Transcript - What Are These Things Good For?
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NATALIE GOLDRING: I think it would be foolish to assume that we are no longer at risk from nuclear weapons. There are some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world today. The risk of nuclear weapons used through miscalculation, through accident, through theft and subsequent use are all issues that we should still be worried about.
MARK SOMMER: The Cold War is long over. But we still live at a time when vast submarine-based nuclear arsenals are targeted at the world’s major cities, ready to launch at a moment’s notice. But it didn’t have to be this way.
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MARK SOMMER: In the fall of 1986, at a summit meeting in Iceland between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, a major breakthrough very nearly occurred.
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__: It was the President himself meeting with Gorbachev who actually carried the negotiation forward. And it corresponded to Reagan’s idea about his legacy as President and what he thought he could do, and the horror he personally had of nuclear war.
__: They did talk, in general terms to be sure, but they really did talk about the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons, not just putting limits on them.
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MARK SOMMER: For the first time in its 60-year history, the arms race seemed poised to reverse itself. And the two leaders seemed ready to embrace the long cherished dream of altogether abolishing nuclear weapons.
BARRY BLECHMAN: George Schultz, Secretary Schultz says this was the biggest mistake of his life, not supporting Reagan and his desire to conclude this agreement with Gorbachev.
MARK SOMMER: In the end, it was President Reagan’s vision of an invisible shield in space to protect The United States from incoming missiles and Premier Gorbachev’s refusal to accept its development that derailed any chance of achieving this breakthrough.
RONALD REAGAN: …that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies.
DAN RATHER: …futuristic weapons to defend this country from incoming nuclear missiles…
CATHERINE KELLEHER: Kind of a plastic dome over The United States through which no missile could come.
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MARK SOMMER: But today, more than two decades later, a new movement, led not by peaceniks this time, but by hard-headed conservatives, is reviving proposals to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
JAMES GOODBY: We ought to be aiming towards zero operationally deployed nuclear weapons.
MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer. Today on A World of Possibilities, What Are These Things Good For: The Pragmatic Push to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons. On a planet armed with overkill, some of America’s most establishment voices are now seriously proposing the phased elimination of nuclear arms.
Two commentaries in The Wall Street Journal, signed by former Secretaries of State, George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, and recent conferences at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University, are setting a new agenda for a nuclear-free world. Stay with us as my guests and I revisit the promise that briefly came into view, then slipped through our fingers at Reykjavik. And we’ll weigh the odds of it ever happening again.
Barry Blechman is a former Clinton Administration National Security Advisor, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He tells us this is a whole new breed of no nukes advocates.
BARRY BLECHMAN: I quite deliberately used the phrase elimination rather than abolition. The abolitionists come to the conclusion that we should abolish nuclear weapons from a moral basis. And there are certainly very strong moral reasons why-- to think that the use of these weapons, particularly against cities, would be an immoral act, and therefore they should be abolished.
But the new wave is a more pragmatic one. It’s one that says, “We’re all threatened, all countries are threatened by proliferation.” I mean, if the Middle East had not one nuclear power, Israel, as it has now, but two, say, Israel and Iran, it’ll be a more dangerous place. And if it had ten nuclear powers, which is quite feasible over the next 20 years if nothing is done, then it would be an extremely dangerous place.
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So it’s more of a-- and to say nothing about the threat of a terrorist organization getting these weapons. So it’s more of a pragmatic basis for this new wave of support for eliminating nuclear weapons, or at least for governments to start thinking seriously about how you might do that. And I think there are ways in which they could be eliminated safely. As I say, it would have to be over a protracted period of time. I don't know if it’s ten years or twenty years or thirty. But over a period of time, I think it’s feasible to imagine the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
MARK SOMMER: Have we ever seen a major weapon, not just a tank or something that became obsolete, but a major, major weapon eliminated from national arsenals worldwide or region-wide? Region-wide we’ve seen it of course in Latin America, et cetera, where two countries that were looking into nuclear weapons, starting to develop them, decided not to do it. But have we seen anything in history that would bear any resemblance to what you’re suggesting?
BARRY BLECHMAN: Well, the thing-- We have seen many countries decide not to develop nuclear weapons or to abandon existing programs like South Africa and Libya most recently. But the thing that comes closest I think is lethal chemical weapons where we-- the great powers of the early part of the 20th Century, after the First World War, they continued to build chemical weapons, but they all decided that it would not be wise to use them, that their use would not be militarily useful and would cause, you know, needless suffering and deaths to their soldiers.
And so without agreement, they all refrained. And, you know, there then became protracted negotiations. And there was a treaty concluded in 19-- I forget-- in the 1990s to eliminate all lethal chemical weapons. And that is slowly being done. The United States is destroying its stocks under verification. There’s an international organization that verifies this. Russia is destroying its stocks of chemical weapons. There are-- Some countries remain holdouts from this regime, like Iran. But most countries are-- have signed and ratified the treaty and are busily engaged under supervised verification and destroying these weapons.
So again, it was the same kind of conclusion, that these weapons are not useful militarily. They do pose grave risks in terms of human suffering. So let’s get rid of them. And let’s develop the procedures and the international organizations to help us do it. So that’s one precedent.
MARK SOMMER: Very interesting. Back in the-- what was it?-- the 1980s, during the Reagan Administration, President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, at least they were reported to have come very close to deciding to eliminate nuclear weapons. And then they were pulled back from that. Were you anywhere near that event to be able to tell us exactly what happened there?
BARRY BLECHMAN: No, I’m a Democrat, so I was far away from the Reagan Administration. But I did-- of course I read a great deal about it. And apparently, it was the-- to the horror of all his aides, National Security advisors that Reagan reached this tentative agreement with Gorbachev. Reagan believed in it. Reagan believed the safest world is one in which every country had perfect defenses and no country had nuclear weapons.
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And George Schultz-- The reason why George Schultz’s spearheading this (there’s been a series of conferences at the Hoover Institute and these op-eds that have appeared in The Wall Street Journal) is Secretary Schultz says, this was the biggest mistake of his life, not supporting Reagan and his desire to conclude this agreement with Gorbachev. Nancy Reagan supports it. She wrote a letter to the Hoover Conference stating what a strong goal it was of her President and how she supports it. I believe Governor Schwarzenegger supported the goal as well at that Hoover meeting.
So there’s a lot of support for it coming from very conservative Republican circles, which gives one hope that there might be a kind of bipartisan consensus formed in this country that we should seek such an agreement and initiate with other countries’ efforts to negotiate nuclear disarmament.
MARK SOMMER: Do you see any kinds of ironies here? In other words, has it sometimes proven before that those who have almost made their credentials by opposing a policy are in the best position to be able to enact it when they decide the time is right?
BARRY BLECHMAN: That’s certainly often been the case, with Nixon’s trip to China being a most obvious example.
MARK SOMMER: Indeed.
BARRY BLECHMAN: There’s--- There are several projects going on. The Hoover Project is aimed at supporting what they call interim measures, which would help make elimination feasible. There’s a project called the Nuclear Compact, which is just getting started, which will have, not only massive public and political campaign in favor of this, but the part that I’m particularly working on is the part which will establish the analytic base for an elimination treaty. It will be looking at, well, what would the verification regime have to look like? What would you do about civilian nuclear materials to prevent them from being diverted to weapons use? What would the transition look like?
The risks involved in sitting down to negotiate an elimination treaty and to begin to implement one against the risks of a highly proliferated world and the danger of terrorist organization getting these weapons-- And to me, it’s simple, where the greater risk is. And we hope to be able to convince many other people of that as well.
MARK SOMMER: Barry Blechman, a former National Security official and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. When we return from the break, we’ll look at changing trends in nuclear threats, from the mad world of mutually assured destruction to the pursuit of invisible missile shields, to the specter of nuclear terrorism and stolen weapons.
__: I think there’s a stronger possibility now we could lose fairly easily ten million people, just by one nuclear bomb.
MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities, made possible with support from the Ploughshares Fund. Stay with us.
ANNOUNCER: This is A World of Possibilities. We invite you to visit our website and explore the audio archives, read about our guests and subscribe to the podcast. Find us at AWorldOfPossibilities.com.
MARK SOMMER: Those of us who great up during the Cold War possess a strange, arcane vocabulary — B-52s, ICBMs, MRVs, MX, Peacekeeper, SALT, START, NSDI. These are all real or once planned weapons systems or treaties. But after tens of billions of dollars, one of them, the missile shield, still exists largely just in the minds of its supporters and the ledgers of The Pentagon budget.
Known to many as Star Wars, it’s a network of space-based lasers and other interceptor missiles that would neutralize incoming attacks, just as in the classic ‘80s videogame, Missile Command.
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Catherine Kelleher was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton. She’s also professor emeritus of strategic research at the Naval War College and senior fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University. We’ll also be hearing from Ambassador James Goodby, former U.S. negotiator and senior research fellow at MIT.
MARK SOMMER: Why was Ronald Reagan so enamored of the strategic defense initiative?
CATHERINE KELLEHER: Well, he had been very much taken, I think, by the arguments that were put to him by Edward Teller, who was himself one of the fathers of the nuclear revolution, you know, involved in Los Alamos and the initial work on atomic weapons, and then really the-- probably the single greatest proponent of the hydrogen bomb development by The United States and the head one of the nuclear laboratories, Lawrence Livermore in California.
Edward Teller was definitely a very good proponent of SDI, and one who held up a vision to-- that President Reagan found extremely appealing of a system that would protect all populations in The United States from the threat of an accident or even a purposive launch of missiles. And so much of that indeed in the presidential campaign of 1984, there were marvelous ads that showed kind of a plastic dome over The United States through which no missile could come.
Incidentally, many people believe that such a dome exists, such a system exists, even today, that we have that kind of protection from attack, even though of course it’s not true.
MARK SOMMER: It is very interesting that many observers at the time said, “Well, this strategic defense initiative, this whole notion of a missile shield, will collapse of its own accord in short order because it is so completely impractical, so outrageously expensive. It will never work.” But we find even-- what?-- more than 20 years later, that it is a serious bone of contention between Russia and The United States, for a much smaller system to be deployed in Eastern Europe. So it remains a source of great irritation between the two countries, without being very strategically practical.
CATHERINE KELLEHER: And even-- and I think this was true at the time of Reykjavik and is equally true of the system proposed for Central Europe-- without the technology really being fully tested, or indeed necessarily available for the kinds of tasks that need to be done. In the case of the Central and East European deployment, the actual missile, the interceptor missile that is being talked about won’t even be available for testing until well into 2010, and perhaps even 2011. And this is-- So we are essentially insisting on a system that we don’t have as yet. We’re insisting on our right to deploy it because the system is in defense of The United States. It’s not even in defense necessarily of the European countries in which it will be based.
MARK SOMMER: It’s interesting. Barry Blechman, a nuclear analyst, a long‑time nuclear analyst, asked the question, what are these things good for? And he said, “That’s the question that’s being asked by many of these very(?) establishment figures. It’s, like, they’re not at the center of diplomacy anymore, or relationships. There are so many other things on people's plates. And maybe that’s a time when you can ask that question and get an answer, “Well, not much,” because-- And it doesn’t come from a utopian point of view. It comes from a very pragmatic point of view. They’re expensive. They’re dangerous. They’re unhealthy. And they’re not the chess piece of choice anymore.
JAMES GOODBY: Well, I wrote a paper in, I think it was 2003 with professor Sidney Drell from Stanford. And the title of that paper was, “What are Nuclear Weapons For?” It’s been reprinted by the Arms Control Association. And I think it’s on the Arms Control Association’s website, if you want to read that. That hasn’t answered, what are nuclear weapons for. And as you said, not much.
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The idea that I’ve been advancing-- and it’s included in that report-- is that we ought to be aiming towards zero operationally deployed nuclear weapons. We are currently under the treaty that George Bush the Second negotiated with Putin in 2002. We’re currently talking about 1,700 to 2,200 nuclear weapons operationally deployed by the year 2012. Now, I would argue that instead of 1,700 or 2,200, we actually could go down to zero operationally deployed nuclear warheads earlier than that, or at least by that time.
MARK SOMMER: The great fear during the Cold War was that there would be a so-called thermonuclear exchange what would kill hundreds of millions of people on both sides. Nowadays, it seems like the great fear that’s really motivating policymakers is not that, because they don’t see that really happening anymore, but, as you say, the outlaw nuclear terrorist operation or rogue state. And that’s a menace to-- of a different kind, not on the same scale, and yet more terrifying in some ways because it’s so-- you can’t create stability in a system that has that kind of wildcard. Is that right?
JAMES GOODBY: That is absolutely right. Deterrence has no effect on terrorists. And therefore, the idea that we need nuclear weapons as a deterrent no longer holds water. I think you can argue that there is a stronger possibility now that an American city would be struck by a nuclear weapon than was the case during the Cold War. We lost zero Americans and other people in Russia and so forth through nuclear weapons. I think there’s a stronger possibility now we could lose fairly easily ten million people, just by one nuclear bomb. And that’s what we have to worry about, because that, I think-- I think both parties, Democrats and Republicans, agree that that is probably the most serious threat we face today.
MARK SOMMER: Ambassador James Goodby is a veteran U.S. arms negotiator. Natalie Goldring is a senior fellow in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and a consultant to the U.N. Department of Disarmament Affairs.
NATALIE GOLDRING: No one knows what a terrorist group would do if it were to obtain one or more nuclear weapons. If they only had one, the question is whether they would use their only bargaining chip or whether they’d hang onto it and try and use it to get release of key prisoners or something along those lines. Again, no one knows what they would do.
But if a terrorist group wanted to have an enormous effect on the history of the world, they could use a nuclear weapon. And they could pretty readily, I think, still deliver a nuclear weapon to an American city, whether on a ship or by train or by car over the border from Canada or from Mexico. We’re extraordinary vulnerable in all of those areas. And we’re highly unlikely to be able to protect our country sufficiently to prevent every foreseeable attack.
What we can do (and I don't think we’ve done it very well so far) is the same thing you do when you try to childproof a house. You can’t childproof a house. You can buy time. You can protect the things that are either most important to you or most dangerous if someone else gets at them. And you can try and give yourself enough time to be able to react to whatever someone else does. The same principles hold. It’s ironic to talk about childproofing and terrorist-proofing in the same sentence.
MARK SOMMER: Oh, kids, terrorists, you know?
NATALIE GOLDRING: But the fact remains, you can’t make anything accident-proof or terror-proof. You can buy time. You can increase the likelihood that we know about people's activities and dangerous activities. But mostly what we can do is we can decrease the importance and the value of the symbolism of nuclear weapons. We can’t decrease the reality of the military power of these weapons, of the destructive power of these weapons.
What we can do is decrease the sort of psychological/social/political value of the weapons. What The United States has done for the last six decades is put nuclear weapons up on an altar. They’re the symbol. You’re part of the nuclear club. You belong at the adult table. You’re a real power, a world power if you have nuclear weapons. All of these things perpetuate a sense of the value of nuclear weapons.
I think Les Aspin had it right 15 years ago when he said nuclear weapons are the equalizer. But now we’re the equalizee. We’re the ones that would be easiest to use the nuclear weapons against to neutralize ourselves. So I think what we need to be doing is moving very, very quickly to get rid of the nuclear weapons in our arsenals and in convincing the other countries with whom we’ve had previous negotiations on these issues to do the same.
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CATHERINE KELLEHER: I think it turns on the assumption of who would in fact be moved to use a nuclear weapon without considering or having to consider the consequences of their action.
MARK SOMMER: Catherine Kelleher.
CATHERINE KELLEHER: And the argument very much made before 9/11 but definitely brought to the fore at 9/11 is that terrorist groups cannot be deterred in a way that states can. They have less to lose. They have an ideological commitment which suggests that the loss of life is not the worst outcome. Rather the loss of ideology would be. They are willing to take this risk because of promised rewards in another sphere, another world. This is a very idealistic argument in certain ways. I think that terrorists often have more to lose than kind(?) of(?) theory(?) would suggest.
But clearly the argument turns on the willingness of states to use weapons only if the threat of retaliation and the threat of loss of land or control or even their populations would not be significantly involved. I think it’s hard to imagine that at one time we talked about the acceptance of a death rate of 50 million citizens being, certainly ...(inaudible) but at least within the realm of the possible, if in return we would be able to launch a retaliatory strike against someone who had struck at us, namely in those days mostly assumed to be the Soviet Union.
I think that kind of thinking definitely no longer exists on the part of states. But it is still the case that states worry or are said to worry more about populations and their continued control over territory than terrorist groups ever would.
MARK SOMMER: Twenty-five years from now, where do you imagine it’s going to be?
CATHERINE KELLEHER: I think my imagination is informed by my hope. Mainly I hope that the elimination movement will in fact come to some political fruition. I participated in a number of studies through the National Academy for Sciences in which we’ve looked at the relative levels of risk involved in stockpiles as low as perhaps 200 warheads, quite a contrast to the many thousands we have now.
The question really is, it will take political leadership and it will take political will to achieve this. And the kind of political leadership that, say, a Gorbachev or even a Reagan is able to exercise comes around fairly infrequently. One hopes that we have some of that leadership in our future because we surely need it.
MARK SOMMER: If you’d like to delve deeper into this topic, some three hours of full-length conversations with today’s guests are available online at AWorldOfPossibilities.com. This program is underwritten by the Ploughshares Fund and distributed by the WFMT Radio Network. I’m Mark Sommer.
When we return, we’ll ask which, if any leaders will have the courage and influence to take us towards a world free of nuclear weapons. Stay with us.
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ANNOUNCER: This is A World of Possibilities. If you wish to purchase a CD of this program, please write to information@aworldofpossibilities.com. This is the WFMT Radio Network.
MARK SOMMER: The movement to ban the bomb has been around since nukes were first invented. But their elimination fell off the agenda years ago, largely forgotten with the end of the Cold War. A radical rethinking of the arms race almost took root at Reykjavik, but could it happen again? The United States has yet even to ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty it signed back in the Clinton years. What then gives us any reason for hope?
In pursuit of answers, I sat down for a conversation with Jayantha Dhanapala, a former top U.N. disarmament official, and asked him to assess the prospects for a breakthrough.
JAYANTHA DHANAPALA: From the bosom, as it were, of the nuclear weapon state, most committed to nuclear weapons, The United States. Now you are seeing a change. It is a little like the way that Nixon made the breakthrough with China. We had many, many organizations and individuals talking about the need for détente between the two great countries, China and The United States. But until Nixon, who was in the right wing of the Republican Party, made the breakthrough, nothing actually happened.
So perhaps it takes people with the credibility that these four gentleman have to be able to influence the U.S. administration that there is something viable in the path that they suggest and that it is well worth going down.
We need to sometimes wait for the right moment in history for important things to take place. It is not always that you have people, you know, coming together like this together with changes of circumstance like the new President’s election in The United States and the new president election in Russia. So this co-location(?) of historical circumstances are unique. We’ve had, you know-- We’ve had to wait a long time before we saw the crumbling of the Apartheid regime. But it finally happened. And it is not possible to blame the anti-Apartheid movements all over the world for not having had that success earlier. There are sometimes moments in the-- I mean, Shakespeare said this very well-- the tide in the affairs of men, and you have to catch it at its, you know, crest and hope that it works.
MARK SOMMER: Shakespeare also said, “Ripeness is all.” And I wonder whether this is simply that sort of moment. It also occurs to me and-- In my earlier comments, I did not in any sense mean to diminish the efforts that people have made over the years. Because I think those could be said to have kept alive the idea, and to have allowed it to build. It does seem to be an interesting combination, though, of those who come at the issue initially from a moral stance and then those who do it in a very pragmatic, political stance, not so much because they think nuclear weapons are abhorrent in themselves, but because they see them, as Barry Blechman put it, a national security expert-- He said, “What good are these things for?” I mean, what are these things good for anymore? So it’s-- Because they can’t be used for war. It’s not that they don’t think war is something you sometimes have to do. It’s that these don’t work anymore. So it’s a non-idealist, a non-utopian--
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JAYANTHA DHANAPALA: Well here, let me dispute what you say. Because some of the weapons that are now being contemplated, and the nuclear doctrines that are now being enunciated actually postulate the use of weapons. Take the reliable replacement warhead for which Bush has made provision in the current budget of three trillion dollars that he has presented to Congress. There is provision there to build a new nuclear warhead which can actually be used. There is provision for a bunker buster which can be used as a nuclear weapon to penetrate bunkers where they think that the enemy has hidden weapons that should be destroyed.
Then if you take the nuclear posture review of the Bush Administration, there is there provision for the preemptive use of nuclear weapons. And that again is a very dangerous thing. Because it’s not a question of a nuclear exchange, where you, you know, have a deterrent and a second strike capability, somebody else hits you with a nuclear weapon. Here, you are actually talking about using nuclear weapons in a preemptive manner, and also using it against countries who may have not nuclear weapons, but who may only have a conventional weapon.
So the whole ballgame has changed. There was, in fact, an unwritten taboo with regard to the use of nuclear weapons that had existed since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And that is why we’ve not had a nuclear weapon used, although there have been near misses and accidents galore. And the Cuban missile crisis is one example of how close we were to a nuclear holocaust.
But there has-- this, I think-- Visceral reluctance and abhorrence of the use of the weapon has held people back. But that doesn’t seem to apply any longer, because as I said, the nuclear posture review of the Bush Administration and the actual manufacture of weapons for use is actually frightening.
MARK SOMMER: So much then, in your view, really depends on who is elected president in The United States, and then whether that individual has sufficient political capital to be able to deal with what one could expect to be some resistance, even domestically.
JAYANTHA DHANAPALA: Well, there will always be lobbying groups, special interest groups in the military-industrial complex and among hawkish elements who will object to it, going back to President Eisenhower whose speech in 1961 on the military-industrial complex was a very perceptive analysis, from a military person, as to the influence and the power of this lobby.
But it takes courage and leadership and vision for a new leader to be able to go ahead. And it has been done before in other areas, in economics and in social affairs and in civil rights movement. It can be done in disarmament, which involves the survival of the human species.
MARK SOMMER: You know, there was a great deal of optimism in many quarters at the very end of the post-Cold War-- of the Cold War era, the early years afterwards, that we would be able to create a different order and a different way of--
JAYANTHA DHANAPALA: --new world order. That is what George Bush [simultaneous conversation]--
MARK SOMMER: Well, I was going to avoid that phrase.
JAYANTHA DHANAPALA: Well, a brave new world then if you go back to Aldous Huxley.
MARK SOMMER: I think we’d like-- In any case, it didn’t occur then. And today, there are rather more tensions. Some of them are economic. They don’t seem to have gone towards, you know, brandishing, you know, weapons. As you look down, you know, the line of future history, it’s clear that utopia doesn’t ever quite arrive. But are we likely to muddle through this, even this period of increasing tension again without actually-- with the words not going towards war and with a certain kind of pragmatic, even conservative movement towards the elimination of these weapons?
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JAYANTHA DHANAPALA: Well, to all those who are doomsday predictors and who look upon the headlines in the newspapers and the pictures appearing on their television screens, it’s useful to look at the actual figures with regard to conflicts. There has actually been a decline in conflicts that are taking place in the world. There was a human security report published by professor Andrew Mack and his team who are here in Vancouver. And they have indicated that there has been an actual decline in civilian deaths over the last few years, and decreasing incidents of violence.
Now what is in fact happening is that the number of wars, the changes of wars are important. It’s no longer inter-state wars. There are very few inter-state wars going on in the world, but a lot of them, inter-state wars between non-state actors and governments usually. And that is what is causing some of the unrest.
We haven’t had a third world war fortunately since 1945. Europe has been at peace, except for the Balkan wars. We’ve had, of course, in the past, during the Cold War, proxy wars. Mercifully that is over. We’ve had huge advances in health. And we are able today, because of international cooperation and globalization, to control pandemics like SARS and the bird flu, and so on. We have eliminated smallpox.
So there are lot of plus factors that we tend to perhaps ignore in our preoccupation with the bad things that unfortunately take place. I am confident about the innate ingenuity of humankind to be able to rise above the challenges that are confronting us, whether they are in the field of nuclear weapons, or whether they are in the field of climate change.
MARK SOMMER: Jayantha Dhanapala, a former top U.N. disarmament official. When we return, we’ll look ahead to what it will actually take to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Stay with us.
ANNOUNCER: You’re listening to A World of Possibilities. Learn more about nuclear elimination by exploring a wealth of bonus materials online, at AWorldOfPossibilities.com.
MARK SOMMER: We return now to our conversation with Natalie Goldring, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service.
So when there is talk coming for conservative establishment types like George Schultz and various defense secretaries of past administrations calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons, has that actually bubbled up into the conversation in Congress and the executive branch?
NATALIE GOLDRING: To some extent, it has. I think that folks in Congress and the executive branch tend to be preoccupied with that day or that week’s issues, as opposed to what are seen as longer-term issues regarding nuclear weapons. Here I take my counsel from people like former Senator Sam Nunn who say, if we wake up the morning after what(?) is(?) it(?) we would have wished we had done the day before. In other words, we still need to look at the long-term. If we find that a nuclear weapon has been used on-- in The United States, or in fact anywhere else in the world, that’s going to prompt a reevaluation of our policy, our perspective, and our approach. We should be undertaking that reevaluation now, not after the tragedy has occurred.
MARK SOMMER: In the 1980s, in the Administration of Ronald Reagan, there was a great fear of an actual major nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and The United States. There were even scenarios that were rolled out by Physicians For Social Responsibility in a famous roadshow around the country of what major attacks on American cities and Soviet cities would look like. That scenario seems less and less likely, despite the fact that there’s a new chill in Russian/American relations. Has it truly receded into past history? It’s not going to come back, that particular nightmare?
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NATALIE GOLDRING: I think it would be foolish to assume that we’re no longer at risk from nuclear weapons. There are some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world today. Virtually all of them are controlled by either The United States or Russia. Ours tend to be under closer control than the Russians’. The risk of nuclear weapons use through miscalculation, through accident, through theft and subsequent use are all issues that we should still be worried about.
MARK SOMMER: Final question — we seem to have trends going in a couple of different directions here in relation to nuclear weapons. On the one hand, there is the distinct possibility of really massive proliferation, breaking out of the non-proliferation regime altogether, with a whole host of countries entering in, especially if Iran gets nuclear weapons, if Pakistan is allowed to proliferate, et cetera.
On the other hand, you have these-- and perhaps for that very reason, you have conservative establishment types pushing for elimination. If you look ten years, fifteen years down the line, are we likely to see what the bumper stickers call nuclear weapons, rust in peace? Or are we likely to see nuclear weapons revived as a prime currency of power in global politics?
NATALIE GOLDRING: Well, I don’t claim a lot of ability to read crystal balls and predict the future. Unfortunately however, I think the safest prediction is that ten to fifteen years from now, we will probably still have nuclear weapons in great quantity, quantity measured in thousands around the world. I hope that The United States and Russia will continue to bring down their arsenals dramatically. I hope we will choose to destroy those weapons rather than simply storing them for possible reuse, which makes them vulnerable to theft.
But this is going to take a global effort. It can’t simply be done in The United States. It can’t simply be done in Russia. It’s going to take world pressure on world leaders to get rid of nuclear weapons, to change the currency with which they are now viewed in the sense that they’re seen as bargaining chips, they’re seen as providing a place at the table.
My hope would be that over the course of the next decade, we could change that culture. We could change the way that nuclear weapons are thought of, and that that would help lead us to disarmament. I also hope that political leadership in The United States takes a different tack, and that we find ourselves looking at nuclear abolition, getting rid of nuclear weapons, getting rid of the deployment of these weapons, the production of these weapons, the stockpiling of these weapons as U.S. policy. That would do more for our credibility around the world on this issue than any other thing we could do.
In the short-term, we can take immediate steps that will help our security. We can take nuclear weapons off missiles. We can remove the warheads, the part that actually explodes, from their delivery systems, and we can buy time. We can buy time for rational thought before these weapons are used. We can safeguard the weapons we have. We can destroy as many as possible, as quickly as possible. And we can encourage Russia, China, and the other nuclear weapon states to do the same thing.
Those are actions we could take tomorrow. We don’t need to wait for changes in government anywhere in the world to accomplish that. We could do it now.
MARK SOMMER: Does the fact that not a single nuclear weapon has been used in warfare since Hiroshima and Nagasaki now 60 years or more, does that give you any sense of hope or confidence?
NATALIE GOLDRING: No. I wish it were otherwise. Unfortunately, I can’t separate out how much of the last 60 years has been luck and how much has been skill. And I don’t want my life, the lives of my children, the lives of their children to depend on our continuing to be lucky in that manner. It’s too great a risk to take.
Jonathan Schell was right — it really is the fate of the Earth. What I’ve talked about is highly pessimistic. I’ve tried to be realistic, and I’m afraid sometimes that brings out the pessimism in me. But we have seen positive developments. The fact that someone like Sam Nunn is willing to talk about getting rid of nuclear weapons is a huge step forward. And we need to capitalize on that. It would of course be better if the generals and admirals endorsed these positions before they retire, rather than afterwards. But we still need to work on that.
The key point I think for your listeners is that there’s a role for everyone to play in this, whether you’re talking to a local-- your member of Congress about his or her positions on the comprehensive test ban treaty or in renewing the START treaty or in negotiating for nuclear disarmament, or whether you’re getting involved at a national or international level. You have a role to play.
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People in the past have argued that these issues should be left to the experts, that they’re just too tough for people to understand. I think anyone can understand the enormous power of nuclear weapons, the fact that a few weapons could destroy any city in the world and keep it from being habitable for decades afterwards, and the enormous human cost that we bear by continuing to produce these weapons and deploy them, even if they’re never again used in wartime.
And everyone has a responsibility to get involved, because otherwise the assumption is that you think we’re doing okay. So if you think that we need to change the situation, your responsibility is to find a way to get involved with these issues and to bring about change, whether it’s at the local political level or at the international level.
MARK SOMMER: Thank you Natalie so much for this conversation.
NATALIE GOLDRING: Now, as always, it’s been a pleasure.
MARK SOMMER: Natalie Goldring, senior fellow at Georgetown University.
I still recall my astonishment when I heard the news out of Reykjavik one fall day in 1986. It struck me as if, rather than Orson Welles stunning false news report announcing war of the worlds, we suddenly had peace of the worlds. Could it be true? How could it happen on Ronald Reagan’s watch?
Within hours, the news of a breakthrough was retracted. The horse that had finally escaped captivity had been lassoed and dragged back to its stall. The world went back to business as usual. Another day, another nuke.
So it’s all the more surprising to find two decades later some of the very worthies(?) whom we thought at the time were most opposed to nuclear reductions are now advocating the complete elimination of them. It wouldn’t be the first time those who stand foursquare against changing policies themselves eventually become the agents of that very change.
However it has to happen, may it happen soon before the bombs start to spread into hands that can’t be deterred by diplomacy or threats of retaliation.
I’m Mark Sommer, and this has been A World of Possibilities. Thanks for listening.
ANNOUNCER: You’ve been listening to A World of Possibilities with host and executive producer Mark Sommer. The production engineers are Mike Schwartz and Matt Fiddler. Associate producer, Naima Didi with additional help from Stacy Winslow. Senior producer, Greg McVicker. Music courtesy of MCA, Warner Brothers, Astralwerks, A&M, Hannibal Music, Real World Music, and Putumayo World Music. Support for this program was providing by the Ploughshares Fund. Find us online at AWorldOfPossibilities.com. This is the WFMT Radio Network.
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