No More "All Options Are On The Table"?

Following up from this older post (and this one as well) - it would be nice indeed if what the following article discusses would become a reality:

Nuclear Arms Ban Is Hot Again
Interest grows among world leaders, 'Global Zero' campaign builds steam.
By Sean Casey

The movement to abolish nuclear weapons, after dropping low on the political radar, shows signs of resurging in the Obama era.

In December, 100 world dignitaries gathered in Paris to unveil the Global Zero campaign -- an effort to eliminate nuclear arms spearheaded by international political, military, and business leaders.

Principle signatories include Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev and Robert McNamara.

Global Zero seeks to develop an international agreement to disarm and dismantle nuclear arms through phased and verified reductions. The plan's first phase will call for heavy reductions to U.S. and Russian arsenals, which comprise 96 per cent of the world's nuclear weapons.

Dr. Jennifer Simons -- a Global Zero principle signatory and winner of the Vancouver Citizens' Peace award -- said there's "been a massive change of mind expressed globally" about nuclear proliferation, and that the winds of change now favour disarmament.

Treaties stalled by Bush

After the Cold War, there was a brief flurry of advancement towards disarmament.

In 1994, the U.S. and Russia agreed to de-target their strategic missiles. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was extended indefinitely the following year, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) was signed in 1996.

But the past decade has not been kind to abolition ambitions.

Nuclear disarmament stalled in key areas. The U.S. did not ratify the CTBT, and the Bush administration withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 to pursue missile defence systems.

In other political and military arenas, abolition took a step backwards. India and Pakistan emerged on the world stage as nuclear powers in 1998. North Korea tested its own nuclear weapon in 2006, and Iran has been accused of pursuing technology to enrich weapon-grade uranium.

Nuclear disarmament renaissance

Despite the setbacks, new calls for disarmament have emerged from high-level policy analysts in recent years.

In January 2007, Henry Kissinger and George Schulz reignited the disarmament debate with an essay published in the Washington Post. They warned that the U.S. "will enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence" unless the world freed itself from reliance on nuclear weapons and deterrence.

Kissinger and Schulz's warnings have not gone unheeded.

Dr. Wade Huntley, research director at UBC's Liu Institute for Global Issues, told a Vancouver conference last week that recommitment to a world free of nuclear weapons "has been increasingly adopted and embraced by foreign policy and strategic thinkers across the political spectrum in the United States."

On the White House's recently updated website, the Obama administration has promised to "move toward a nuclear free world" by strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, stopping the development of new nuclear weapons and by taking ballistic missiles off of hair-trigger alert.

"U.S. policy, which has long been an anchor in moving closer to a world free of nuclear weapons, could now become an engine," Huntley said. U.S. diplomatic leadership could pave the way toward "a global nuclear weapons agreement that, much like the land mines ban, would set the goal of elimination and map the path by which that goal can be realized," Huntley said.

Canadian enthusiasm waned

A poll conducted last year found 88 per cent of Canadians believe nuclear weapons make the world a more dangerous place.

But Huntley said the Canadian government's enthusiasm towards nuclear non-proliferation has waned.

"Everybody supports disarmament," Huntley said. "But what's really changed is that the nuclear issue doesn't have the prominence and priority in the public agenda the way it used to. The questions of energy development, of climate change, of human rights and human security have taken priority."

If nuclear apocalypse is no longer feared, why should disarmament continue to be a Canadian concern?

(Keep reading ...)