The Foreign Service Journal, February 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | FEBRUARY 2013 33 lines of thought: an emphasis on the ultimate futility of depen- dence on nuclear weapons for national security; a paradigm shift from arms control, as practiced since the early 1960s, to nuclear disarmament; ballistic missile defense as a key to reductions in strategic offensive forces; and de facto termination of the doctrine of “protracted nuclear war.” “This Is Madness” Nuclear deterrence, as practiced during much of the Cold War, came to be known by its acronym, “MAD”: mutual assured destruction. Stevenson had seen the terrible irony of that moni- ker back in the 1950s. Stevenson first publicly challenged the logic of nuclear deter- rence as the Democratic Party’s standard bearer late in the 1956 U.S. presidential campaign: “This is madness—this policy of try- ing to preserve peace by a preponderance of terror.” And he had already proposed the suspension of testing of thermonuclear weapons, hopeful that such an example would lead to a lasting ban on such tests. The Eisenhower administration sharply criticized Steven- son’s proposal at the time, but two years later, in October 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower declared a moratorium on all U.S. nuclear weapons tests while negotiations on a treaty to ban all nuclear tests were under way. While serving as the Kennedy administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, Stevenson continued to be an outspoken critic of nuclear testing. A limited test ban treaty came into force in 1963 and, in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a comprehen- sive test ban treaty. But when the Senate considered that agree- ment in 1999, it rejected it. President Barack Obama’s administration has promised to revive that treaty, and now has a chance to do so as his second term begins. Shaping Human Destiny In a speech in Prague on April 5, 2009, Pres. Obama said: “Some argue that the spread of these [nuclear] weapons cannot be checked—that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruc- tion. This fatalism is a deadly adversary. For if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable. Now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change.” Like Pres. Obama, Adlai Stevenson and other American leaders all embraced the conviction that human destiny can be shaped by human beings. As American leadership is being tested by the threat of nuclear-armed terrorism, changes in thinking are badly needed. When one compares the immense outpouring of energy and resources in defense of nuclear deterrence with how little has been done to help the world understand how to live without nuclear bombs, it becomes painfully clear that we have a lot of catching up to do. As former Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn jointly declared in a famous 2007 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “Deterrence continues to be a relevant consideration for many states with regard to threats from other states. But reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.” Indeed, nuclear deterrence can no longer be counted on to work as we thought it did during the Cold War. Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown summed this up well when he wrote: “What works on one does not necessarily work on many.” Still, some Cold War veterans believe, implicitly or explicitly, that it would be unthinkable for the United States to rid itself of all its deployed and non-deployed nuclear weapons, even if all other nations did so. To them, only the threat to resort to nuclear weapons in combat against other nations stands between us and armed attacks of one sort or another on our homeland or our interests abroad. I suppose some people in other nuclear-armed nations believe the same thing about their own nation’s arsenals. In fact, though, the U.S.-Soviet model of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War was probably unique. No one should think that deterrence in a world with multiple powers possessing nuclear bombs and warheads will work the same way. And we shouldn’t want to find out. When one considers how little effort has gone into eliminating nuclear weapons, it becomes painfully clear that we have a lot of catching up to do.