Global Zero

By Gwynne Dyer

If Barack Obama were to send the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to Congress for ratification early in the new session, that would be a great start.

Since signed in 1996, 148 countries have ratified it. But it will remain ineffective unless the United States ratifies it too. Then Obama could get on with banning nuclear weapons themselves, not just the tests.

Which brings us to a new initiative called Global Zero. Launched in Paris on Dec. 9, and endorsed by more than a hundred world leaders, its goal is the complete abolishment of nuclear weapons.

That may have a slightly antique ring to it ― don't these people know that the Cold War ended ages ago? ― but nuclear weapons are still around. Some 20,000 of them, in fact. Just last July, at a rally in Berlin, Obama publicly adopted the same goal: ``This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons."

Admittedly, the hundred ``world leaders" are mostly ex-world leaders who may be suffering from ``retired general syndrome." During their careers, generals generally loyally support the reigning orthodoxy about nuclear weapons, and are amply rewarded thereby.

But when they retire the rewards and status vanish. Some of them begin to wonder, out loud on occasion, if they ever really believed all that. Some people in the peace movement sarcastically call them ``generals for peace." They suggest that they would have been more useful if they had seen the light when they still had power.

Most of the hundred-plus notables who signed the Global Zero declaration were not generals, but most of them are former something-or-others: former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, former British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard.

Not to mention former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, former British Defense Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, former Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi, Ehsan Ul-Haq, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Pakistan, and Brajesh Mishra, former Indian National Security Advisor. But for once, the ``formers" are not the only ones talking sense.

What makes Global Zero seem more than the usual empty talk is the fact that this time around all of the leaders of the major powers seem to be on the same page.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, in March, that the United Kingdom is ready to work for ``a world that is free from nuclear weapons." On Dec. 8 French President Nicolas Sarkozy also gave his support for the goal of general nuclear disarmament.

Last June Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh backed the same goal, saying that ``the only effective form of nuclear disarmament and elimination of nuclear weapons is global disarmament." Pakistan and China have said explicitly that they support Global Zero. In fact, the only countries owning nuclear weapons that have remained silent are North Korea and Israel.

North Korea is less of a problem than it seems because it could probably be persuaded to give up one or two its nuclear weapons, in exchange for strong security guarantees and lots of foreign aid. This is so especially if the United States were to promise to get out of the nuclear weapons business too.

Israel is a knottier problem because it doesn't even admit that it has nuclear weapons (several hundred of them, in fact). But Israel could find itself facing unprecedented pressure from the one country with any real leverage over Israeli policy, the United States.

One of the most striking aspects of the Global Zero meeting was the remark by Richard Burt, the man who handled the press conference, that Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal would have to be part of the process.

This no doubt caused consternation in Israel, because while Burt currently holds no official position in the U.S. government, he was the chief U.S. negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) with the former Soviet Union. So he probably wouldn't have said that if U.S. policy were not moving in that direction.

But that's the real question: Is the United States really ready to give up its nuclear weapons? It was the first country to have them and it has built its grand strategy around them for the past 64 years.

But if it were willing to give them up, and if the Russians were really willing to follow suit, then their cooperation would account for 96 percent of the world's nuclear weapons. After that, it shouldn't be that hard to cajole and pressure the rest of the world's nuclear powers into doing the same.

It would take at least a decade to get from here to zero. First, ratify the test ban treaty. Then, in the forthcoming talks to renew or replace the START treaty between the U.S. and Russia (which expires next year), agree on radical reductions in American and Russian nuclear weapons. Then bring in the rest of the world for the final negotiations to outlaw nuclear weapons entirely.

It seems like a pipe dream, but conditions have never been as promising as they are now. If Obama takes the lead, it could actually happen ― and even in the depths of recession, it wouldn't cost anything.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.