Zero.

    After the end of the Cold War, and before its corpse had even grown cold in the grave, the Clinton Administration astonishingly chose not to diminish, but instead to expand the role of nuclear weapons in American national security doctrines. Now these weapons were designated for the first time as “counterproliferants.”

    They were to be used not only in retaliation, but as a tool of pre-emption against “rogue states” and non-state actors. And they were to used to prevent them from acquiring not only nuclear weapons, but chemical weapons and biological weapons as well.

    The Bush Administration, in its Nuclear Posture Review of December 2001, specifically articulated several scenarios where the United States might employ America’s vast nuclear arsenal. Like the Clinton doctrines, many of these would be carried out not only not in response to a nuclear attack, but indeed not in response to any attack upon us at all. The Bush document even named seven particular states as the possible targets of a preemptive American nuclear attack upon them.

    The Obama Administration, in its Nuclear Posture Review of April 2010, stated plainly that it anticipated far fewer contingencies where the United States might actually use its nuclear weapons in combat.

    However, many nuclear policy experts had urged the new Administration to adopt an explicit policy of “No First Use” — a statement that our country would never employ nuclear weapons except to retaliate for the use of nuclear weapons against our allies or ourselves.

    China, despite laughably less powerful military forces than the United States, both conventional and nuclear, has long maintained such a policy of “No First Use.”

    But President Obama refused. His Administration insists that still, in certain circumstances, the president of the United States might need to authorize an American nuclear first strike. His Administration explicitly maintains the policy option for America to start a nuclear war.

    In addition, for at least the past half decade, speculation has run rampant that either the United States or Israel, or both, might launch a preemptive attack on all elements of the Iranian nuclear complex, to forestall the (hypothetical) future possibility that Iran might someday obtain a nuclear arsenal of its own. Just this month, on Sunday August 1, the lead article in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section, by Steven Simon and Ray Takeyh, was called, “A Nuclear Iran. Would America Strike to Prevent It?”

    Such a preemptive strike, of course, might be undertaken exclusively with conventional military forces. Or, it might not.

    In the April 17, 2006 issue of the New Yorker magazine, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons perhaps 5-10 years down the road, Pentagon planners were preparing not just military strikes on that country, but nuclear strikes.

    In the July 10, 2006 issue, Hersh reported that after lengthy and heated internal military debates, the Pentagon brass had concluded that, for the time being, a nuclear attack on Iran would be “politically unacceptable.”

    But then on January 7, 2007, the Times of London reported that Israel had begun laying the groundwork for a series of nuclear strikes on the Iranian nuclear infrastructure — perhaps utilizing tactical nuclear weapons supplied by the United States, and perhaps too in conjunction with American forces.

    If all that were not worrisome enough, in a CNN presidential debate on June 5, 2007, no less than four of the Republican presidential candidates indicated that to forestall a nuclear Iran, they would consider launching an American nuclear first strike against Iran.

    But that all took place during the last Administration, right? Right. But in the press conference announcing the Obama Nuclear Posture Review on April 6, 2010, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, asked directly about “No First Use,” said that the Administration was unwilling to “limit ourselves so explicitly.”

    And when asked directly about Iran and North Korea, he said that despite the limitations on American nuclear employment doctrines in the new document, with regard to those two states in particular, “all options are on the table.” Live on C-Span. Three separate times.

    Accident. Miscalculation. Madness. The creators of Countdown to Zero are quite correct in asserting that these contemporary nuclear perils are quite real, and, indeed, that they could come to pass today “at any moment.”

    But all the nine nuclear-armed nations must also embrace the principle that nuclear weapons can serve no purpose other than to deter the use of nuclear weapons by others (a purpose that will disappear if, someday, we can achieve at last universal nuclear disarmament).

    The nuclear-armed nations cannot continue to conjure contingencies for employing nuclear weapons on any hypothetical field of battle, or to fantasize that starting a nuclear war could ever serve either their own national interests or the interests of the human community.

    If they do continue to do so, then we may just be on a countdown not to nuclear zero, but to something else nuclear entirely.

    After all, said President Kennedy, in the very next sentence he uttered after his “nuclear Damocles” at the United Nations on September 25, 1961, “The weapons of war must be abolished, before they abolish us.”

  • Countdown to Zero: Your Role in Getting There

    In the Nuclear Age, the potential exists to end civilization and destroy complex life on Earth.  In the 20th century, we moved from homicide to genocide to the potential for omnicide – the death of all.

    A new documentary film, Countdown to Zero, by the producers of An Inconvenient Truth, stresses one core principle of the Nuclear Age: The only safe number of nuclear weapons in the world is zero.  Nuclear weapons do not make us safer; they leave us standing on the precipice of nuclear catastrophe.

    What is still needed, however, is a sense of urgency and a plan to get from where we are, in a world with some 20,000 nuclear weapons, to zero.  

    President Obama, who favors a world without nuclear weapons, says, “This goal will not be reached quickly – perhaps not in my lifetime.”  Secretary of State Clinton has says that the goal may be reached “in some century.”  

    In the meantime, the US continues to rely upon nuclear weapons for its security and continues to spend more than $50 billion annually on its nuclear weapons program, including modernizing its nuclear arsenal.  The US plans to spend $80 billion on improving the US nuclear weapons infrastructure over the next decade and $100 billion on improving nuclear weapons delivery vehicles.  That does not seem like a serious path to zero.  It seems instead like a path for maintaining nuclear “superiority.”

    The problem with nuclear weapons is not just that terrorists or rogue states may acquire and use them.  The problem is that any state has nuclear weapons, including the nine states that currently do: US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.   Nuclear weapons in any hands, including our own, pose a significant threat to humanity.

    A plan to get to zero nuclear weapons will require negotiations on a new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.  Such good faith negotiations are a requirement of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  Other indicators that the US is serious about achieving zero nuclear weapons would include:

    1. Ceasing to provide special favorable treatment to parties outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), such as the US-India Nuclear deal.
    2. Ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and urging other countries to do so, so that the treaty may enter into force.
    3. Stopping to press for strategic advantage – weapons modernization, missile defenses, space weaponization, global strike force, etc.
    4. Recognizing publicly the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal as a starting point for achieving a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone in the Middle East.
    5. Taking all nuclear weapons off a quick-launch or launch-on-warning posture.
    6. Adopting a policy of No First Use of nuclear weapons, with no exceptions, changing the current policy of reserving the right to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states not in compliance with the NPT.

    Getting to zero will require US leadership and a sense of urgency.  How is that to happen?  In the way any significant change has always occurred; it will require the people to lead their leaders.  That means that each of us has a role to play.

    We can start by supporting ratification of New START, the new agreement between the US and Russia, lowering the number of nuclear weapons on each side to 1,550 each.  This is a step in the right direction.  It is a necessary step, but not sufficient. 

    Here are three steps you can take today to become part of the ongoing solution:

    First, educate yourself.  Sign up at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s website, www.wagingpeace.org, to receive our free monthly newsletter, The Sunflower.

    Second, take action.  Go to www.wagingpeace.org/goto/action to participate in the Foundation’s Action Alert Network.

    Third, educate others.  Speak out and be a force for ending complacency on this most critical of all issues confronting humanity.  Encourage others to see Countdown to Zero and to also sign up for The Sunflower and the Action Alert Network at www.wagingpeace.org. 

  • Zero Nuclear Weapons for a Sane and Sustainable World

    This is a transcript of the 2010 Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future, delivered by Max Kampelman on February 25, 2010 at Santa Barbara City College.

    It will take time, patience, pain and good fortune, but our welfare as human beings, indeed the survival for many, must be based on more than the threat of nuclear retaliation.  A balance of nuclear terror is not an adequate basis for our survival as human beings or as a country, or for our country’s strategic policy, although it did recently serve to permit the United States and Russia to substantially reduce the number of our strategic nuclear weapons.  What does remain and cannot be ignored, however, is the existence of active rogue and terrorist forces in the world seeking nuclear capabilities for their dangerous purposes.  I am convinced that zero nuclear weapons, urged by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and others, must be our immediate civilized goal.

    Where are we heading?  Are democracy and liberty our human destiny, as suggested by Francis Fukiyama?  Or do we face an inevitable violent clash of civilizations on perhaps a worldwide scale, as suggested by Samuel Huntington?  

    Let me point out that during my childhood, one lifetime, strange as it may appear to the young among us, there were no vitamin tablets, no antibiotics, no televisions, no dial telephones, no refrigerators, no FM radios, no synthetic fibers, no dishwashers, no electric blankets, no airmail, no transatlantic airlines, no instant coffee, no Xerox, no air conditioning, no frozen foods, no contact lenses, no birth control pills, no ballpoint pens, no transistors.  The list can go on.

    In my lifetime, medical knowledge available to physicians has increased perhaps more than tenfold.  I am told that more than 80 percent of all scientists who ever lived are alive today.  The average life span of the human being keeps steadily increasing.  We now have complicated computers, new materials, new biotechnological processes and more, which are altering every phase of our lives, deaths, and even reproduction.  

    We are living in a period of information power with the telefax, electronic mail, the super computer, high definition television, the laser printer, the cellular phone, the optical disc, video conferences, the satellite dish – instruments which still appear to my eyes to be near miracles.  No generation since the beginning of the human race has experienced or absorbed so much change so rapidly – and it is probably only the beginning.  As an indication of that, more than 100,000 scientific journals annually publish the flood of new knowledge that pours out of the world’s laboratories.

    These developments are stretching our minds and our grasp of reality to the outermost dimensions of our capacity to understand them.  Moreover, as we look ahead we must agree that we have only the minutest glimpse of what our universe really is.  We also barely understand the human brain and its energy; and the endless horizons of space and the mysteries found in the great depths of our seas are still virtually unknown to us.  Our science today is indeed still a drop, and our ignorance remains an ocean.

    It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention.  I suggest the corollary is also true; invention is the mother of necessity.  Technology and communication are necessitating basic changes in our lives.  Information has become more accessible in all parts of our globe, putting authoritarian governments at a serious disadvantage.  The world is very much smaller.  There is no escaping the fact that the sound of a whisper or a whimper in one part of the world can immediately be heard in all parts of the world – and consequences follow.  And yet, the world body politic has not kept pace with the world of scientific and technological achievements.  Just as the individual human body must adjust to the climate in which it lives, so is it necessary for governments and administrations to examine the atmosphere in which they live as new directions and changes become apparent.

    It is important for the human race to seek security without associating it with destruction.  Nuclear terror is not an adequate foundation for strategic policy.  President Obama has made that clear during his political campaign and in his later appearances at the United Nations where he and President Medvedev of Russia called for zero nuclear weapons.

    It is increasingly evident that the developing constructive relationship between the United States and Russia should realistically reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons.  Indeed it provides the opportunity for more than prudent and even deep reductions.  The developing constructive relationship between the United States and Russia permits both of us to lead the world toward an enforceable United Nations General Assembly agreement that the development and possession of nuclear weapons is considered to be an international punishable crime.  The UN Security Council should then be charged by the UN General Assembly with the responsibility to eliminate nuclear cheating.  This could be accomplished by the creation of a UN Bank to purchase all active nuclear military materials and convert that material into civilian nuclear power for energy starved areas.  Violations of zero should result in political, economic and social world isolation.  

    The task of the UN General Assembly is to establish a civilized “ought” for the world and the task of the UN Security Council is to create the machinery of civilization necessary to achieve the goal of zero, to prevent cheating and to provide for political, economic and social isolation as a price for cheating.  

    The United Nations has been understandably disappointing to many, but it is alive and should be utilized.  At the opening session that created the United Nations, President Truman welcomed its presence in the United States, and in his formal greeting called for the abolition of nuclear weapons on behalf of the United States government.  He greeted the delegates from around the world and said that “there is nothing more urgent confronting the people of all nations than the banning of all nuclear weapons under a foolproof system of international control.”  It is time to remember that goal.

    It is time once again for the United States to lead the world towards that goal and sanity.  It is also time to achieve that goal of zero and to demonstrate that the United Nations is alive, that its goals are civilized and clear and that it can begin to earn civilized respect.  

    President Obama recently reminded us of the historic Truman message to the United Nations.  He was joined by our Russian colleague, President Medvedev, as they both declared a commitment to a nuclear free world.  In addressing the UN delegates from around the world, our President said: “there is nothing more urgent confronting the people of all nations than the banning of all nuclear weapons under an international set of agreements. . . .”

    The President’s message is clear.  And yet we all appreciate that until that zero goal is reached, problems must be met and resolved.  This reality should not be permitted to replace or postpone the goal we have set for ourselves as a nation.  I note this here because of understandable reactions by our highly trained and committed officials who are inclined to emphasize reductions in nuclear weapons more clearly than those of us who aspire and call for zero nuclear weapons.  

    The time for us to achieve our goal of zero is now!  

  • US Leadership for Global Zero

    US Leadership for Global Zero

    Barack Obama recognizes the importance for US and global security of achieving a world free of nuclear weapons. His election opens the door to US leadership to achieve the goal of zero nuclear weapons.

    He has promised: “I will make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of US nuclear policy.” He has also stated, “A world without nuclear weapons is profoundly in America’s interest and the world’s interest. It is our responsibility to make the commitment, and to do the hard work to make this vision a reality. That’s what I’ve done as a Senator and a candidate, and that’s what I’ll do as President.”

    All of us on our planet share in this responsibility. It is a responsibility to ourselves, to each other, and to future generations.

    The United States created and used nuclear weapons during World War II. They are the most powerful weapons ever created. A single nuclear weapon can destroy a city, as we know from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With today’s more powerful nuclear weapons, we can readily surmise that a few nuclear weapons could destroy a country, and a nuclear war could destroy civilization and threaten most life on the planet.

    Nuclear weapons are now in the arsenals of nine countries: the US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea.

    Humanity’s challenge is to control and eliminate these weapons globally. Nuclear weapons are illegal, immoral, impractical and costly. We must keep the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons clearly before us: Zero nuclear weapons. Zero is both the safest and most stable number of nuclear weapons. But how do we move from a world with 26,000 nuclear weapons to global zero?

    We need to let the new US President know that Americans and people throughout the globe seek his leadership on this issue, reversing past US policy that has relied upon nuclear weapons and threatened their first use. We must call upon President-elect Obama to make his intentions known to the world, taking the following five steps to forge a path to a world free of nuclear weapons.

    First, make an unambiguous commitment on behalf of the United States to global zero and seek this commitment from all other nuclear weapons states. This is the simplest and most direct of the five steps and can be accomplished in a major foreign policy address.

    Second, pledge that the US government will deemphasize the role of nuclear weapons in military policy by taking the weapons off high alert status and by committing to No First Use of nuclear weapons, and seeking this commitment from all other nuclear weapons states. This will demonstrate to the world that the US commitment is more than mere rhetoric.

    Third, negotiate with the Russians, as a matter of high priority, major reductions in nuclear arsenals. Reach an agreement to reduce our respective nuclear arsenals to under 1,000 nuclear weapons, deployed and in reserve, by the year 2010. This agreement will likely require the US to abandon its plans for deployment of its unworkable and provocative missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

    Fourth, launch a major global effort to assure control of all nuclear weapons and the fissile materials to construct new nuclear weapons. This will be necessary for gaining confidence that a nuclear weapons-free world is attainable, particularly as the current nuclear weapons states move to lower and lower levels.

    Fifth, use the convening power of the United States to bring together the nine nuclear weapons states to negotiate a new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention similar to the Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions, for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons. When the existing nuclear weapons states have reached agreement, the Nuclear Weapons Convention should be opened for signature and ratification of all the world’s countries.

    With strong US leadership, the kind that Barack Obama has pledged, a nuclear weapons-free world could be achieved by the year 2020, and this should be the goal of those seeking a more secure world. It still would be far from a perfect world, but it would be a great triumph for humanity. It would pave the way to building a more peaceful and secure future for all inhabitants of earth.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and a councilor on the World Future Council.