All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, Chaos Radio streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org, and also from AntiWar.com slash radio, introducing our first guest today, Jonathan Schell, he's the author of The Fate of the Earth and the Seventh Decade, The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.
He is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and a visiting lecturer at Yale University.
Welcome to the show, Jonathan.
Good to be with you.
It's very good to have you on here, and you have a very interesting article, yours is part three of Time to Bury a Dangerous Legacy in Yale Global Online here, and it's three separate articles by three separate experts or activists, or I'm not exactly sure, here on the subject of the continuing danger of nuclear weapons on this planet, and I guess I wanted to start with one fact that you point out in your article, is that there are still 25,000 nuclear weapons and roundabouts in the possession of various governments around the world right now.
Yeah, that's true, about 95% of those are in the United States or Russia, and that is truly a bizarre state of affairs, you know, a couple of decades after the end of the Cold War.
You know, when the Cold War ended, everyone sort of cheered and kind of thought that these arsenals would go away, and instead they've dropped in numbers, but they've hung around, and what's bizarre about it is that these weapons seem to have lost all reference in any political framework.
You know, during the Cold War, you might be for them or against them, but you knew what it was about.
It was about that great global struggle, and that just went away.
Not only did it go away, but so did the Soviet Union, and now there isn't any difference between the U.S. and Russia worth a pistol shot, much less blowing us all up 15 times over.
So, one of the great mysteries and strange facts about the world today is that we hold on to arsenals in the thousands with no plans to get rid of them or bring them down, you know, to zero or to the hundreds or whatever it might be.
Now, back in the Cold War days, that's what they always said, right, was there's enough nukes to kill us all over and over and over again.
Is that still the case with the 25,000?
That is still the case.
Just think about it for a moment.
You know, the basic rule of thumb is that any city on Earth can be annihilated by a nuclear weapon of the proper size, and they come in many sizes.
So, just picture that, let's say, the top 300 cities in the United States are annihilated.
Oh, well, that's starting to get down to, you know, the level of Burlington, Vermont or something.
And, basically, when you throw in the fallout and the firestorms and everything else that would be going on, that's just the end of the United States right there.
So, really, it takes only a couple of hundred weapons to wipe out any nation on Earth.
So, you see the levels of overkill that are involved if we're talking about 25,000 weapons.
Well, you know, the founder of the modern American libertarian movement, in his article War, Peace and the State, Murray Rothbart, wrote, these weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction.
We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a sin and a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.
And that really is the point, right?
That's what these are for, killing cities, right?
These aren't for, really, even for military use anymore.
It's not like there's a Red Army pouring across the Folding Gap we have to worry about.
There's no military threat whatsoever that could even begin to justify such a threat.
So, you know, in the Cold War, probably there was a greater likelihood today that the big arsenals would be used.
We can get to the smaller arsenals and terrorism and proliferation later, but probably there's a smaller chance.
So, in that sense, it's less dangerous, although you can always have an accidental nuclear war.
But to have them still in existence, with no quarrel between the two countries, is definitely the most bizarre and crazy situation that we've had in the entire nuclear age.
It's as if it's just something we keep around like some old furniture in the attic, and yet this is an ability to blow ourselves all up.
So, if anybody who's listening to this show can explain to me why it is that the United States should endure having Russia's rotting old nuclear arsenal pointed at us, you know, so many years after the end of the Cold War, for the dubious privilege of pointing ours back at them, I'll appreciate the explanation, because I can't fathom it.
Well, now, didn't the Nuclear Powers and the Nonproliferation Treaty promise to begin to dismantle their nuclear weapons?
Well, they did indeed.
Not just to begin, but to complete the job.
And what's sometimes not appreciated is that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which of course is the international law that really is governing the efforts all around the world to stop proliferation, be it in Iran, North Korea, Libya, what have you, so that's a treaty of absolutely the first importance, like a dam holding back, you know, incredibly accelerated proliferation potentially.
But that was not just a nonproliferation treaty, it was also a disarmament treaty.
And the countries that agreed to do without nuclear weapons, and there are 183 of them, so it gives you an idea of how important that treaty is, those countries exacted a bargain from the Nuclear Powers.
They said, okay, you Soviets, you Americans, French, British, so forth, Chinese, can hold on to your nuclear weapons temporarily, but you have to vow, under Article 6 of the treaty, to move down to zero.
In other words, it's really an abolition treaty, only in sort of slow motion.
The problem we have now is that the countries that have done without nuclear weapons, but might be interested in them, are looking at the Great Powers and saying, look, you're still living in a double standard world.
You're saying, this is not an abolition treaty, this is one where we get to keep ours forever, that is, you keep yours forever, and we don't get to have any.
And that's just a new form of colonialism, and the result of that is proliferation pressure, and it puts the very fabric of the treaty under stress and conceivable breakdown.
Yeah, that's something that Gordon Prather at Antiwar.com covers a lot, is what he calls the Bush-Cheney administration's war against the world's non-proliferation regime, that it does nothing but stand in their way, and so they mean to undermine it every chance they get.
Well, they do.
I mean, all you have to do is look at the deal with India.
India is a country that went ahead and got the bond, didn't sign up for the NPT.
Under the rules of the NPT, they're not supposed to get any assistance with their civilian nuclear power, because that's supposed to be reserved for countries who agreed to do without the bond, the 183 of them.
And so if you go ahead and say to India, well, you got the bond, but anyway, you can have the nuclear power under special exception, then it creates a precedent for other countries to say, well, they didn't abide by the rules and they got away with it, why don't we try the same thing?
And at the same time, Iran, for example, has, according to the NPT, an unalienable right to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and yet we do nothing but beat them over the head with the NPT and accuse them of enriching uranium to make weapons, even though they're only getting it to 3.5% that you couldn't possibly make an atom bomb out of.
Well, that's exactly right.
And of course, when they look at India, they point over to the Indian deal and say, look, India not only enriches, but it's got the bomb.
So why don't you crack down on them?
Rather than us, all we're doing is trying to get the fuel for civilian power.
By the way, it's not very clear to me, they may well be interested in getting a bomb, but it's hard to know because the fact is that the steps you take for the fuel cycle for nuclear power, you know, seven out of 10 are the same as the ones that you take toward getting the bomb.
So it's a little hard to sort those two things out.
Right.
Well, they would have to, in order to go the last few steps, they would have to withdraw from the NPT and kick the IAEA safeguard inspectors out and so forth, right?
That's right.
So we will know if they really start, you know, turning that Natanz facility into a weapons factory.
Yes, we in all likelihood would know at that point, or at any case, if they tested or whatever, we'd know just as we knew when, eventually when India did the same thing.
I mean, they didn't, they weren't in the NPT, so they didn't have to withdraw.
Right.
But you know, when, especially if they test when a nuclear, when a country gets a nuclear weapon.
Now, one of the articles, it's really three articles in the Yale Global Online here.
And one of these is about the danger of nuclear terrorism and different intelligence and reports over the years that Osama bin Laden is very interested in obtaining an atom bomb to use against the United States and so forth.
And I guess the first thing that always comes to mind is loose Russian nukes.
The USSR fell and whatever happened to those nukes?
And does anybody think those former commies were able to keep good accounting of what happened to them all?
And my understanding is that the U.S. Senate back at the end of the Cold War passed something called the Nunn-Lugar Act, or both houses of Congress, I guess, the Nunn-Lugar Act, which was to appropriate money for America to buy up any loose nuclear material that could possibly be used to make a bomb from the Russians.
Is that right?
And then the second question, I guess, is how's that going?
Yeah, well, it's just about right.
The Nunn-Lugar program doesn't actually buy up materials, but there are other programs that do buy up materials.
One of the interesting and remarkable facts of our present moment is that the United States buys all kinds of uranium that was used for the Soviet arsenal, and that when they cut back on the numbers, freed up the uranium, the U.S. buys it, and now about 10 percent of U.S. electricity is fueled by former Soviet bomb materials.
So that kind of thing is going on, so it's a good program, I guess.
I'd rather have the lights on in the house than have the house blown up with a nuclear bomb, I guess.
But the Nunn-Lugar program does indeed provide some billions of dollars, I don't know what the figures are, for American assistance to secure the loose nuke, so to speak, or the loose nuclear material, to be more exact, to get state-of-the-art security around the huge stockpiles of plutonium and uranium that the Russians still have.
But it's always been underfunded, and they've done about 50 percent of the job, but it's gone very slowly.
And at first, the Bush administration actually cut back on the thing, because they really don't believe in agreements of this kind.
But then, under pressure from Congress, it was stepped up again.
But it's all sort of going very slowly, and there's a kind of an inherent contradiction in it.
It's a very good program, a very enlightened program.
But you know, there comes a point when the Russians just don't want American technicians and so on snooping around too closely into the nuclear arsenal, especially as tensions begin to rise a little bit with the expansion of NATO, and the idea of putting in missile defenses in the Czech Republic and Poland, so there's a kind of limitation to how far that could go in any case.
Oh, come on, those defensive missiles in Poland are to protect Western Europe from Iran.
Well, there's a gentleman at MIT who knows this stuff backwards and forwards called Ted Postol, who points out that these very same capabilities can be very easily directed at Russia, and therefore Russia's fears that they might have a Russian orientation cannot be dismissed.
Do you think, and I've heard this before, but I'm not sure whether this is really right, but I've heard people say that they think that the defensive missiles in Eastern Europe are there to augment America's offensive capability, to put the American military in a position where they can, at least they believe, successfully get away with a first strike against the former Soviet Union there in Russia.
Well, there was a very interesting article in Foreign Affairs recently, the name of the author is escaping me right now, but that said that the United States is on its way towards developing, in effect, a first strike ability against Russian nuclear forces.
It touched off a lot of debate back and forth on the question, so whether that's sort of actually an objective of American upgrades of its forces and accuracy and so forth is kind of an open question, but it's a fact that the Russian forces are kind of falling behind and the U.S. forces are getting more accurate and lethal in that respect.
And so, but what's truly, what I want to point out and underscore here is why on earth are we talking about first strike, second strike with Russia?
One question.
Is there anything in that relationship, I mean, there are a few tensions now, but mostly they're about nuclear weapons, as a matter of fact, or NATO expansion, those two things.
But why on earth is that even a discussion now?
It's as if the Cold War had never ended, it's just like a limb that was amputated, but we still think it's out there, and so we keep on threatening one another, and I can't see that it makes any sense at all.
Well, yeah, it seems like at this point here, pretty soon anyway, we'll all be obligated to defend the territorial integrity of former Soviet Georgia.
American boys will be obligated to prevent South Ossetia from seceding.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, that is insanity, I'm sorry, but you're right.
Yeah, and once again, the lack of thought here is behind the whole expansion of NATO.
You know, here you have a crazy situation, the thing is, you know, bringing in new members in droves, and is actually carving into the old Soviet Union, as you point out.
That can only be experienced as threatening, I mean, it's their own former territory.
What is it about?
What's NATO for?
The only thing that NATO is actually doing, and it's the first time it's fought a war, is sending people to Afghanistan, and they're losing there.
So the whole thing is sort of conceptually on a cracked foundation.
But somehow, nobody tries to straighten that out, or to figure out what the direction really should be.
Yeah, and all you have to do is just turn the situation around.
What if they were bringing in all of South America, Canada, and Mexico into the Warsaw Pact?
And Texas.
Right, right, yeah.
Because Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, you know, Texas, Arizona, you know, maybe Oklahoma, you know.
Yeah, it's crazy.
In fact, I think it's worth pointing out that one of the harshest critics of America's policy toward Russia at this point is Pat Buchanan, who, you know, just like his boss Nixon was the only one who could go and meet with Mao Zedong, it takes Pat Buchanan to say, hey, lay off the Russkies, what are you doing?
Right, right.
Well, he's been through quite a few interesting transformations, including his very eloquent opposition to the Iraq War.
Very surprising.
Well, and I guess it was with the end of the Cold War, he said, all right, Warsaw Pact is gone, it's time to disband NATO and end all this.
And the promise was broken, and he resented it, I guess.
He remembered what the promise was, unlike the rest of the conservatives.
Yeah, everyone else just forgot about it.
Yeah.
Now, you talk about in your article how one of the, well, obviously, I guess, the biggest argument against the idea of nuclear disarmament is that having all the great powers armed with nuclear weapons all this time has prevented war.
Since World War II, the idea that America would go to, actually would go to war with Russia or with Europe or with any other great power is completely out of the question, because now the people who start the war can die in it too.
Yeah.
And so do we really want to undo that fact that's working in our favor right now?
Well, you know, as I was suggesting, what's undone that situation, even more than any existence of nuclear weapons, is we simply don't have a quarrel with Russia at present.
So we can live at peace with them without threatening mutual assured destruction against one another.
And that's the opportunity that I think we should seize.
But it's true, and there is something to it.
It's a very, very hard thing to assess what the influence of nuclear weapons was during the Cold War.
Certainly, I would say that they had a sobering influence.
They had an exacerbating influence too, because if you think of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that was about nuclear weapons.
In other words, it was caused by nuclear weapons.
So they exacerbated the situation terribly, but at the same time, they did introduce a certain sobriety, and certainly Kennedy and Khrushchev, for instance, were very keenly aware to their credit what was humanly involved if they made a mistake during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they managed to back off it quite shrewdly.
But the trouble is that whatever benefits of that kind existed during the Cold War, and as I say, they're very sort of cross-currents back and forth with some pluses and minuses, but whatever those were, they're deteriorating quickly in a world in which there are multiple nuclear powers.
It's one thing when you have two sides, and they're separated by an ocean and quite a large landmass as well, in all of Europe and Eastern Europe.
It's one thing to have this so-called deterrent set up, and in those circumstances, it's quite another when you've got already nine nuclear powers, and the curve is heading upward.
But then suddenly, you just think of Asia, for example.
You know, you have a multiplicity of nuclear relationships, and it's very, very hard, in fact, I would say it's impossible to achieve anything like the balance or the stability that was one feature of the Cold War arsenal, plus the fact that you get the danger that this technology is going to seep out from all those nine countries and others that are in the nuclear power business into the hands of terrorists, and that's really a whole new universe.
Yeah, I'm trying to remember, there was some mathematician who said that, all right, well, here's the statistics.
You have these tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in the world, therefore, there's a probability greater than zero that they will be used at some point.
It's as simple as that.
Yeah, yeah, and you know, when you marry up an ability to end our species, and that's what we've got, even today, we've probably got, it's hard to make a firm factual judgment on the question, because nobody truly knows, but we're sort of in that zone.
When you marry that up to just the sheer ingrained fallibility of human beings, it's an equation that doesn't work out well.
I remember during the testing of the nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India in 1998, there was this video clip, I just can't get it out of my head, it was a Pakistani general standing out in the middle of a field somewhere, telling the cameraman, you tell those Indians, we're not scared of them, and they're atom bombs, they can bring it on, pal.
Talking like George Bush.
No connection to reality here at all, you know, I'm Mr. Tough Guy, drop an atom bomb on my head, I'm not afraid.
Yeah, no, that's absolutely true, and the Indians began to brag and boast in the few weeks that passed between their nuclear test in 1998 and the Pakistani response, they began to brag and boast in the same way.
Just incredible that people would really, I mean, you know, when George Bush is talking about the Sunni insurgency that's armed with AKs and roadside bombs, that's bad enough, but to literally have people with that kind of power talking like that about atomic weapons.
Yeah, it's truly terrifying, and then when you recall that their so-called father of their bomb, Mr. A.Q.
Khan, was out there peddling that stuff all over the world, set up a kind of secret multinational corporation for selling bomb kits to Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, etc.
It's really a formula for global anarchy, and by the way, I was looking in the news the other day, seeing that the same Mr. A.Q.
Khan, who's been under merely house arrest for these supremely dangerous activities, is getting sick of house arrest and is appealing the new authorities over there for a release.
We'll see how that goes.
Yeah, well, and from what I understand, the nuclear network, the black market nuclear network that he helped set up, is still in existence, with or without him.
Well, that was the thing about it.
He made use of international suppliers from Germany, Switzerland, Malaysia, Dubai, all over the place, Hungary, Turkey, and those people are still out there.
They haven't been brought to account.
They have not been brought into court and tried, with a very, very few exceptions.
And so the network is something that went far beyond Khan and was international, truly.
Now, one of the things that, I think this was in your article, I forget, there's three of them, Time to Bury a Dangerous Legacy, part one, two, and three, in Yale Global Online right now, but one of y'all bring up the possibility or the example of full scale between India and Pakistan, a conflict there, and what effect that would have on the rest of the world.
And I think it was in your article where you talk about the nuclear winter that scientists figured out if America and the Soviet Union had a full scale war back in the Cold War days, that that would have put enough smoke and dust in the sky to create a nuclear winter and pretty much destroy all the people in all the countries that didn't even have anything to do about it.
And then you're asking the question of, well, what if we had more of a limited nuclear war between a couple of powers like India and Pakistan, for example, what effect would that have on the rest of the people of the earth?
Yeah, well, that was not my article, but that was the other gentleman, but it's authoritative.
You know, back in the 1980s, the concept of nuclear winter was discovered, and the danger that if enough of these weapons went off, you'd have soot and smoke and all kinds of particulates and so on, lofted into the atmosphere, kind of like a mega-volcano, sufficient to shroud the earth and cause a kind of nuclear winter so that you'd have a couple of years with no crops growing and all the consequences of that.
Then it got sort of downgraded to being a sort of nuclear fall.
But now they've used the new meteorological models that have been developed for global warming calculations and so forth.
And they've discovered that actually nuclear winter is a real threat after all, and not only that, but that even a nuclear war between Pakistan and India, as you say, would be enough to very severely cool the earth, at least for a season or two, and disrupt agriculture on a global basis.
Oh, you bring up this idea of the breakout, that, well, if the great powers get rid of their nuclear weapons, and oh, I can hear George Bush saying it right now, all the terrorists and the North Koreans are going to hold us all hostage.
Well, in the first place, if you ask yourself, how is it that a terrorist could get hold of a nuclear weapon or nuclear materials to make one, there's only one answer.
That's one technical task that they cannot perform.
It really takes a state to refine uranium or to produce plutonium.
So it's sort of a positive feature that's built into the nuclear dilemma.
But they can very easily steal them or buy them or whatever that would be through the black market or the services of an AQ con or what have you.
And so there's no way, once that's happened, once the bomb is in the hands of the terrorists, that you can stop it reliably from getting into the United States.
You know, you know, the old joke is that you hide it in a bale of marijuana.
Right.
There's plenty of that coming in.
And there's plenty of that coming in.
And there are plenty of people, as we know, you know, from Canada, from Mexico, even more and so on and so forth and on both coasts.
So the only way to cut the nexus, to cut the tie there is to stop any diversion of the materials in the first place.
Now, if you start and there's only one way really reliably to do that, and that is to roll back this technology on a global basis.
In other words, you start with a ban on fissile materials and then you start cutting it back.
The same time you cut back the weapons until you went right down to right down to zero.
And this is one of the reasons why it's especially urgent now to name zero nuclear weapons as the goal, because that's a step that's directly responsive to this new danger, this arisen of terrorist threat, not to speak of proliferation to other countries.
It's the only way you can you can get a handle on that, because if there are no nuclear materials in the world or very few, then terrorists can't steal them and they can't make it themselves.
Those problems solved.
And, you know, I think it's worth pointing out, too, how many states there are in the world that have no interest in having nuclear weapons whatsoever.
Well, that's that's fascinating.
You know, there's a sociologist, Kenneth Boulding, who once said that if it's been done, it's possible.
So when people say to me, well, that's just dreaming to talk about doing without nuclear weapons, I say, what about South America?
Argentina and Brazil have very active nuclear power programs, including the fuel cycle.
But and they sort of drag their feet for a long time on signing the NPT.
But eventually, led by Mexico, the country you don't often think of in terms of the nuclear question, but they played a very important role here.
They brokered the signing of a treaty called PLATELOLCO, hard, hard word to say, in which all of South America, Latin America has agreed to be nuclear weapon free, even though they're perfectly capable of doing it.
And nobody thinks that was impossible.
It's existed and very secure.
Nobody thinks it's going to change any time soon.
So if South America, why not Asia?
Right.
And, you know, South Africa actually had nuclear weapons and then gave them up.
And we don't want to.
That's true.
You know, although it's not a totally pretty story, because that was when the white apartheid regime was giving way to black majority rule.
So it was a little bit as if they were saying, well, we don't want to give these black people.
But still, still it was done.
It shows that it's possible for a country.
And that's the only true example of that we have of a country that had a full fledged nuclear program plus nuclear bombs and just unraveled the whole thing and got rid of it.
Shows you can happen.
Well, you know, I'd like to try to make an argument geared toward the imperialist warmongers in this country who really do believe that the rest of the world belongs to us and that we must dominate it forever.
I suggest that we can still do that even without nuclear weapons.
And you know what we want?
If that's what we want, we probably could do it better without them.
I don't I don't want that.
So I don't like to lean on an argument.
Yeah, I mean, I think we could mind our own business.
And I think it's hopeless for us to try to rule the world.
We can't even we can't even take take over the city of Basra in Iraq.
You know, never mind the whole world.
It's a pipe dream.
It's a brutal, farce and fantasy.
Sure.
And for those who are even still scared of the Russians, I mean, the fact is, if if we just unilaterally disarm and had no nuclear weapons at all and the Russians decided they were going to try to take advantage and bomb America, I don't know how that could possibly be in their interest.
But anyway, in the paranoid fantasy, the United States military could still reduce Moscow to rubble without a single atom bomb.
No, it's true that American conventional superiority.
You see the irony here and again, it's not an argument that I want to lean on because I'm not an advocate of of the U.S. running the world or quite the opposite, just like you.
Nevertheless, one of the ironies here, just to point up the irrationality of the situation is that in the nuclear sphere, the U.S. does not I mean, notwithstanding what I said about, you know, possible first strike capacity against Russia, the the final truth of the matter is that it does not have superiority because we can't stop, you know, even a Pakistan should they should they try from smuggling a bomb over here and blowing it up or even a terrorist group.
So in a certain way, in the nuclear field, we're at parity, even with much smaller powers that can check up just a few nuclear weapons because of their extraordinary power in the conventional sphere.
It's not true.
You know, we we have half of the world spending on conventional military arms.
We're obviously superior in firepower, you know, maneuverability, everything else to all other countries.
But but but I can't point that out as if I think that this gives us the ability to push around other countries because we see in Basra, northern Pakistan, Afghanistan, et cetera, et cetera, that even these military forces, for all their apparent superiority, are overmatched by something or other when local people get mad at us and start to fight.
Yeah, well, they're they're perfectly good for defending America against attack.
And, you know, in particular, against other powers, Canada might attack us and we could repel the Canadians.
Right, right.
But will would our Marines ever really be able to occupy Vancouver?
Probably not.
Probably that's what it really comes down to.
We're just like Basra.
Right, right.
Yeah, we can we can, you know, fight back against your army.
But occupying your cities, you know, as though we were the British Empire, it doesn't seem like Americans are cut out for that kind of work.
So it seems that we're not.
And in fact, I don't think I think that day is over.
I think the day of empire is over.
And so it was a piece of stupendously bad timing for the United States at the end of the Cold War and especially after 9-11 to suddenly style itself as a globe straddling empire.
And isn't it funny, it isn't the hydrogen bombs, it's the AK-47.
That's what ended the age of empire.
The average schmuck in the in the average dirt hole town can now defend himself with a Kalashnikov.
Well, that's absolutely right.
And that's the other thing about nuclear weapons.
And if you I've been teaching a course on it, I'm in New Haven now here at Yale University.
And so I've given me occasion to look back and examine the history pretty closely.
And one of the conclusions that stands forth is the spectacular irrelevance, which eventually was felt by all the presidents of these weapons.
We can't use them.
The threats don't work.
The only thing they're good for is stopping someone else from using one, maybe.
And so they are not actually a source of power, strange to say, for all their explosive force.
They're not a source of power and there's very little you can do with them.
So it's another reason that it would be just fine to get rid of them.
Where do we go from here?
The no nuke movement, what do we do?
Well, I think I think what has to happen is that there are two tracks in in arms control and disarmament that have always been separate and that need to be brought together.
On the one hand, you have sort of what's formally called arms control, which is really the Moscow, Washington talk, the kind of bilateral two country thing that started way back in 1972 with the Assault One Treaty and continue down to the present with the various acronymic names, which I won't go into.
And it's a two power thing.
And then on the other hand, you have nonproliferation efforts, which is centered around the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
I think that what needs to happen, if we can have any hope of getting a handle on proliferation and and anti nuclear terrorism or whatever you want to call it, that those two strands need to be brought together into some single forum or negotiation.
They have to be related to one another so that the great powers, in fact, all the existing nuclear powers would offer a very, very simple deal to the potential proliferators.
And it really would be the fulfillment of what's already in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the way we were saying, and that is, look, we're going to do what we agreed to under Article six.
We're going to get out of the nuclear business.
And here's our timetable.
Ronald Reagan, who was a great abolitionist, by the way, wanted to do it in 10 years.
So maybe that would be a good time frame.
So we're getting out of this and here are the steps and here's what we're going to do.
So you don't you don't get into it.
Right.
The world is leaving this behind.
And I think that would immediately create what we we entirely lack at the moment, which is a kind of consistent global will to all move together in the same direction.
And that would be out of the nuclear age, out of the age of nuclear arms, because right now, you know, we say, oh, Iran's doing this, that and the other.
They're getting there.
There seem to be proliferating or getting ready for it.
Russians say, wait a minute, we want to sell a reactor to Iran.
We don't want to put on so much pressure.
Let's water it down.
The French say the same thing and so on and so forth.
So you have a broken will, you have an ineffectual.
But if you were to bring these two strands together, you'd have a united will, I think, of the countries of the world.
Not to speak of the hundred and eighty three that already do without nuclear weapons would be all for this and it would be irresistible.
Yeah, I think definitely America could take the lead in that and just say, here we are, we're the biggest power in the world and we're willing to give them up now.
You have nothing to point at and say we need them to defend ourselves and the Americans anymore.
Yeah, I think I think the United States, which is, you know, you know, it's a universal danger, you know, that's in the nature of it, because it's just physics of the 20th century and any mind can grasp it.
But in another way, it's a it's a it's a red, white and blue problem.
You know, we we we developed it, we we actually used it on a human population.
We came up with almost all of the innovations, both technical and strategic during the Cold War.
And so we've always been for better or worse and mostly for worse in the lead on this issue.
So I think it would be highly appropriate if we took the lead in heading back down the mountain and down into the safe valley of of of a nuclear weapon free world.
And by the way, I just want to mention I mentioned just now that, you know, Ronald Reagan was an ardent abolitionist and almost came to an agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev on that in 1986.
Right.
He said he thought that God put him on earth to abolish nuclear weapons.
Indeed, he did.
And he came close.
It's an amazing thing because a little counterintuitive, because he also, you know, engaged in a big nuclear buildup and so on.
But the fact is that he was a fervent nuclear abolitionist, amazing thing.
And his idea has been taken up by his secretary of state, George Shultz, and they've got a bunch of co-signatories on some articles in the including Henry Kissinger, believe it or not.
I know.
In fact, I was going to ask you about that.
It's in my notes.
Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Senator Nunn as well.
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be suspicious now of this movement.
Yeah, well, I like to say that it's as if the four horsemen of the apocalypse turned their horses around and started galloping in the opposite direction.
Sounds about right.
Wow.
So, yeah, there you go.
George Shultz and Henry Kissinger even agree with you and I.
It's time to get rid of the nukes, huh?
Well, they do.
And and so that's a real feature.
And they've got a whole raft of other signatories.
They've got like, you know, a very high percentage of former secretaries of state and defense who who signed on with them.
So it's a it's a deep change in the sort of nuclear priesthood, so-called.
So once again, what's stopping us?
But what other is now stopping us from doing this?
If if if, you know, even official opinion is starting to swing around in that direction.
Right.
Why can't we just do it?
Although, you know, to counter that, wasn't it just last week or two weeks ago that Hillary Clinton was denouncing Barack Obama for refusing to endorse Truman's nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Really?
You know, I missed that.
Well, it was the Reverend Wright thing because Wright denounced it.
And so somebody said, well, Barack Obama, you're not going to agree with him about that, are you?
And I forget exactly what his answer was, but he refused to come out, come right out and endorse the nuking of Japan.
And that was just too much for Hillary Clinton.
How dare he?
God, she'll use anything, won't she?
It's really incredible.
Also, you know, and I'm sorry we're over time and I got to let you go here, but I got to point this out to as long as we're on it.
When when Barack Obama mentioned to the Council on Foreign Relations that, hey, you know, we might have to put some guys in Pakistan to go after Osama and so forth.
I believe it was an Associated Press reporter said, well, but you wouldn't use nuclear weapons, would you?
And he said, no, I absolutely would not use nukes in Pakistan.
Of course not.
And Hillary Clinton denounced him for that, too, and said, you should never say who you won't nuke.
Yeah, that was that was again, he was playing the tough card, trying to play the tough card.
She sure is tough.
I'll give her that.
All right, everybody.
That's Jonathan Schell.
He is a Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of The Fate of the Earth and the Seventh Decade, The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.
And his new article in Yale Global Online is Time to Bury a Dangerous Legacy.
Thank you very much for your time today, Jonathan.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
