The Dream of a Nuclear-Free Planet

These days, the Obama administration is finalizing the third review of the American nuclear doctrine since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The approval of the strategic document, known as the Nuclear Posture Review, was announced for December 2009, then for February, and finally for March 1. Now, we continue to wait.

The essence of the plan, leaked little by little, has been agreed upon: A drastic reduction of existing atomic bombs in the U.S arsenal (about 9,400), the removal or drastic reduction of warheads deployed on bases of seven European countries (between 300 and 500 installed in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Italy and Turkey), the upgrading of testing laboratories (already approved for 3.7 billion euros [4.9 billion dollars] over the next three years), renunciation (already official) of “bunker-buster” weapons and of Bush’s proposed missile defense system in Central Europe, credible missile systems deployment in the Gulf and East Asia, and the improvement of Prompt Global Strike, the non-nuclear weapons system that is able to hit any target on Earth in less than an hour.

The plan has not been finalized yet because some of the content only has meaning when included with the new bilateral nuclear arms reduction plan with Russia and the revision of the U.S. nuclear umbrella in Japan and Europe. It is a pending agreement that is hard to negotiate, and in the case of NATO, conditioned by the ongoing review of the strategic concept.

All of these difficulties can be quickly surpassed if Obama’s top advisers agree on two issues that have already ignited more than six highest-level meetings at the White House: What are nuclear weapons good for and how are they useful in the 21st Century? Should the U.S. renounce the first use of nuclear arms, which has been in effect since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, now 65 years ago?

In Prague on April 5, 2009, Obama advanced a radical change in the U.S. nuclear doctrine by betting for “a world without nuclear weapons … this goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime.” The objective (call it a dream, or an ideal if you’d like) was repeated in September’s U.N. Security Council Resolution 1887.

The Right immediately accused him of naivety and the Left of falsifying and simultaneously increasing the military budget. Obama was deaf to all criticism. He was convinced that only through a substantial reduction of U.S. and Russian arsenals, which make up approximately 95 percent of the 27,000 nuclear warheads that exist in the world today, can you successfully fight terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

To summarize the risk of nuclear terrorism, Obama has called a summit in New York of some 40 countries for April 8 and 9. To strengthen the regime against nuclear proliferation, created under the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the 188 countries that have ratified it will meet from May 3–28 in New York.

The possibilities for any agreements on these forums are minimal if the United States and Russia do not lead by example before requesting others to make new commitments, if the eight countries already possessing nuclear weapons (nine, if we count North Korea’s test in 2006) do not modify their current security strategies, and if they don’t change their current psychological and political conditions, which have converted Pakistan, India and the U.S. Senate, to name only three, into noticeable adversaries of nuclear disarmament.

In the last year, at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Pakistan made a treaty that prohibits the production of usable fuel to make bombs. India’s cooperation in the NPT is dependent on a permanent bench in the Security Council of the U.N. Finally, the U.S. Senate continues to boycott all the efforts Obama has been making to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty approved by the Clinton Administration in 1999.