Former U.S. Officials Urge World Powers to Reaffirm Move Toward Nuclear Disarmament

World nuclear powers need to reinvigorate efforts to reduce weapon stockpiles which have lost much of their deterrent value since the end of the Cold War, a bipartisan group of four former U.S. foreign policy officials wrote in a Wall Street Journal commentary published today (see GSN, Nov. 28, 2006).

While nations continue to need to deter potential enemies, “reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective,” says the commentary by former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn.

The emergence of North Korea as a nuclear-armed nation, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the risk of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons could all lead to “a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence,” the authors wrote.

Of particular concern are nuclear-armed terrorists.

“Nonstate terrorist groups with nuclear weapons are conceptually outside the bounds of a deterrent strategy and present difficult new security challenges,” the commentary says.

The four call for a series of steps to “lay the groundwork for a world free of the nuclear threat,” including:

— reducing the alert status of deployed nuclear weapons to lower the chances of accidental or unauthorized launches (see GSN, April 5, 2005);

— cutting nuclear forces “substantially” (see GSN, Dec. 7, 2006);

— eliminating short-range nuclear weapons (see GSN, Feb. 9, 2005);

— encouraging key states to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (see GSN, Nov. 17, 2006);

— securing weapon-usable nuclear materials worldwide (see GSN, Dec. 18, 2006);

— controlling the production of enriched uranium, while ensuring access to nuclear fuel (see GSN, Sept. 19, 2006); and

— ending the production of fissile materials for weapons (see GSN, May 18, 2006; Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4).

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Sam Nunn is co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.  NTI is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by the National Journal Group.]

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