Overview
With
the end of the Cold War many long-held assumptions about national
defense and foreign policy are being re-examined. The picture
before us is complex and contradictory. The clash of superpowers
no longer seems to pose as a great a threat to the planet; but
weapons-grade nuclear material is becoming available to countries
large and small. Vicious ethnic wars, from the former Yugoslavia
to Central Africa, are erupting; yet financial constraints facing
governments around the world make the multi-billion dollar global
arms trade increasingly absurd.
In this
fluid situation, alternative longer-term and more fundamental
approaches to the ongoing armaments threat must be discussed
and considered.
One of
these is what has been termed "general and complete disarmament"
(GCD).
Most people—including
much of the press corps—do not realize that GCD proposals
were once widely debated in the United States and abroad.
At various times, for example, such proposals were put forward
by the administrations of Presidents Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt,
Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Especially important—and
perhaps newly relevant with the end of the cold war—were
the 1962 Kennedy-era McCloy-Zorin U.S./Soviet "Agreed Principles"
for general and complete disarmament.
Recently,
renewed public discussion of nuclear abolition has come from
such previously unlikely sources as the Stimson Center and
Paul Nitze and Robert McNamara, as well as from former heads
of the Strategic Air Command and NATO. What could begin to
emerge from this process, we believe, is a recognition that
in order to deal effectively with nuclear issues, one must
also inevitably consider the question of conventional imbalances—and
hence, "general" nuclear-conventional disarmament schemes.
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