The Old and New Shapes of Nuclear Danger

Posted 12 11 2007 2:17PM

The Nation --"After I became an American citizen, the thing that standsout so clearly in my mind is the Reagan/Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik,"California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "Theleaders of the two most powerful nations on earth were actuallydiscussing the elimination of nuclear weapons. Such a breathtakingpossibility. I still remember the thrill of it."

The occasion was a conference at the Hoover Institution atStanford University, led by the four authors of an article that appearedin the Wall Street Journal last January. It called for "A WorldFree of Nuclear Weapons," as championed by Reagan and Gorbachev atReykjavik, and its authors were George Shultz, Secretary of Stateunder Ronald Reagan (Shultz was present at Reykjavik); William Perry,Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton; Henry Kissinger, Secretary ofState under Richard Nixon; and former Senator Sam Nunn--fourarchbishops of the cold war nuclear priesthood, most of whom until nowhave dismissed the idea of nuclear abolition as undiscussably utopianand naïve. The four cited proliferation and the terrorist danger,and warned that the world is entering "a new nuclear era that will bemore precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically costlythan Cold War deterrence." Significantly, they invoked moral aswell as practical reasons for their proposal, approvingly quotingReagan's opinion that nuclear weapons are "totally irrational,totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive oflife on earth and civilization." The conference at Hoover was the secondin a series convened to explore concrete pathways to the goal ofabolition. The group will eventually publish a book and hold aninternational conference to present their findings.

As Schwarzenegger self-deprecatingly observed, he knows moreabout weight lifting than throw-weights; yet he went on to speakcompellingly of the new nuclear dangers. (It is a perverse pleasureto be able to quote Schwarzenegger, Shultz, Kissinger, Perry, Nunn andReagan approvingly in a single article in The Nation, whichnormally does not keep company of this kind. The hopeful aspect may bethat in our fractious time there are still some issues that can recallus to our common humanity.) And not only former weight lifters andnuclear priests but anyone who reads a newspaper can see thatnuclear dangers are spreading like the brush fires that were sweepingthrough Southern California as the conference met. The UnitedStates has, of course, got itself stuck in Iraq in pursuit of weapons ofmass destruction and facilities for making them, including nuclear ones.In Iran the government is racing to produce nuclear powerfuels that, with a few extra touches, could become nuclear weaponsmaterials. To halt this development, many inside and outsidethe Bush Administration have favored a military attack onIran, though a recent National Intelligence Estimate has declared thatwhile Iran once had an active nuclear weapons program, it was suspendedin 2003.

The Pentagon has even developed plans for nuclearstrikes against Iran as well as other possible proliferators. Innuclear-armed Pakistan, the state is in crisis and the danger is risingthat some of its nuclear bombs or materials will fall into hands evenmore irresponsible than those currently holding them. A recent op-ed inthe New York Times by liberal hawk Michael O'Hanlon andneoconservative Frederick Kagan suggested that the United Statesmight intervene militarily in Pakistan. The mission would be to takecontrol of the country's nuclear arsenal and help "hold the country'scenter." (If, in a neoconservative dream-come-true, the United Statesassailed both Iran and Pakistan, it would be at warsimultaneously in four contiguous Islamic countries: Iraq,Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.)

Waves of fear are rippling across the Middle East and beyond fromthese crises and wars. In this year alone, twelve othernations in the Middle East have announced their interest inacquiring nuclear energy. Israel, of course, has been anuclear power since about 1967, and in a still mysterious episode, onSeptember 6 it bombed a facility in Syria that allegedly was part of anuclear program assisted by North Korea, which tested its first nuclearweapon last year. Although North Korea has declared areadiness to give up its arsenal, no one knows if or when it willactually do so. Nor have the cold war nuclear powers surrendered theirarsenals; on the contrary, they are retooling and retargeting them atthe proliferators. The United States has founded an Air Force commandcalled Global Strike Task Force, which enables it to target "any darkcorner of the world" with conventional or nuclear munitions. Britain andFrance have announced similar policies. Thus, from Pyongyang to Tehranto Tel Aviv to Washington, a new global struggle has been born, matchingmany existing nuclear powers against aspiring nuclear powers.

Is there any chance that the abolition initiative will be takenup not only by people retired from power but by those who are in poweror seek it, such as the current crop of presidential candidates? Thereare some hopeful signs. The nuclear question, an exile from discussionsince the end of the cold war, has begun to seep in around the edges ofthe campaign. In the Democrats' August 19 debate, John Edwards pledgedto "eliminate nuclear weapons"--and got a brisk round of applause.Dennis Kucinich was championing nuclear abolition long beforethe Journal article was written and has remained an eloquent andsteadfast proponent of the cause. In a speech mostly detailing manysensible steps to reduce nuclear dangers, Bill Richardson committedhimself to the same goal. The most significant conversion toabolition, however, was made by Barack Obama in a major foreign policyspeech in October. He stated, "We'll keep our commitment under theNuclear Nonproliferation Treaty on the long road towardseliminating nuclear weapons.... As we do this, we'll be in abetter position to lead the world in enforcing the rules of the road ifwe firmly abide by those rules. It's time to stop giving countries likeIran and North Korea an excuse."

Hillary Clinton took note of the Journal article in anarticle of her own in Foreign Affairs, but her substance and tonewere notably different from Obama's. She reported that theJournal four had advocated "reducing reliance on nuclear weapons"and promised to do the same. But the very title of the article had beensomething quite different: "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons"--a goalunmentioned and not embraced by Clinton. As if to underscore theevasion, she claimed she could "reassert our nonproliferationleadership" merely by negotiating an agreement to further reduce USand Russian arsenals. In a remarkable piece of double-think,she added that this "dramatic initiative" would "send a strong messageof nuclear restraint to the world, while we retain enough strength todeter others from trying to match our arsenal." Deterring others frommatching the United States is crucially different from deterring themfrom attacking the United States, for it commits the nation, as the BushAdministration does, to indefinite nuclear superiority over all othernations. In short, her "dramatic" act of "restraint" would leave theUnited States in a position of global nuclear dominance for theindefinite future. It's hard to imagine a stance more likely toaccelerate nuclear proliferation.

The statements of Obama and Clinton have drawn a line between thecampaigns of these two Democratic front-runners on an issue of supremeimportance for our time. Obama has embraced the goal of a worldwithout nuclear weapons. Clinton has not. Wouldn't thismatter be as worthy of a few questions in the debates as, say, driver'slicenses for undocumented immigrants or Obama's readinessto get verbally tough with Clinton?

So far, Reagan's legacy has found no takers among the Republicancandidates, even as they claim with every other breath to be his heirs.The debate question for them would be whether their admiration for theirhero extends to his vision of nuclear abolition, and if not, why not?

Abolition in the First Era of the Nuclear Age

In the year of campaigning that lies ahead, we'll find outwhether the nuclear question--a "presidential" issue if there ever wasone--gets the attention it deserves. Developments in theworld's multiplying nuclear hot spots, however, are not going towait for pundits, pollsters and spinmasters. The need of the hour, withor without the candidates' participation, is to figure out the alarmingnew shape of nuclear danger, how it got that way and what todo about it. One approach to these questions is to look back at theReykjavik summit and ask what its larger significance might be andwhether it has the relevance to our day that has been claimed. Reykjavikoccurred at a turning point of the cold war. Today we have entered whatmany call the second nuclear age. Does the first nuclear agehave relevance for this second one?

The reaction in the immediate aftermath of Reykjavik wouldsuggest that the answer is no. An impression arose that the negotiationshad been a chaotic and dizzying bout of improvisation in which aclueless Reagan had somehow been lured into momentarily agreeing toabolition. In this telling, the whole episode, both embarrassingand futile, came off as a freakish event in which the leaders of themajor cold war states, departing from their briefing books and perhapstheir senses, somehow decided to give an airing to a proposal that allserious people knew to be utterly quixotic. However, the recentlydeclassified Soviet and American Memoranda of Conversation of the eventreveal that the summit was in fact a disciplined, sincere explorationand negotiation of the possibility of abolishing nuclear weapons. Eachleader knows exactly what he wants. Each listens carefully to the other.Each is a rock-ribbed abolitionist. Each, indeed, has been anabolitionist for several years and has thought long and deeply about thesubject. By the second day of the meeting, each is prepared to surrenderhis country's entire nuclear arsenal on the spot. But their paths to thegoal are different, and in the end--heartbreakingly--they cannot agree.

More important for understanding the present moment than thisimpressive performance is that the negotiation can be seen as theculmination of an evolution of thinking as long as the cold war. Theproblem presented by the advent of the bomb in 1945 was how to absorbsuch a stupendous, disproportionate force as the energy released frommass into the fluctuating, frail, contingent realm of historical events.A protracted effort at what might be called translation was required--aslow sifting and weighing, in heart and mind, of each aspect of thenuclear dilemma. For a single modern historical era, the cold war lasteda remarkably long time--and thereby offered a pedagogical advantage.Considered as a laboratory in which to examine the bomb, itprovided ample leisure for investigation. You might say that it held themysterious and elusive atomic fire steady in its tense grip long enoughfor people to discover some important things about it and to reflect onit quite deeply.

Most important, the bomb's uselessness for war wasimpressed upon its possessors. In this period, thenuclear-warfighting school, teaching that nuclear arms were just anotherweapon for war, was gradually eclipsed by the rise of the deterrence, ormutual-assured-destruction, school, teaching that the mainobjective of nuclear policy must be to assure that the weaponsare never used. This strand of nuclear thinking seemed to reach aculmination in 1985, when Reagan and Gorbachev made their famous jointstatement at the Geneva summit that "a nuclear war cannot be won andmust never be fought." Observers might have thought themutual-assured-destruction school had finally triumphed, once and forall. For decades right-wing politicians who rejected the doctrine hadmaintained that victory in a nuclear war was possible. Now theirgreatest champion, the ultraconservative Reagan, was standing beside aleader of the Soviet Union declaring otherwise. The decades of dangerhad not passed in vain. The illusion that anyone could win or gain anyadvantage from a nuclear war was officially dead.

Yet Reagan had not embraced the deterrence doctrine's corollary:namely, that nuclear arsenals must be preserved forever. It so happenedthat he despised deterrence, chiefly on moral grounds. He did indeedassess the realities of nuclear war in the same way as his liberalopponents, most of whom were wedded to deterrence, but his prescriptionfor dealing with the situation could not have been more different.Neither, of course, did he agree any longer with his own tribe ofnuclear hawks. He was on his own. He was a fervent nuclear abolitionist.

The theme first surfaced on March 23, 1983, in the third year ofReagan's presidency, when he made two radical proposals in theperoration of a speech on his military buildup. The first, later namedthe Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), was to build a defensive systemthat would "intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missilesbefore they reached our own soil or that of our allies," thus rendering"these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." That accomplished, theworld--and this was the second blockbuster proposal--could proceed to"achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategicnuclear missiles," which in turn would "pave the way for arms controlmeasures to eliminate the weapons themselves."

Reagan's double shock caught his top officials by surprise--andalmost all of them were appalled. They believed, quite correctly, thatan impervious missile shield over the United States or any other countrywas a technological impossibility. Reagan seemed to have escaped fromone of the grand illusions of the nuclear age (that a nuclear war couldbe won) into another (that a nuclear attack could be defended against).Furthermore, support for abolition among Administration officials wasnil. Seen from their perspective, Reagan had committed the United Statesto two impossibilities in one speech.

The reaction of the Soviet leaders was even more unfavorable. Oneof the often-avowed purposes of Reagan's arms buildup had been tospend the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. SDI appeared to them toaccelerate this effort. They were not mistaken. After leaving officeReagan recalled, "We...knew that if we showed the political resolve todevelop SDI, the Soviets would have to face the awful truth:They did not have the resources to continue building a huge offensivearsenal and a defensive one simultaneously." SDI also seemed to theSoviets to be aimed at US nuclear superiority after all. Yet just fourdays after his SDI speech, Reagan addressed this second issue. Heannounced that if the United States developed effective SDI technology,he would share it with the Soviet Union. Once the two countries werethus defended, he would declare, "I am willing to do away with all mymissiles. You do away with yours."

The sharing proposal struck both his own Administration and theSoviets as the most unreal element of the plan yet. Less noted at thetime was that, however remote from realization (as was SDI itself),sharing made a kind of conceptual sense. If enacted, it would haveprecluded any bid for superiority. Moreover, it would radically reducethe burden of proof on SDI. Even Reagan was soon required to recognizethat a full, impenetrable shield against a large nuclear arsenal waschimerical. On the other hand, if offensive arsenals were firsteliminated, then defenses would face only the lesser and more feasiblechallenge of defending against the kind of tiny missile forces that acheater on an abolition agreement might cobble up in secret. Later,Reagan would insist that this objective was the chief rationale for hisprogram.

'Let's Do It!'

The abolition idea aired at Reykjavik arose out of theconfluence of several historical currents in the cold war's lastdecade. One was the evolution in Reagan's thinking, moral as well asstrategic, regarding nuclear arms. Another was the nuclear freezemovement of the early 1980s. Reagan had opposed it in harsh terms,calling it "a dangerous fraud" perpetrated by those "who want theweakening of America." Yet he could not ignore the freeze. One of itsmany important victories was a sharp decline in the popularity of hisnuclear buildup, which had dropped in the polls from 80percent to 20 percent. Administration officials hoped theSDI/abolition package would steal the freeze movement's thunder--an aimin which it in fact appeared to succeed. For example, in 1984Reagan's National Security Adviser, Bud McFarlane, wrote in a memoto Reagan, "You have thrown the left into an absolute tizzy. They areleft in the position of advocating the most bloodthirstystrategy--Mutual Assured Destruction--as a means to keepthe peace." Yet at its peak in 1982 and '83, the freeze movement createdthe political conditions that permitted Reagan's abolitionism,dormant until then, to appear. Unknowingly and unwillingly, the freezemovement and Reagan were partners in a powerful, almost decade-longeffort to lift nuclear danger, leaving one wondering what might bepossible today if a popular movement and a President were to cooperatein an attempt to rid the world of nuclear arms.

Then a new historical current, destined to absorb all the others,came into play. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was appointedGeneral Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.Remarkably, Gorbachev was no less fervent a nuclear abolitionist thanReagan. In January 1986 he proposed a three-stage plan to abolishnuclear weapons by the year 2000. Gorbachev had arrived at his positionalong a route of his own. His goal was a democratic Soviet Union atpeace with the West. In pursuit of this, he sought, more insistentlythan Reagan, an end to the cold war, for its own sake but also for theeconomic relief it would afford his domestic reforms.

Of course, abolition didn't happen in 1986 any more than it hadin 1945. The decisive moment was Reykjavik. At the opening session, onOctober 11, both men agreed, in keeping with their public and privatestatements for some two years, that their objective was the eliminationof all nuclear weapons. Gorbachev then startled Reagan with a handful ofsweeping and highly detailed arms-control proposals, including a 50percent reduction in strategic nuclear weapons. They wereconditioned, however, on US willingness to confine development of SDI tothe laboratory.

Gorbachev did not mention abolition in these proposals, butReagan did in his response. Gorbachev was calling on him torestrict SDI, but SDI in Reagan's opinion was the very thingthat "would make the elimination of nuclear weapons possible." Thefundamental terms of the negotiations were set. In the course of thesummit, the two heads of state seemed to compete in bringing forwardever more radical proposals for offensive nuclear disarmament, only tosee them dashed on the unbridgeable disagreement over SDI.

The climax came on the afternoon of the second and last day.Gorbachev proposed ridding the world of all strategic nuclear arms intwo five-year periods, while Reagan introduced a proposal to get rid ofhalf of strategic weapons in five years and all ballistic missiles inthe following five years. Gorbachev's proposal was the more sweeping, asstrategic arms include bombers and cruise missiles as well as ballisticmissiles: it was nuclear abolition.

Next, Gorbachev noted the differences between the two proposalsand asked if Reagan would accept the Soviet one. Reagan promptly agreed.Hawkish aides had handed him his more limited proposal as a means topre-empt his abolitionism. But taking his cue from Gorbachev, he castaside that plan and reverted to his own goal. He even worried that notevery last nuclear weapon would be eliminated. He asked whetherGorbachev was saying that "we would be reducing all nuclearweapons--cruise missiles, battlefield weapons, sub-launched and thelike." For it would be "fine with [me] if we eliminated all nuclearweapons." Gorbachev responded, "We can do that. We can eliminate them."At this point, the record shows that the normally sober, impassiveShultz burst out, "Let's do it!"

Of course, it was not to be. SDI reared its head again. Gorbachevcontinued to insist that SDI research be confined to the laboratory.Reagan continued to insist on the right to conduct tests outside thelaboratory. Was the abolition of nuclear weapons, Reaganasked, to founder on a single word--"laboratory"? It was, and it did.

Whether abolition would have been implemented had an agreementbeen struck is an interesting question. A strange "asymmetrical"struggle between the two leaders, on the one hand, and a phalanx of thenuclear establishments, on the other, would have ensued. The outcome,whatever it was, could only have been decided in a struggle of thewidest dimensions.

Reykjavik in History

The deeper and more important question raised byReykjavik, however, concerns the relationship of the cold war toabolition, and the meaning of that relationship for our present nucleardisorders. Common sense would suggest that the end of the cold warshould have been an ideal moment for disarmament. Isn't peace better fordisarmament than war, however cold? But the record shows that theopposite was true. In actuality, the idea of abolition resurfaced at oneof the pinnacles of cold war tension. Reagan was in the midst of hismilitary expansion. The decade before, the Soviet Union had conducted animmense nuclear buildup of its own in the wake of the Cuban missilecrisis. In early 1983 it had walked out of nuclear arms-reduction talkswith the United States.

It's also a fact that when the cold war disappeared into history,the idea of abolition disappeared with it.

One reason for these surprising turns of events is thatnegotiations between great powers generally go best when the parties arein equilibrium; yet as the 1980s proceeded, equality was eroding. TheSoviet Union had never come close to the United States in overalleconomic productivity; but by the early 1980s it had--at punishingeconomic cost--achieved parity in the nuclear arena, removing any hopethat the United States could "prevail" in a nuclear war. The new paritydrove home the long-existing reality that the two nations, equally andredundantly menaced with prompt inexistence, were in the sameboat. Such had been the backdrop to Reagan's and Gorbachev's historicjoint statement that nuclear war can never be won and should never befought. And it was this recognition that led both men to ask why, ifthat were so, it was necessary to have nuclear weapons at all. InReagan's words in his 1984 State of the Union speech, "The only value inour two nations' possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they willnever be used. But then would it not be better to do away with thementirely?" It was one of the deepest, hardest-won lessons of the coldwar.

Nuclear strategy has often been likened to a chess game whoselast few moves need not be played because everyone can see that theoutcome is a foregone conclusion. The remarkable yet somehow fittingfact is that in the mid-1980s, this very conclusion was drawn by thatgame's two kings, who were now asking themselves why, if the knownend of the game was destruction for all concerned, anyone should evenmake the intermediate moves. Indeed, why play such a futile game at all?

But the moment of equilibrium was perishable. At Reykjavik,Gorbachev told Reagan, "A year ago it was not the case that the SovietUnion had advanced major compromise proposals.... I simply did not havethat capability then. I am not sure that I will still have it in a yearor two to three years." Gorbachev's reforms were designed tocure the ills afflicting the Soviet system, but the system was itselfthe illness, and instead of curing it, his genuinely salubrious measureshelped it toward its demise. Whatever chance it had ofsurviving in a reformed condition was killed off in 1991,when hard-line Communists launched their coup against Gorbachev, andBoris Yeltsin picked up the pieces. Thus it happened that as one of thetwo great cold war rivals collapsed, the other rose, to what some beganto imagine would be world dominance. The "sole superpower" wasgetting ready to proclaim itself. Its leaders thought they had beenrelieved from any pressure to surrender their nuclear arsenals.

Seen from this angle, the Reykjavik summit was a tragedy oftiming. At exactly the moment when the harvest of protracted nucleareducation was being gathered, the cold war laboratory in which it hadbeen learned was on its way to being dismantled, and its greatlesson--that the only sensible thing to do with nuclear arsenals was getrid of them--was shelved.

The Second Nuclear Era

With the end of the cold war, a new era of the nuclear ageopened. At first it seemed that with the old restraining parity with theSoviet Union a thing of the past, the sole superpower could simply doanything it wanted. But harsher realities built into the very nature ofthe nuclear age soon began to reassert themselves. In the new laboratoryof the new era, the educational process resumed. Once again adialectic of pressures and counterpressures commenced. Once againthe nuclear dilemma, having further matured (some fiftynations are now capable of building the bomb), was driven from hiding bypolitical events. Once again, there were trials and errors. And onceagain, just as in the 1980s, an impasse appeared--the one we face today.

There are important differences, of course. The new era hasbrought a new set of nuclear dangers to the fore. In the cold war, themost salient lesson was that the bomb is equally destructive to all; inthe post-cold war era, the inescapable lesson is that the bomb'stechnology is equally available to all competent producers, very likelyincluding, one day not far off, terrorist groups. In the cold war, thedriving force was the bilateral arms race; in the post-cold war era, ithas been proliferation.

Nevertheless, the fundamental underlying lesson, built into thegenetic code of the nuclear age and destined to last as long as that agedoes, is the same: nuclear weapons cannot be the source of advantage forany one nation or group of nations at the expense of the rest;they are a common danger and can be faced only by all together, throughpolitical and diplomatic means. Just as during the cold war the doublestandard inherent in the concept of American nuclear superiority couldnot be sustained, so today the double standard implicit in the two-classworld of nuclear and nonnuclear powers is unsustainable. Just as the twoReykjavik leaders drew the lesson that only negotiation, not furtherbuildups, could release the world from the common peril, so today wemust give up the illusion that force can solve the proliferation problemand must turn to negotiation instead. Finally, just as the true solutionto the cold war peril of annihilation could only be abolition, so it istoday, because any other leaves the double standard intact, and thedouble standard is at the root of proliferation. Perhaps because this isthe second time around, the lessons have been presented more quickly,for a critical moment of decision has already arrived.

The Prospects for Nuclear Abolition Today

These are the realities that the Wall Street Journalauthors and Kucinich, Schwarzenegger, Obama and others are addressing.They are the reason the abolitionist message of Reykjavik is the rightone for our day. Of course, the surrounding circumstances in the UnitedStates are as greatly altered as the shape of the international order.The prospects for abolition today are in some respects more promisingthan in the 1980s but in others less so. The arguments for maintaininglarge nuclear arsenals during the cold war were clear and strong. Manydisagreed with them, but everyone at least knew what they were: eachside saw in the other an implacable ideological foe with global reach.Neither dared to be without nuclear arms as long as the other possessedthem. The path to mutual disarmament was strewn with large obstacles,not least the difficulty of verifying a disarmament agreement.

Today the arguments for nuclear arsenals are incomparably weaker.Consider the American case. If we ask why, in a Soviet Union-free world,the United States is willing to live in a world in which it and Russiapossess thousands of nuclear weapons poised on hair-trigger alert,instead of seeking to negotiate away both nations' arsenals, it's noteasy to give an answer. There is no hostility with Russia that couldjustify any war, much less mutual annihilation. Why, almost two decadesafter the end of the Soviet Union, should the United States andRussia maintain more than 20,000 warheads between them andnuclear materials for producing thousands more? Jack Matlock, Reagan'sadviser on Soviet affairs at Reykjavik, has recently called this stateof affairs "insane."

Does the counterproliferation mission perhaps create a new needfor the arsenals, as the Bush Administration has often stated? For allthe talk about the need to smash underground bunkers, it is hard toescape the suspicion that the nuclear bombs left over from the cold warhave gone searching for missions rather than the other way around. It'sdifficult to suppose that the nation's leaders, unless they have trulytaken leave of their senses, will attack Iran or North Korea withnuclear weapons simply in order to dig a deeper hole in the earth insearch of a fugitive mini-arsenal all too probably hidden somewhereelse. Certainly, arsenals of thousands of weapons would scarcely berequired for the purpose.

A policy vacuum has thus opened up, and politics, like nature,abhors a vacuum. The gate is open for something new. A few Democratshave tiptoed up to it but not yet walked through. One reason may be thateven if the arguments for keeping nuclear arsenals are weaker, so ispopular will to challenge them. There is no movement on the scale of thefreeze; however, there are stirrings of fresh efforts to address the newsituation. Peace Action, the legatee of the freeze, has more than100,000 members in some thirty states. Student Peace Action is active onmore than 100 campuses. Other groups with a long history of antinuclearactivism are stepping up efforts. They include the American FriendsService Committee, Women's Action for New Directions, Physicians forSocial Responsibility, the Council for a Livable World and the NuclearPolicy Research Institute, headed by the legendary antinuclearactivist and writer Helen Caldicott. More specifically geared to thedetails of abolition is the Lawyers Committee on NuclearPolicy, which, with other groups, continues to refine its blueprintfor a Nuclear Weapons Convention. A number of Washington NGOs aregearing up to supplement the Hoover effort. A new group, FaithfulSecurity, under the direction of David Cortright, has begun toremobilize religious communities. Evangelical groups, many of which areconcerned about global warming under the banner of "creation care," area natural constituency to oppose nuclear weapons. The same is true ofthe secular environmental movement. If a coalition of traditional peacegroups, environmental groups, Washington arms controlorganizations such as the World Security Institute andthe Henry L. Stimson Center, and religious groups, includingevangelicals, were to push for abolition in tandem with the Hoovergroup, a powerful political force would result, especially if there werea receptive President in the White House. But it won't happen by itself.It has to be created.

When Americans are asked about nuclear abolition, they regularlyfavor it by wide margins. A recent poll sponsored by the Center forInternational and Security Studies at the University of Maryland hasfound that 73 percent of Americans embrace the goal. In most countriessupport is even higher. This gulf between official and popular opinionis striking, especially since the public almost never hears abolitionadvocated in the news media. At the very least, the numbers show that ifsuch a proposal were made, it would not meet with crippling publicresistance. It even seems possible that if antinuclear sentiment didgrow more intense, nuclear establishments around the world might yieldto it more quickly than anyone now imagines.

Yet trying to forecast the rise or fall of public interest inthis or any issue is probably a vain exercise. Major shifts in opinionalmost always come unexpectedly. Who would have thought in 1979 that anuclear freeze movement would soon arise and win approval in Congress,or that shortly thereafter the most right-wing President of the cold warperiod would advocate the abolition of nuclear arms, or that a Sovietleader would come to power ready to champion both abolition anddemocracy for the Soviet Union, which would then disappear? Is a seriousnew bid to achieve a world without nuclear weapons possible? Or willhistory's first use of a nuclear weapon since 1945 come sooner?Events--in the Middle East, in South Asia, in Northeast Asia, in Russiaand in the United States--are pushing the world toward a decision. Soon,whether by commission or omission, for better or worse, it will bemade.

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