Many well-meaning friends have counseled me that by championing elimination of nuclear weapons I risk setting the bar too high, providing an easy target for the cynical and diverting attention from the more immediately achievable.
The harsh truth is that six years after the end of the Cold War we are still prisoner to its psychology of distrust, still enmeshed in the vocabulary of mutual assured destruction, still in the thrall of the nuclear era. Worse, strategists persist in conjuring worlds which spiral toward chaos, and concocting threats which they assert can only be discouraged or expunged by the existence or employment of nuclear weapons.
No one is more conscious than am I that realistic prospects for the elimination of nuclear weapons will evolve over many years. I was in the public arena for too long ever to make the perfect enemy of the good. I hasten to add, however, my strong conviction that we are far too timorous in imagining the good, we are still too rigidly conditioned by an arms-control mentality deeply rooted in the Cold War. We fall too readily into the intellectual trap of judging the goal of elimination against current political conditions. We forget too quickly how seemingly intractable conflict can suddenly yield under the weight of reason or with a change of leadership.
How better then, you may well ask, to proceed. It begins not with a call for greater reductions, but rather to initiate immediate, multilateral negotiations toward ending the most regrettable and risk-laden operational practice of the Cold War era: land and sea-based ballistic missiles on standing nuclear alert. What could be more corrosive to building and sustaining security relationships built on trust?
Russia, with its history of authoritarian rule and a staggering burden of social transformation, is ill-equipped to lead on this issue. It falls unavoidably to us to work painfully back through the tangled moral web of this frightful 50-year gantlet, born of the hellish confluence of two unprecedented historical currents: the bipolar collision of ideology and the unleashing of the power of the atom.
As a democracy, the consequences of these cataclysmic forces confronted us with a tortuous and seemingly inextricable dilemma: how to put at the service of our national survival a weapon whose sheer destructiveness was antithetical to the very values upon which our society was based. Over time, as arsenals multiplied on both sides and the rhetoric of mutual annihilation grew more heated, we were forced to think about the unthinkable, justify the unjustifiable, rationalize the irrational. Ultimately, we contrived a new and desperate theology to ease our moral anguish, and we called it deterrence.
I spent much of my military career serving the ends of deterrence. I want very much to believe that in the end that it was the nuclear force that I and others commanded and operated that prevented World War III and created the conditions leading to the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
But, in truth, I do not and I can not know that. It will be decades before the hideously complex era of the Cold War is adequately understood, with its bewildering interactions of human fears and inhuman technology. Nor would it much matter that informed assessments are still well beyond our intellectual reach–except for the crucial and alarming fact that, forgetting the desperate circumstances which gave it birth, and long after their miraculous resolution, we continue to espouse deterrence as if it were now an infallible panacea. And worse, others are listening, have converted to our theology, are building their arsenals, are poised to rekindle the nuclear arms race–and to reawaken the specter of nuclear war.
This can not be the moral legacy of the Cold War.
