Under George Bush, America has made things far worse by its unilateral and preemptive policies, its over-reliance on military solutions, and its snubbing of global institutions that alone can fashion the framework of disarmament. Worse still, the United States has ceased being a restraining force for multilateral sobriety. Many of these new players are not subject to rational calculations of the old bottom-line Kremlin. Terrorists have greater chances to acquire unaccounted-for nuclear devices-and ever mounting perceived grievances. There are more nuclear players than ever before-many of them existential enemies of one another, like Pakistan and India who almost went to war once again in 2002. Only through luck and a half-century of Soviet-American trial-by-error diplomacy did the superpowers narrowly avoid blowing the world apart.īut now the threat is far worse still. America used it at Hiroshima in sloppy and casual fashion. The world’s nations often came to the bomb haphazardly. Schell’s argument is straightforward and at first glance unimpeachable. Witness the recent Wall Street Journal opinion essay calling for global abolition of nuclear weapons by the deans of American foreign policy Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry, and George Schultz. Nevertheless, Schell rightly points out that realists and conservatives have come a lot closer to his way of thinking from their prior insistence on unilateral American nuclear deterrence. Schell’s good Reagan came to his senses late in his administration, only after the other Reagan spent a fortune on strategic nuclear weapons, rearmed NATO forces in Europe with tactical nuclear weapons, and may well have helped thereby to implode the Soviet Union. The argument is again well-written, often passionate, and takes a new tack in praising the efforts of Ronald Reagan-the book’s unlikely hero-prophet-at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit where he tried to convince Mikhail Gorbachev to help him rid the world of nuclear arms. His latest plea updates the narrative of the earlier Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, by now warning us that seventy years into the nuclear age the nightmare of “The Bomb” is growing in ways far more dangerous than even during the Cold War American-Soviet stand-off. During the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s, Jonathan Schell became well known for his detailed arguments calling for global nuclear disarmament.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |