It seemed at first that ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction would continue along the lines we had managed to establish. In 1992, Presidents Yeltsin and Bush signed the START-2 Treaty, and the Chemical Weapons Convention was drafted. Shortly afterwards, however, the process began slowing down before stalling completely. The START-2 Treaty languished in the US Congress and the Russian Duma for several years, and was not ratified by Russia. The delay was particularly due to the protracted economic crisis in Russia. Neither was a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty agreed. Negotiations on monitoring compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention also got nowhere, blocked by the United States.
The reduction and elimination of weapons of mass destruction became a hostage to the general state of international relations, and in the 1990s, instead of gradual improvement and the growth of trust, the direction of travel was reversed. I have no doubt that the main reason for that was a misreading by the West, and particularly the United States, of the circumstances of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War.
The West claimed a victory, as if the Cold War had ended not as the result of joint efforts, not through negotiation, but thanks to power politics. This led them to conclude that they should further increase their strength and military superiority. They abandoned the joint commitment, documented in a statement in Geneva by the leaders of the USSR and the United States, that our countries would not seek military superiority over each other. This affirmation was, however, no less important than another historic provision of that joint declaration, acknowledging that nuclear war must never be allowed, and that in such a war there could be no winner.
The world witnessed the capital of trust accumulated in the second half of the 1980s being frittered away, as the prospect of a new, more secure world order was replaced by the spectre of chaos and a world in which might was right. The use of force against Yugoslavia, the expansion of NATO and missile strikes against Iraq during the second half of the 1990s demonstrated how the United States intended to handle security issues. The voices of Russia, China and even of some US allies were ignored. The policy of unilateralism formulated, incidentally, before George W. Bush arrived in the White House, became an ongoing negative factor in world politics. Might was right: other countries duly took note.
In the late 1990s, India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons and North Korea followed suit. There were questions about Iran’s nuclear programme and whether it really was intended, as claimed by the Iranian leaders, solely for peaceful purposes. There are dozens of potential threshold nuclear countries in the world that could, if they so chose, create nuclear weapons. The example of South Africa which, after the abolition of apartheid, renounced nuclear weapons and destroyed them, has had no successors. The threat of nuclear proliferation and a new arms race became a reality.
In international politics the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons has, in effect, been abandoned. Instead, in the military doctrine of the nuclear powers it is again regarded as an acceptable means of waging war, for a first or even a ‘preventive’ strike. This change first occurred in US military doctrine, before its example was followed by others.
We have to face the fact that the opportunities that arose with the ending of the Cold War have not been pursued. Indeed, frankly, they have been squandered.
Ban the bomb!
I believed, and still do, that the only way to save the world from the danger posed by nuclear weapons is to get rid of them completely. In the final analysis, that is the only way, and in early 2007 something happened that indicated this was understood in elite political and intellectual circles of the United States, the country that had in the past made the greatest ‘contribution’ to the nuclear arms race.
On 4 January 2007, the Wall Street Journal published ‘A World Free of Nuclear Weapons’, signed by such well-known US politicians from both major political parties as George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn. The fact that these ‘four wise men’, political heavyweights not given to utopian projects and who have unique experience of forming the policies of previous administrations, decided to go public on such an important issue as the need to repudiate nuclear weapons, testified to an important change of attitude among the American establishment. This was momentous.
I responded with an article, also published in the Wall Street Journal, on 31 January. I reminded its readers that, at their forum in Rome in November 2006, Nobel Peace Prize winners had issued a special appeal in respect of the nuclear threat. I reminded them too of the campaign, in which I participated, initiated by the world renowned physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Sir Joseph Rotblat (who died in 2005), to inform the public about the nuclear threat. I reminded them of the great work undertaken by Ted Turner’s Nuclear Threat Initiative. We shared a common understanding that the Non-Proliferation Treaty could not be allowed to gather dust and that the main onus for ensuring that did not happen was on the members of the ‘nuclear club’. I wrote:
We must put the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons back on the agenda, not in some distant future but as soon as possible. It links the moral imperative – the rejection of such weapons from an ethical standpoint – with the imperative of assuring security. It is becoming clearer that nuclear weapons are no longer a means of achieving security; in fact, with every passing year they are making our security more precarious.
Again, as in the mid-1980s, there is an issue of political will, of the responsibility of leaders of major states to overcome the gulf between talking about peace and security and the very real threats hanging over the world.
I called for a dialogue to be launched ‘within the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, involving both nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states, to cover the full range of issues related to the elimination of those weapons’. The goal would be to develop a common concept for moving towards a world free of nuclear weapons, and the key to success would be ‘reciprocity of obligations and actions’:
The members of the nuclear club should formally reiterate their commitment to reducing and ultimately eliminating nuclear weapons. As a token of their serious intent, they should without delay take two crucial steps: ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and make changes in their military doctrines, removing nuclear weapons from the Cold War-era high alert status. At the same time, the states that have nuclear-power programs would pledge to terminate all elements of those programmes that could have military use.
Banning nuclear weapons is not just a slogan but a specific, practical task. How is it to be accomplished, what is obstructing movement in that direction? These issues were the focus of intense, persistent discussion in the World Political Forum that I and a group of friends and allies established. The idea of setting up the forum found political support in many countries, and the inaugural conference took place in Turin on 18 May 2003. In my opening speech I said:
The main objective of our Forum is to help to re-start dialogue as the only means of addressing the problems accumulating in the world; to develop new rules of conduct for states in order to present them to governments, political forces and the public at large, in the hope that they will find new approaches to solving crises on an international level, generating the political will to reform international institutions, and create a new, just and secure world order.