Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Could nuclear weapons go the way of the Gustav Gun? In the late 1950s a movement arose to Ban the Bomb, and over the decades it escaped its founding circle of beatniks and eccentric professors and has gone mainstream. Global Zero, as the goal is now called, was broached in 1986 by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, who famously mused, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” In 2007 a bipartisan quartet of defense realists (Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and William Perry) wrote an op-ed called “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” with the backing of fourteen other former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of State and Defense.¹⁰⁷ In 2009 Barack Obama gave a historic speech in Prague in which he stated “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” an aspiration that helped win him the Nobel Peace Prize.¹⁰⁸ It was echoed by his Russian counterpart at the time, Dmitry Medvedev (though not so much by either one’s successor). Yet in a sense the declaration was redundant, because the United States and Russia, as signatories of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, were already committed by its Article VI to eliminating their nuclear arsenals.¹⁰⁹ Also committed are the United Kingdom, France, and China, the other nuclear states grandfathered in by the treaty. (In a backhanded acknowledgment that treaties matter, India, Pakistan, and Israel never signed it, and North Korea withdrew.) The world’s citizens are squarely behind the movement: large majorities in almost every surveyed country favor abolition.¹¹⁰

Zero is an attractive number because it expands the nuclear taboo from using the weapons to possessing them. It also removes any incentive for a nation to obtain nuclear weapons to protect itself against an enemy’s nuclear weapons. But getting to zero will not be easy, even with a carefully phased sequence of negotiation, reduction, and verification.¹¹¹ Some strategists warn that we shouldn’t even try to get to zero, because in a crisis the former nuclear powers might rush to rearm, and the first past the post might launch a pre-emptive strike out of fear that its enemy would do so first.¹¹² According to this argument, the world would be better off if the nuclear grandfathers kept a few around as a deterrent. In either case, the world is very far from zero, or even “a few.” Until that blessed day comes, there are incremental steps that could bring the day closer while making the world safer.

The most obvious is to whittle down the size of the arsenal. The process is well under way. Few people are aware of how dramatically the world has been dismantling nuclear weapons. Figure 19-1 shows that the United States has reduced its inventory by 85 percent from its 1967 peak, and now has fewer nuclear warheads than at any time since 1956.¹¹³ Russia, for its part, has reduced its arsenal by 89 percent from its Soviet-era peak. (Probably even fewer people realize that about 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from dismantled nuclear warheads, mostly Soviet.)¹¹⁴ In 2010 both countries signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which commits them to shrinking their inventories of deployed strategic warheads by two-thirds.¹¹⁵ In exchange for Congressional approval of the treaty, Obama agreed to a long-term modernization of the American arsenal, and Russia is modernizing its arsenal as well, but both countries will continue to reduce the size of their stockpiles at rates that may even exceed the ones set out in the treaty.¹¹⁶ The barely discernible layers laminating the top of the stack in the graph represent the other nuclear powers. The British and French arsenals were smaller to begin with and have shrunk in half, to 215 and 300, respectively. (China’s has grown slightly from 235 to 260, India’s and Pakistan’s have grown to around 135 apiece, Israel’s is estimated at around 80, and North Korea’s is unknown but small.)¹¹⁷ As I mentioned, no additional countries are known to be pursuing nuclear weapons, and the number possessing fissile material that could be made into bombs has been reduced over the past twenty-five years from fifty to twenty-four.¹¹⁸

Figure 19-1: Nuclear weapons, 1945–2015

Sources:HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/static/2927, based on data from the Federation of Atomic Scientists, Kristensen & Norris 2016a, updated in Kristensen 2016; see Kristensen & Norris 2016b for additional explanation. The counts include weapons that are deployed and those that are stockpiled, but exclude weapons that are retired and awaiting dismantlement.