Our Nuclear Nightmare

More than 200 years ago, the philosopher Immanuel Kant defined the ultimate choice before mankind: if world history was to culminate in universal peace, would it be through moral insight, or through catastrophe of a magnitude that allowed no other outcome?  We are approaching a point where that choice may be imposed on us. The basic dilemma of the nuclear age has been with us since Hiroshima: how to bring the destructiveness of modern weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that are being pursued. Any use of nuclear weapons is certain to involve a level of casualties and devastation out of proportion to foreseeable foreign-policy objectives. Efforts to develop a more nuanced application have never succeeded, from the doctrine of a geographically limited nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s to the "mutual assured destruction" theory of general nuclear war in the 1970s.

In office I recoiled before the options produced by the prevalent nuclear strategies, which raised the issue of the moral right to inflict a disaster of such magnitude on society and the world. Moreover, these prospects were generated by weapons for which there could not be any operational experience, so that calculations and limitations were largely theoretical. But I was also persuaded that if the U.S. government adopted such restraints, it would be turning over the world's security to the most ruthless and perhaps genocidal.

In the two-power world of the Cold War, the adversaries managed to avoid this dilemma. The nuclear arsenals on both sides grew in number and sophistication. Except for the Cuban missile crisis, when a Soviet combat division was initially authorized to use its nuclear weapons to defend itself, neither side approached their use, either against each other or in wars against non-nuclear third countries. They put in place step by step a series of safeguards to prevent accidents, misjudgments and unauthorized launches.

But the end of the Cold War produced a paradoxical result. The threat of nuclear war between the superpowers has essentially disappeared. But the spread of technology—especially the technology to produce peaceful nuclear energy—has vastly increased the feasibility of acquiring a nuclear-weapons capability. The sharpening of ideological dividing lines and the persistence of unresolved regional conflicts have magnified the incentives to acquire nuclear weapons, especially by rogue states or non-state actors. The calculations of mutual insecurity that produced restraint during the Cold War do not apply with anything like the same degree to the new entrants in the nuclear field, and even less so to the non-state actors. Proliferation of nuclear weapons has become an overarching strategic problem for the contemporary world.

Any further spread of nuclear weapons multiplies the possibilities of nuclear confrontation; it magnifies the danger of diversion, deliberate or unauthorized. And if the development of weapons of mass destruction spreads into Iran and continues in North Korea—in the face of all ongoing negotiations—the incentives for other countries to follow the same path could become overwhelming. How will publics react if they suffer or even observe casualties in the tens of thousands from a nuclear attack? Will they not ask two questions: What could we have done to prevent this? What shall we do now so that it can never happen again?

Considerations such as these induced former senator Sam Nunn, former secretary of defense William Perry, former secretary of state George Shultz and I—two Democrats and two Republicans—to publish recommendations for systematically reducing and eventually eliminating the danger from nuclear weapons. We have a record of strong commitment to national defense and security. We continue to affirm the importance of adequate deterrent forces, and we do not want our recommendations to diminish essentials for the defense of free peoples while a process of adaptation to new realities is going on. At the same time, we reaffirm the objective of a world without nuclear weapons that has been proclaimed by every American president since Eisenhower.

Such a world will prove remote unless the emerging nuclear-weapons program in Iran and the existing one in North Korea are overcome. Both involve the near certainty of further proliferation and of further incorporation of nuclear weapons into the strategies of nuclear-weapons states. In the case of Iran, the permanent members of the Security Council have called for an end to the enrichment of materials produced by the program for peaceful uses of atomic energy. In the case of North Korea, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and the United States have demanded the elimination of its nuclear weapons. North Korea has agreed to abandon its nuclear-weapons program but, by procrastinating in doing so, threatens to create a legitimacy for the stockpile of weapons it has already produced.