Getting to Zero: The Road to Nuclear Disarmament and Abolition

For over sixty years the whole of humanity has lived under the threat of complete annihilation. The existence of over 20,000 thousand nuclear weapons held by at least eight states means that the continuation of life on planet Earth is in the hands of several human beings. With several thousand nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert, we are never more than fifteen minutes away from extinction.

During the past sixty years, the United States has threatened many other countries, both states with nuclear weapons and those without, with the use of nuclear weapons, and is the only country to use a nuclear weapon on the civilians of another country with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Today, the detonation of one nuclear device in a densely populated region could kill millions of people in a matter of minutes.

Thankfully, it appears that the consensus of the foreign policy establishment on nuclear weapons issues is changing to reflect that ordinary people want to live in a world free of the threat of nuclear weapons. In 2005, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara made the case for deep cuts to the U.S. nuclear arsenal . And over the past two years, four of the most respected figures in elite American foreign policy circles, George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn and William Perry, have been leading the charge for disarmament.

With the new leadership of President-elect Barack Obama, there are concrete nonproliferation and disarmament opportunities for the first time in almost thirty years.  President-elect Obama has publicly stated his commitment to a vision of a nuclear free world.

There are a number of incremental and concrete opportunities along the road to travel towards zero nuclear weapons. In order to make President-elect Obama’s campaign positions a reality, the new President and Congress should:

Ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The U.S. Senate ratification of the CTBT would send an important message to the world that we seek to rejoin the global community and are serious about nuclear nonproliferation

Press forward with the goal of nuclear weapons abolition as its own clear, distinct demand by announcing the initiation of negotiations for the global abolition of nuclear weapons at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in the spring of 2010 – doing so would finally begin to fulfill the U.S. and other nuclear states obligation to pursue abolition as clearly stated in Article VI of the NPT

Work with Russian leadership to extend the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and work bilaterally to negotiate deeper nuclear weapons cuts
Instruct the U.S. ambassador to the UN Conference on Disarmament to initiate negotiations for global nuclear disarmament, and announce an invitation to all nuclear states to begin high-level negotiations on abolition