Mark these days. A long-dreaded transformation from hope to doom is taking place as the United States of America ushers the world onto the no-turning-back road of nuclear perdition. Once, we could believe there was another way to go. Indeed, we were invited to take that path by the man who is, even today, overseeing the blocking of it, probably forever.
It was one of the most stirring speeches an American president had ever given. The place was Prague; the year was 2009; the president was the recently sworn in Barack Obama. The promise made that day is worth recalling at length, especially since, by now, it is largely forgotten:
"As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act... So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I'm not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now, we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, ‘Yes, we can...'"
President Obama had been in office only three months when, boldly claiming his place on the world stage, he unequivocally committed himself and his country to a nuclear abolition movement that, until then, had at best existed somewhere on the distant fringes of power politics. "I know," he added, "that there are some who will question whether we can act on such a broad agenda. There are those who doubt whether true international cooperation is possible... and there are those who hear talk of a world without nuclear weapons and doubt whether it's worth setting a goal that seems impossible to achieve. But make no mistake. We know where that road leads."
The simple existence of nuclear weapons, an American president declared, paved the road to perdition for humanity.
Obama as The Captain Ahab of Nuclear Weapons
At that moment, the foundations for an imagined abolitionist world were modest indeed, but not nonexistent. The 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) had, for instance, struck a bargain between nuclear haves and have-nots, under which a path to abolition was treated as real. The deal seemed clear enough: the have-nots would promise to forego obtaining nukes and, in return, the world's reigning nuclear powers would pledge to take, in the words of the treaty, "effective measures in the direction of nuclear disarmament."
For decades before the Obama moment, however, the superpower arsenals of nuclear warheads continued to grow like so many mushrooms, while new nuclear states -- Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea -- built their own impressive arsenals. In those years, with the singular exception of South Africa, nuclear-weapons states simply ignored their half of the NPT bargain and the crucial clause mandating progress toward eventual disarmament was all but forgotten.
When the Cold War ended in 1991 with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and the next year Americans elected as president Bill Clinton, who was famously against the Vietnam War, it was at least possible to imagine that nukes might go the way of internationally banned chemical weapons. But Washington chose otherwise. Despite a paucity of enemies anywhere on Earth, the Pentagon's 1994 Nuclear Posture Review insisted on maintaining the American nuclear arsenal at Cold War levels as a "hedge," an insurance policy, against an imagined return of Communism, fascism, or something terrible in Russia anyway -- and Clinton accepted the Pentagon's position.
Soon enough, however, even prominent hawks of the Cold War era began to worry that such a nuclear insurance policy could itself ignite a global fire. In 1999, a chief architect of the nuclear mindset, Paul Nitze, stepped away from a lifetime obsession with building up nuclear power to denounce nukes as "a threat mostly to ourselves" and to explicitly call for unilateral disarmament. Other former apostles of nuclear realpolitik also came to embrace the goal of abolition. In 2008, four high priests of the cult of nuclear normalcy -- former Senator Sam Nunn, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, and former Secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger -- jointly issued a sacrilegious renunciation of their nuclear faith on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. "We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons," they wrote, "and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal."
Unfortunately, such figures had come to Jesus only after leaving office, when they were exempt from the responsibility of matching their high-flown rhetoric with the gritty work of making it real.
Obama in Prague was another matter. He was at the start of what would become an eight-year presidency and his rejection of nuclear fatalism rang across the world. Only months later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in large part because of this stunning commitment. A core hope of the post-World-War-II peace movement, always marginal, had at last been embraced in the seat of power. A year later, at Obama's direction, the Pentagon, in its 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, actually advanced the president's purpose, committing itself to "a multilateral effort to limit, reduce, and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide."
"The United States," that document promised, "will not develop new nuclear warheads." When it came to the future of the nuclear arsenal, a program of responsible maintenance was foreseen, but no new ground was to be broken. "Life Extension Programs," the Pentagon promised, "will use only nuclear components based on previously tested designs, and will not support new military missions or provide new military capabilities."
