Net Zero

Michael Reynolds-POOL/Getty Images Get real: Kissinger and Shultz mean well, but their mission is misguided.

The Zero Nukes movement got a big boost this week when two former U.S. secretaries of state — tough-minded Republicans Henry Kissinger and George Shultz — met with President Barack Obama in the White House, along with former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and former Secretary of Defense William Perry.

It was the same Henry Kissinger who, after the October 1986 Reykjavik summit, criticized Shultz (and then U.S. President Ronald Reagan) for delegitimizing the role of nuclear weapons in keeping the peace over the previous 40-plus years. And it was the same George Shultz who defended the Reagan administration’s buildup of nuclear arms before the Russians got serious about real reductions.

Granted, times change. And with them, legitimately, opinions of the likes of Kissinger and Shultz. Plus, it’s hard to disparage a fine goal, like getting rid of all nuclear weapons forevermore. Lofty aims often move history.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Or at least that picture — Kissinger and Shultz advocating nuclear zero with Obama? I’d respectfully say several things to the well-meaning men in that photograph.

First: Get real. These men are realistic enough to acknowledge that there are lots of steps between the world today and the lofty goal of tomorrow — such as tough-minded verification, everywhere around the world, to eliminate all existing nukes and to preclude building any nukes anywhere in that no-nukes world.

Really? Including North Korea? Including Iran? Everywhere around the world?

To think that we’ll ever be able to verify nuclear matters everywhere around the world — to think this is even conceivably possible — is to lose all grip on reality. These are not problems to overcome with hard diplomatic work and imagination, but illusions to be dismissed by practical folks.

Second: Why stop there? If you’re spending time and effort on a goal as lofty as no-nukes, why not go full blast and spend your time and effort on no-war? Peace on Earth, everywhere, forevermore.

Don’t laugh. That’s what serious diplomats did in the 1920s with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a treaty signed by nearly all countries in the world that totally renounced war. The most distinguished diplomats of their day, on the order of Kissinger and Shultz, spent enormous time and effort negotiating it.

Before too long, Japan turned militaristic, Italy turned fascist, and Germany turned Nazi. The nations of the world, having signed a solemn pact to eliminate war, engaged in a global conflagration that resulted in more than 50 million deaths.

One suspects that these distinguished diplomats of the 1920s could have focused their energies on more practical actions than dickering over the language of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, now mocked by anyone more advanced than having taken IR 101 in college.

Third and related: Get productive. There’s a lot of serious work to be done on nuclear weapons — stabilizing nuclear-armed Pakistan as a cohesive state, stopping the Iranian effort, ensuring the security of Russian nuclear weapons (once dubbed loose nukes), precluding trade in enriched uranium and plutonium, making sure existing nuclear states have PALs (permissive action links) and other devices to render the weapons useless for unauthorized personnel (like terrorists), and so on. I can think of a dozen serious matters, each quite complicated and important. Experts I know can surely add to this list.

Scores of tangible steps are necessary to make our nuclear world much safer. Allocating time and effort to no-nukes slogans takes limited energies away from such real needs.

It’s as if the director of the National Cancer Institute turned the agency’s focus to promoting no-cancer campaigns worldwide, including a no-cancer meeting in the Oval Office. Wouldn’t it be better to focus attention on real medical research to combat cancer rather than PR efforts for someday eliminating all cancer?

Fourth and last: The premise is wrong. The no-nukes movement presumes that vertical nonproliferation (basically, the United States and Russia cutting down and then eliminating their nuclear weapons) affects horizontal proliferation (Iran and others, like North Korea, obtaining nukes).

But does it? Is Iran pursuing nuclear weapons because the United States hasn’t reduced its stockpiles enough? No way. It’s because the country wants to become the main power in the world’s key region and deter the United States from taking any action against its funding of terrorism and all sorts of other dastardly actions.

Did North Korea get nukes because U.S. arms control efforts weren’t vigorous enough? Again, no. It’s because that was the only way for anyone to pay the least attention to this poor, desperate country and its pathetic dictator.

In fact, the United States and Russia have done a staggering amount of reducing nuclear arms. Both arsenals are way, way below the totals when Kissinger and Shultz were in office.

In fact, nuclear arms reductions have proceeded at a pace none of us thought possible, or even imagined, in the 1970s and 1980s. But we didn’t have any no-nukes movement then. Our efforts were far more serious, and — I’m happy to say — far more productive.