Disarmament: Dream and Reality

While nuclear disorder threatens the planet, dreams of a world where nuclear weapons would not are experiencing a renewed popularity.

The alarming instability of Pakistan, nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korean provocations remind us every day how fragile the non-proliferation regime is.

Faced with these three cases, the powerlessness is such that it is trying to project itself into an ideal future.

In Prague in April, then at the U.N. in September, Barack Obama has been a champion of eliminating nuclear weapons. This is a somewhat premature idea, but it comes from a generosity that we cannot fight.

Recall, after all, that Europe does not need nuclear weapons to bear the carnage of the 20th century. In this light then, deterrence is a blessing.

To achieve this ideal goal, the past encourages us to be minimally realistic: Disarmament is possible only if we succeed in making the world safer. We are a long way from that.

That said, France did not fall into the camp of the cranky, quickly portrayed as preventers of disarming. No, we do not cling to the symbol of “greatness” to preserve our past ways of mass destruction, as the clichés of a certain anti-French campaign would like to believe.

Being that the elimination of nuclear arsenals is not for tomorrow, let us be firmly in favor of “the abolition” of the ultimate weapon, since it is in these moral terms that the question is asked.

Let’s make it clear that we have done more than any other country to work towards the noble cause: the elimination of missiles on Plateau d’Albion, reduction by one-third of airborne weapons, and transparently lowering the number of nuclear warheads to “less than three hundred,” which is the level of “strict sufficiency” for a credible deterrent.

Let’s demand that other nuclear powers do as much, and especially, that they stop strengthening and modernizing their arsenals.

This international campaign is just beginning. Mere words are not enough. But, above all, let us not act as if we are under siege and avoid identifying ourselves as the target of disarmament crusaders, while their real objective at this stage is to hide their failure in Iran, North Korea or Pakistan.