Cross-posted from Truthout.
(Read Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.)
We All Just Want to Be Safe
Ultimately, national security is as foremost in the minds of those who believe that disarmament leadership acts as an incentive to keep non-NWS from proliferating as it is in those who think it’s immaterial. The latter are apprehensive about a national-security gap opening when non-NWS ignore NWS disarmament measures and proceed to proliferate. Disarmament advocates are at least as concerned with the existing national-security gap created by nuclear risk. They believe that the deterrence crowd underestimates the chance of nuclear war breaking out as a result of an accident, miscommunication, or that relic of the Cold War — the launch-on-warning setting to which many nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are still dialed.
Due to the staggering number of variables that come into play, comparing the threat of steeply reducing the number of nuclear weapons with that posed by their very existence would likely be an exercise in futility. There’s no guarantee that a steep rollback in the number of nuclear weapons won’t result in the opening of a national-security gap. Whether one does or not, it can’t be denied that negotiating the span to a nuclear-weapons-free future requires a leap of faith. But launching ourselves into an era of disarmament, however frightening, certainly beats waiting for nuclear weapons — our own or another’s — to launch.