2008: A call to arms control

The year before us promises the beginnings of the first serious discussions of arms control and disarmament in more than a decade.

This fortuitous opportunity emerges from a broadening consensus around the world - both among women and men on the street and among elites - to implement more serious and effective arms control and disarmament measures. At least three convergent trends stand out to explain this new, more ringing call to arms control.

Growing threats, growing awareness

To begin, there is intensifying awareness and concern around the world about how to balance the obvious upsides of globalization with its increasingly apparent downsides. Regarding arms control, this plays out as an increasing need to balance the benefits of greater and more diffuse flows of people, goods, technologies and knowledge - including flows related to nuclear weapons - with a greater ability to monitor and prevent their misuse towards illicit and violent ends.

In particular, there is a higher concern about the threats posed by nuclear weapons and technologies - an apprehension expressed by political elites and the general public alike. Terrorist use of a nuclear or radiological weapon is widely seen as a real possibility, made all the more salient in recent months as a nuclear weapon state, Pakistan, teeters on the edge of political crisis.

Longstanding non-proliferation and disarmament mechanisms, such as the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), are faltering. North Korea’s detonation of a nuclear device in 2006 and suspicions about Iran's nuclear intentions further fuel concerns. Meanwhile, most of the world's nuclear weapon states - the US, Russia, China, the UK, France and India - are in the midst of upgrading their nuclear arsenals. All of these developments come at a time of increasing demand for civil nuclear energy, which only amplifies proliferation concerns.

In response, there is growing urgency across the globe to bring new life and a mainstream momentum to nuclear arms control and disarmament. In survey after survey, citizens around the world overwhelmingly call for verifiable steps towards a world free of nuclear weapons.

Interestingly, while preventing the acquisition of nuclear weapons by aspiring state and non-state actors remains a core concern, much of the new energy today focuses on the need for the world's major nuclear weapon states to reduce the salience and quantities of their current arsenals.

Elite voices make the call

Importantly, some of the most high-profile calls for disarmament are coming out of the USA. This includes the two Wall Street Journal opinion pieces by the "Four Horsemen" - George Schultz, Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger and William Perry - which in January 2007 and again in January 2008 came out forcefully calling for steps aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons altogether.

In October 2007, US Democratic Party presidential hopeful Barack Obama said that, as president, he would cooperate with Russia to "dramatically reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons" and would seek "a world in which there are no nuclear weapons."

A January 2008 editorial in The Guardian called on the UK to "lead the way" in getting rid of nuclear weapons, and in 2007 the then British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, called for both a "vision" and "action" which could lead to a "world free of nuclear weapons."

In another high-profile step in favor of arms control, Warren Buffet, one of the world's wealthiest entrepreneurs and philanthropists, donated US$50 million - which was recently matched by the US government - to promote progress towards creation of a multilateral nuclear fuel bank under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

A range of other high-level appeals and activities are planned for 2008 and 2009 in the USA and around the world, promising to keep issues of arms control and disarmament politically front and centre.

Political opportunity for action

Finally, there is a growing expectation that a revived disarmament agenda will not only be the vision of retired statesmen, presidential candidates, officials and think tanks, but that governments will actually find it politically possible to take concrete action. Much of that anticipation reflects a political changing of the guard around the world. We have new leadership in the UN, and newly elected leaders in the UK, France, Germany, Japan and soon Russia.

There will be a new US president in the White House in 2009. The European Union expects to finalize its ground-breaking Treaty of Lisbon reforms in 2009 and, with new leaders, will seek to emerge as a more coherent political force. Even in China, leaders installed in 2002 are now solidifying their confidence and position as they enter a second term in office.

Responding to the real threat posed by nuclear weapons, and building on the growing public concern with the threat, these leaders, more so than their predecessors, can take action in the increasingly favorable political space around disarmament issues.

Much work to be done

Understandably, much of the focus on disarmament is on specific steps that the US and Russia should take to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in their overall security postures.

However, a broader, global effort will also be needed which includes but reaches beyond the US and Russia, which pulls in both nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states, and - very importantly - firmly stakes out expansive, mainstream common ground across the political divides of right and left, "doves" and "hawks," nationalists and internationalists, hope and fear.

The positions of such countries as China, India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran and North Korea must be sought and built in to an emerging global consensus on arms control and disarmament. Think tanks and other non-governmental organizations will need to play a constructive role - especially when official government relations are constrained from doing so - in generating the kind of awareness raising, information sharing and consensus building that will realize, sustain and verify concrete disarmament results.

Also at the global level, new energy and insight will be needed to reinvigorate a range of multilateral arms control efforts. The times call for governments to invest renewed interest in a fissile material production cut-off treaty and achieving key ratifications for the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty - especially in the USA and China, which will help move the treaty toward its entry into force.

Effective implementation - even survival - of the NPT will demand a demonstrable recommitment by all parties to the treaty’s central bargain. This means earnest and transparent disarmament steps by nuclear weapon powers, especially and initially through unilateral and bilateral measures by Russia and the US, and strengthened protocols to prevent additional states from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Finally, political leaders need to know of new and emerging technologies over the past decade which will sharpen the ability to verify and enforce arms control and disarmament agreements.

In other words, we cannot leave things only at "arms control," but need to focus too on "arming the controllers" with the necessary tools to assure verification and enforcement. Such measures will be critical to gaining the technical confidence and political will of nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states alike to genuinely pursue arms control and disarmament.

These steps face difficult obstacles to be sure. The weakened condition of US–Russian relations is only the beginning. Arms control and disarmament is far more complicated today at the global level, particularly with the greater role played by China and India and with the emergence of other new and potential actors armed with nuclear weapons. But in the coming year, a new window of opportunity will open even wider to realize constructive progress on arms control and disarmament - and all concerned should take full advantage.