Those steps, as well as the administration’s 25-percent increase in spending for global nonproliferation activities (to $2.7-billion in the 2011 budget request), are entirely sensible. For example, Mexico agreed to convert a research reactor from highly enriched uranium (usable in bombs) to lower-enriched uranium (not usable) Ukraine agreed to eliminate its stocks of highly enriched uranium within two years the United States and Russia recommitted to eliminate an excess stock of plutonium and so on.
But it was notable primarily not for its progress toward nuclear zero, but for actions to reduce the risks of nuclear theft, accident, and terrorism. The much-heralded nuclear-security summit in April, in Washington, was worthwhile. Those steps are not insignificant, but they have a good deal of continuity with past policy, and still leave us very far from nuclear zero. Will President Obama really pursue such an idea? He gave an inspiring speech in Prague early in his first year in office, agreed to modest cuts in deployed forces with Russia in the New Start Treaty, and modestly lowered the profile of nuclear weapons in the April 2010 Nuclear Posture Review Report. The current movement is notable too in that it has a serious strategy for moving forward-not at some distant time when miraculous new inventions might make nukes obsolete, but by later this decade, even if it would take at least another decade to put a treaty into effect.
But the pace of the nonproliferation movement has accelerated in recent years. Of course, it also evolved from earlier nonproliferation efforts, including the 1996 report of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. But Global Zero draws inspiration from the recent grass-roots effort to craft a land-mine treaty, and from the work of several influential philanthropists in global antipoverty campaigns. Ideas about eliminating the bomb are as old as the bomb itself. The organization’s goal is to rid the world of nuclear weapons by 2030 through a multilateral, universal, verifiable process, with negotiations on the Global Zero treaty beginning by 2019. A group of 100 signatories (not including the above four) established Global Zero in Paris in December 2008. It was established in the wake of a January 2007 newspaper column by George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn advocating a nuclear-free world. But they believe that the vision needs to be shared, in a vibrant, powerful way.Ī movement known as Global Zero has gained in strength to attempt just that. They acknowledge that a nuclear-weapons-free world remains a vision, not immediately attainable and perhaps not achievable within the lifetimes of most contemporary policy makers. But the president of the United States and a number of key foreign-policy dignitaries are now on record saying yes. Can mankind uninvent the nuclear bomb, and rid the world of the greatest military threat to the human species and the survival of the planet ever created?
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