Down & Out: A Nuclear Path
by Gar Alperovitz, Alex Campbell, Thad Williamson
The Nation (December 30, 1996) Vol. 263, No. 22: 16-20.
Copyright 1996 The Nation Company Inc.

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Accordingly, reducing nuclear weapons beyond a certain point in such circumstances must eventually also bring with it a demand for reciprocal conventional reductions. The build-down of nuclear and conventional forces in Europe during the past decade is a prime example of the basic logic in action.

But if long-term nuclear disarmament requires a global approach-and if specific situations of regional disarmament also will require simultaneous conventional build-downs-we are forced back to the overall disarmament argument: "In the end, longer-term nuclear and conventional reductions must be viewed together, and ultimately they require global action-i.e., general disarmament.

To some, disarmament thinking will always seem utopian. However, with the cold war over, the threat (real or imagined) that brought the world to its present level of armed terror is no more. Even in its wildest imagination, the Pentagon no longer sees the Russians as trying to take over Europe; a Russian nuclear attack on the West would be suicidal.

Many of the real or imagined obstacles that stood in the way of disarmament efforts have also disappeared: "Significant elements of what in the West's view would be a first or even second stage [of general disarmament] have been or soon will be achieved, de jure or de facto," former White House disarmament negotiator Lawrence Weiler observes. These include the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; conventional arms rollback in Europe, agreements on outer space, biological warfare and chemical warfare, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, recently signed by all five declared nuclear powers.

The long U.S.-Russian struggle over what to do about Germany is also no longer an issue. And the once-vexing question of mutual verification-a process with which the United States now has real experience and greatly enhanced technologies-is also much less problematic.

Most on the right are totally opposed to disarmament. They believe that maintaining massive nuclear and conventional arms is essential to U.S. security-perhaps forever, or at least for many, many decades. Some on the left worry that discussion of general disarmament will get in the way of nuclear disarmament, that it dilutes concern over the nuclear threat.

The latter view is challenged by Institute for Policy Studies fellow and former Kennedy Administration disarmament expert Marcus Raskin: "My concern is that the nuclear abolition movement should not become the movement to make the world safe for non-nuclear war." "And Nobel laureate Joseph Rotblat has pointed out that a fundamental requirement of total nuclear abolition is a world of open governments that permit effective citizen verification of compliance. This in turn requires demilitarization to end the "war system," hence ultimately something like general disarmament.

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