Nobody opines sagely anymore that the races will never get along, calmly ladling conventional certainties over the earnest idealism of civil-rights activists. But we live in a world so permeated with militarized fear of demagogic leaders and rogue states that nuclear deterrence retains enough of the default credibility it had during the Cold War, as the opposite of utopian naivete, and common sense is still on the defensive.
No matter that some of the most prominent old Cold Warriors have lost their faith in nuclear weapons, and grasp that us vs. them security concepts are disastrously counterproductive in today's more complex, more nationally porous global reality, and have downgraded that era's most notorious acronym -- M.A.D., as in Mutually Assured Destruction -- to just plain mad.
"U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage . . ."
Let those words reverberate, as we ponder their seriousness: ". . . to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons . . . and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world. . . . (which) is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era."
They were written, in early 2007, by two former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and George
Schultz; a former secretary of defense, William Perry; and former Sen. Sam Nunn, long-time chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. All are ex-hawks, stalwart defenders of the Free World back in the day, but here they are speaking in humbler language, language that is plaintive and almost prayer-like, of "a world free" -- of nuclear weapons.
They warn: ". . .the U.S. soon will be compelled to enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence. 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 world-wide without dramatically increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used."
And they quote JFK: "The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution."
Their words have given courage to editorial boards here and there. In August, the San Francisco Chronicle, citing the support of "well-known realists" Kissinger and Shultz, editorialized that "the United States should take the lead in building a consensus for reducing, and ultimately disarming, global stocks of nuclear weapons."
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