The Gift of Time (Introduction) (Page 3)

Today, the terms of the nuclear predicament have been altered fundamentally. The barrier of impossibility has fallen. The Soviet Union has unexpectedly--almost magically--cleared itself out of the way. Gone is the murderous, implacable hostility between global rivals, which just a few years ago seemed destined to last forever; gone the totalitarian empire; and gone the obstacles to inspection that have been considered the main brake on nuclear disarmament. The elimination of nuclear weapons has always been much to be desired. What distinguishes our moment is that, for the first time since the invention of the weapons, it is entirely reasonable to believe that the goal actually can be reached. The opportunity for action that has now opened up is, above all else, an opportunity to heal our fractured selves. It is an opportunity to end the forced cohabitation with horror, the shotgun marriage with final absurdity--to snap out of the trance of the cold war, annul the suicide pact dictated by the doctrine of deterrence and take the step that alone can free us from nuclear danger and corruption, namely, the abolition of nuclear weapons. Abolition is the great threshold. It is the logical and necessary destination because only abolition gets us out of the zone of mass slaughter, both as perpetrators and as victims.

Since the beginning of the nuclear age, it has been a commonplace to say that humanity's technical achievement has outstripped its political achievement. Now the situation is reversed. The world's political achievements have raced ahead of its technical achievements. In the political realm, peace reigns, but in the technical realm hostility--indeed, threats of "mutual assured destruction"--remain the order of the day. Today, we require a technical event as great as the political event that was the end of the cold war. To use a homely metaphor, the West in the wake of the Soviet collapse is like a person who has won $50 million in the lottery and then declares, "Wonderful--now I can redecorate my living room!" Why not buy a whole new house? History has handed us a political windfall. Why do we refuse to spend it? Political assets, unlike financial ones, are not apt to increase over time. If not made use of, they can, in an instant of crisis or war, evaporate.

The questions that need to be addressed are moral, political and strategic. The moral question for the United States is whether, during the cold war, we so accustomed ourselves to threatening nuclear annihilation that it became second nature to us. Why shouldn't America's leaders, by agreeing together with Russia's leaders to abolish nuclear weapons, rescue our people from the threat of annihilation by a Russian nuclear attack when the only price to be paid is giving up the threat, itself morally intolerable, of annihilating our new friends the Russian people? Was the cold war not, as we first hoped, the apogee of the era of nuclear weapons, to be succeeded by an era of disarmament and peace, but instead a period of initiation, in which not only Americans and Russians but Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis, Koreans, Iraqis, Iranians and others were unlearning their horror of nuclear destruction--were learning to think the unthinkable? Was the cold war a sort of Trojan horse whereby nuclear weapons were being smuggled into the moral and political life of the world? Have we, in a silent but deep moral revolution in which the United States has played the leading role, come to regard threats of mass destruction as normal--as the proper and ordinary procedure of any self-respecting nation, whether or not it faces an extraordinary danger from without? Can we still remember that to destroy hundreds of millions of human beings is an atrocity beyond all history? Or have we, so to speak, forgotten this before we had ever quite learned it? And have we, accordingly, adopted the strange vocation--so deeply at odds with the principles on which our nation was founded--of salesman of terror to the world?

The chief political question is whether nuclear proliferation can be stopped and reversed while the current nuclear powers declare by their actions as well as their words that they believe that nuclear bombs are indispensable instruments of power. Or should proliferation perhaps be reluctantly accepted, or even enthusiastically embraced? The development that sets the stage for proliferation is, of course, the spread of nuclear technology. Although politically speaking it may in a sense be 1945 again, technically speaking it is much later than that. While the world was understandably transfixed by the mortal rivalry between the two superpowers, dissemination of the knowledge underlying the bomb and the technical wherewithal for building it was proceeding. During the cold war, the "secret" of the bomb was held by a few governments. Now it is published in magazines. Back then, the nuclear club was exclusive. Now just about anyone can join. Then, the necessary scientific knowledge was centralized in a few places. Now it is ubiquitous, protean, osmotic--fully up- and down-loadable, just like any other information in the information age.

The principal strategic question is whether the doctrine of deterrence, having been framed during the cold war, will now be discredited as logically absurd and morally bankrupt or, on the contrary, recommended to nations all over the world as the soundest and most sensible solution to the nuclear dilemma. The question then will not be whether a particular quarreling pair of nations or blocs (the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war) is better off with nuclear arsenals but whether any such pair (India and Pakistan, Greece and Turkey, Iraq and Israel, or Iran and Iraq will do as examples) is better off. If, as many analysts say, deterrence was a successful solution to the dangers of the cold war, then why should it not be adopted by all nations prone to conflict? Why resist proliferation? Wouldn't it be better to step it up--to proceed knowingly and deliberately to an increasingly nuclearized world? This is the direction in which events now appear to be drifting, and a few theorists are honest and unflinching enough to champion the goal. For example, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago has called nuclear weapons a "powerful force for peace" and advocates "well-managed proliferation." He hopes that Germany will acquire nuclear weapons and advises the world to "let proliferation occur in Eastern Europe." In statements like his, we can see the elements of a new conventional wisdom, in which nuclear weapons become entrenched in the plans and policies not just of a few great powers but of the world at large.

It's plain that the moral, political and strategic aspects of the question are in practice tightly linked. The fundamental choice in all three areas is between, on the one hand, condemnation of nuclear weapons and their abolition and, on the other, their normalization and universalization. Normalization and universalization go naturally together. Normalization will be complete when no extraordinary external threat--and perhaps no threat at all--is thought necessary to justify building nuclear arsenals. Universalization is the natural consequence, because if possession of nuclear weapons requires no special justification, then almost any nation would be justified in having them. The implications for U.S. policy of the resulting "new deterrent framework" (in the phrase of Robert Joseph, director of the Center for Counter-Proliferation Research) would be deterrence à tous azimuts, in the official French phrase, which is to say a policy of nuclear deterrence aimed at forestalling threats that might arise at any point on the globe. (And, in fact, the new Presidential Decision Directive takes a few steps in that direction.) The question today is: Will the world be better off with or without nuclear weapons? This is the debate that has now begun.

It's plain, too, that in addressing the new issues our assessment of the nuclear policies of the cold war will be of the first importance. Was the nuclear buildup a story of wise management of a terrible dilemma that had no other solution? And was it, further, a fortuitous training session, in which the world was introduced to the previously unsuspected virtues of nuclear arms? Or was it a tale of the reckless endangerment of mankind? If the first is true, then nuclear weapons are a marvelous gift of proven worth to the world. If the latter is true, then abolishing nuclear weapons is the unfinished business of the end of the cold war. In the first case, we cannot do without them. In the second, we must get rid of them.

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