Letter From Ground Zero

Long before the atomic bomb turned night into day in the desert of Alamogordo in July 1945, it was an idea in the minds of scientists, who deeply pondered the political and moral dilemma they were about to impose on the world. With few exceptions, they arrived at a basic conclusion. The great physicist Niels Bohr articulated it well when he said, "We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war." The reasons were clear and inescapable. In the first place, thanks to the unlimited destructive power of nuclear weapons, nuclear war "cannot be won and must never be fought," as Ronald Reagan was to put it much later. In the second place, the knowledge on which the bomb was based was destined, like all knowledge, to spread. In the long run, there would be no "secret" of the bomb. The conclusion was equally clear: If nuclear danger was to be contained or lifted, the task had to be accomplished by political means--above all, by international agreements.

The first and most ambitious of these--the Baruch plan, which was put forward by President Truman and called for the abolition of nuclear weapons--was rejected by the Soviet Union, which then put forward a plan that was rejected by the United States. The arms race that the scientists had hoped to head off began. Nevertheless, for the rest of the century the world followed the scientists' advice: Except on one occasion, no nuclear power used force to stop another power from getting nuclear weapons. The pattern was set in the late 1940s, when the United States declined to launch a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union in the years before it got the bomb. In the early days of the Soviet nuclear buildup, President Eisenhower likewise rejected what he called "preventive war." "How could you have one," he said at a press conference, "if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled?" The pattern held when China launched its nuclear weapons program: Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union launched a pre-emptive attack. The one exception was the Israeli attack in June 1981 on a reactor that Iraq was using in its nuclear-weapons program.

All other attempts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons or reduce existing arsenals have been diplomatic and political. They include the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which came into force in 1974, the SALT and START treaties, under which the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union, and then Russia, have been cut by half, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.

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