Barack Obama's campaign for a world without nuclear weapons - By Matthias Nass

Is a world free of nukes possible? Unlike his predecessor, US President Barack Obama has embraced such an appeal by the "old cold warriors' peace movement." German elder statesmen have added their voices to the chorus. April's Nuclear Security Summit could take important steps forward.

The first step is to make nuclear weapons and fissionable material secure. Black markets would be shut, transport routes cut and financial resources for dark deals frozen, so that the deadliest and most destructive devices that human ingenuity has spawned do not fall into the hands of terrorists. However, the significance of the Nuclear Security Summit, to which Obama has invited heads of state and government from 43 countries to Washington on April 12 and 13, goes beyond that. Obama envisions it as a milestone on the path to a world without nuclear weapons, with himself blazing the trail.

The second stop on this long and perhaps endless road will be a UN conference in May to review the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). The last conference of this kind in 2005 ended in disarray. The five official nuclear powers (the US, Russia, China, France and Britain) and an overwhelming majority of non-nuclear NPT signatory states failed to reach any compromise at all. This time the chances look better. That's largely thanks to Obama, who has finally placed the issue of nuclear disarmament back on the international agenda.

After the Cold War ended, the issue of disarmament was shrouded in silence. It was a deceptive silence because new threats had supplanted the system of mutual deterrence between East and West, which had remained in place even after the Cold War had ended. The number of nuclear states has since grown to nine. Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea have acquired nuclear weapons. Now it is Iran's nuclear ambitions that threaten to unleash a new regional arms race in the Middle East. Meanwhile, fears grew that the system of nonproliferation could completely collapse, as have concerns that transnational terrorist groups might gain access to unsecured nuclear material, especially from post-Soviet states.

This was the background to the dramatic speech that Obama gave on April 5 last year at Prague Castle. The Cold War was over, the president said, but the danger emanating from weapons of mass destruction had in no way been banished. "In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up," Obama said.

He promised to speedily conclude a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia on reducing strategic weapons, and pledged to pressure Congress to finally ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) after years of inaction. Also, he announced steps to bolster the NPT by urging nuclear states to take resolute steps toward disarmament.

On March 26, Obama fulfilled the first of those promises when he and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev finally reached agreement on the terms of a new START deal. Each side will cut the number of its nuclear warheads from the current 2,200 to 1,550. The number of delivery systems - strategic bombers and land- and sea-based missiles - from the previous limit of 1,600 to fewer than 800.

Symbolically, the treaty will be signed on April 8 in Prague - almost exactly a year after Obama's watershed speech in the Czech capital on his vision for a nuclear-free future, and only days before the Nuclear Security Summit the president is due to host in Washington.

The summit picks up where Obama's Prague speech left off. One point was especially important for the president: "We must ensure that terrorists never acquire a nuclear weapon. This is the most immediate and extreme threat to global security. One terrorist with a nuclear weapon could unleash massive destruction. Al Qaeda has said that it seeks a bomb. And we know that there is unsecured nuclear material across the globe. To protect our people, we must act with a sense of purpose without delay...Today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." 

It was one of the president's most passionate speeches to date.

His critics were quick to respond, accusing him of being naïve and even threatening the peace, even though Obama had acknowledged that "this goal will not be reached quickly - perhaps not in my lifetime." Yet the first step had to be taken now, he said.

Obama is anything but a dreamer. His memorable rhetoric conceals a core of toughness and clear-eyed pragmatism. Similarly, his campaign has gained supporters as unlikely as they are eminent. They are seasoned realists, not peace activists.

In January 2007, the Wall Street Journal published an appeal for "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons" written by former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry and Sam Nunn, former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

This realpolitik 'Gang of Four' saw the world facing the abyss because of North Korea's and Iran's nuclear programs. "The world is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era," they wrote. Even more alarming was the possibility of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. "It is far from certain that we can successfully replicate the old Soviet-American 'mutually assured destruction' with an increasing number of potential nuclear enemies worldwide without dramatically increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used," they warned.

Quoting John F. Kennedy, they called for action: "The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution."

One year later, they fired another salvo, again in the Wall Street Journal, "Toward a Nuclear Free World." Their call to redouble efforts at concluding a START successor treaty, strengthening the NPT and ratifying the CTBT has found a growing list of supporters: Madeleine Albright, James A. Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Warren Christopher, Lawrence Eagleburger, Melvin Laird, Colin Powell - in other words, prominent members of the security policy establishment - backed the appeal. A German 'Gang of Four' consisting of Helmut Schmidt, Richard von Weizsäcker, Egon Bahr and Hans-Dietrich Genscher chimed in with a powerful statement.

These are no wide-eyed idealists but experienced politicians who have become the pioneers of a strategic nuclear transformation, an "adaptation to new realities," as Kissinger called it. Former President George W. Bush did not want to hear much about it but in Obama, the elder statesmen found a president who has embraced their ideas.

Early in February, the four Americans met with the German group (only Bahr was absent due to illness) at the American Academy on the shore of Berlin's Wannsee Lake. They have become the focal point of a growing movement for what has become known as "global zero," that former diplomats, officers and strategists from several European states including Russia have joined.

"The greatest danger the world faces today is the proliferation of nuclear weapons," Kissinger said in Berlin. "If this continues, nuclear war will be inevitable." The old warriors' peace movement is gaining momentum. "Time is not on our side," Schultz warned. "Things are slipping away." That is why the old men - and the young president in the White House - are pressing for action.

An assessment of the US nuclear position, the Nuclear Posture Review, is due out soon. Obama has rejected the Pentagon's initial draft as not going far enough. The president wants to slash the size of the US nuclear arsenal, while giving greater significance to missile defense. The 200 or so tactical nuclear weapons still in Europe might be removed. The new Nuclear Posture Review probably will not forswear the first use of nuclear weapons that Obama had hoped for. Resistance from the Pentagon and Obama's own White House advisors is too great.

Plans for US missile defense installations remain a thorny issue between Washington and Moscow. Although Obama has abandoned Bush's planned deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia has expressed displeasure with newer plans - clearly aimed at Iran - for missile defense installations in Romania and Bulgaria. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has led criticism, saying the project violated the strategic balance of power.

Besides the chorus of support that Obama has been hearing for a world without nuclear weapons, he has, of course, been facing criticism too. Hasn't deterrence worked, ask the skeptics. Hasn't the prospect of mutually assured destruction kept the peace so far? And could it be extended to other flashpoints such as India and Pakistan? Wouldn't wars even become more likely in a nuke-free world?

Above all: How would Obama keep tyrants of the stripe of Kim Jong-Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in check if he were to voluntarily give up his ultimate deterrent? "Most realists in the international security community regard such thinking as a hazy, long-term, and probably unachievable aspiration," Harvard political scientist Graham Allison recently wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs.

To be sure, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called France's nuclear arsenal "the nation's life insurance policy." British Prime Minister Gordon Brown also says his country will keep its nuclear weapons indefinitely. In a world this insecure, especially as other countries keep trying to develop nuclear weapons, Britain does not see a possibility of relinquishing its independent nuclear forces. Of course, conservatives in the US also argue that Obama's disarmament policy is a threat to US national security.

If, however, one agrees with Obama that the biggest current threat is that of nuclear terrorism, one must then also agree that prompt action is essential. Also, there can be no doubt that the two nuclear superpowers of the Cold War must lead the way. Of the 23,000 nuclear warheads today in existence - in the mid-1980s the total exceeded 70,000 - more than 22,000, or 95 percent belong to the US or Russia. The remaining 1,000 or so are divided among China, France, the UK, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. 

The disarmament rhetoric by the US and Russia will only become credible once they themselves set an example by substantially reducing their arsenals. They would hardly be jeopardizing their own security by resuscitating the disarmament process and creating fresh opportunities to stop proliferation.

"Arresting and then reversing the proliferation of nuclear weapons places a special responsibility on the established nuclear powers," Kissinger said at the Munich Security Conference in 2009. "They share no more urgent common interest than preventing the emergence of more nuclear-armed states." Progress will be slow and incremental and priority has to be given to what is attainable and verifiable, he noted, adding that progress has to be made: "Our age has stolen the fire from the gods; can we confine it to peaceful purposes before it consumes us?"