The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2007

Building on that success, the United States has done fairly well in helping to secure nuclear materials at civil- ian sites overseas, although it is still a work in progress. But we have not done nearly enough to control those associated with military nuclear programs. And it is from such enterprises that the device that could level an American city could be procured by al-Qaida. Recall that it was not that long ago that Dr. A.Q. Khan was finally caught after many years of running a highly successful and profitable nuclear black market from Islamabad. And it is quite possible that Pakistan is not the only country harboring such profiteers. So our only hope of safety is to persuade other countries to get rid of most, if not all, of those weapons, in parallel with similar reductions in our own nuclear arsenals. In fact, we have that obligation under Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which mandates negotiations on nuclear disarmament. When President Ronald Reagan called for a world free of nuclear weapons more than 20 years ago, he was criticized by people here and abroad who thought that our security and that of our allies depended on nukes, in accordance with the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. Even today, in many ways we have not moved far beyond that mind-set. But Reagan was right. Promising security, these weapons generate insecurity. As a deterrent, they are useless against terrorists. And in the post-9/11 era, any successful counterterrorism policy and any nuclear non- proliferation policy worth its salt must deal with the most serious potential sources of nuclear terror: the new weapons that are being built, the ones already stockpiled, and the fissionable materials that can be used for such weapons. Ronald Reagan may not have foreseen the utility of deep reductions in nuclear weapons as a nonprolifera- tion tool in an age of terrorism. But his ideas about abolishing all nuclear weapons did lead to elimination of a whole class of nuclear weapons systems and started a downward trend in U.S. and Soviet/Russian holdings of strategic nuclear weapons. Actions like these are direct- ly responsive to the political needs of governments that might be inclined to forgo nuclear weapons. And they should be part of a new nonproliferation bargain between the nuclear “haves” and the “have-nots.” A Third Miracle? It was a miracle that we survived the bitter hostility of the Cold War without a nuclear weapon ever being fired in anger after 1945. And we have all lived through a second miracle of the nuclear age: the peaceful end of the Cold War. No one imagined, let alone predicted, that a superpower armed to the teeth with nearly 40,000 nuclear weapons could collapse as a centrally organized state, while the police power that safeguarded its nuclear weapons disintegrated — and no nukes would be stolen or used, even at the height of the chaos. Now we need a third miracle, one that will bring the world safely through the new medievalism that has appeared in the 21st century — and do so without a nuclear weapon having been detonated in one of the world’s great cities. But for that to happen, the next administration must make a fresh start in its nuclear thinking. President George W. Bush is correct in saying that the nexus between radicalism and technology is where the gravest threat to international security lies. But his administration’s policies have failed to get at the root of the problem. From the beginning of the nuclear era, the U.S. gov- ernment recognized that in the arena of nuclear weapons, it has no permanent friends, only permanent interests. The United States opposed both British and French acquisition of nuclear weapons. Eisenhower had to deal with the seductive logic of preventive war F O C U S J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 19 James E. Goodby entered the Foreign Service in 1952 and retired from government service in 2001 with the rank of career minister. His long diplomatic career included tours as deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs (1974-1977) and Bureau of European Affairs (1977-1980); ambassador to Finland (1980-1981); chief negotiator for nuclear threat reduction agreements (1993-1994); special repre- sentative of the president for the security and disman- tlement of nuclear weapons (1995-1996); and deputy to the special adviser to the president and Secretary of State for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (2000- 2001). Ambassador Goodby is currently a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a senior fellow (nonresident) at The Brookings Institution. He is the author of At the Borderline of Armageddon: How American Presidents Managed the Atomic Bomb (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and Europe Undivided (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1998).