Commentary: Restoring U.S. nuclear-free leadership

Thomas Graham Jr. and Max Kampelman, in The Washington Times, 2 April, 2008

After a long dry spell, the seeds planted by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985 and Reykjavik in 1986, appear to be bearing fruit. Their declaration in Geneva that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” set the stage for the historic Reykjavik meeting at which the two leaders came tantalizingly close to finally abolishing their nations’ nuclear arsenals.

Ultimately, they set in motion a series of negotiations in which both of us participated and which led within three years to treaties that abolished intermediate range nuclear weapons and reduced strategic offensive weapons by 50 percent.

Yet, despite this promising beginning, the threat of nuclear war has metastized. Today, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have entered the ranks of nuclear powers, and Iran may yet join them. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), predicts that unless present trends are reversed, there will be more than 25 nuclear weapons states in a few years, many of them unstable and prone to takeover by extremists. The likelihood of the use of nuclear weapons would then be greater than at any time during the Cold War.

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