Getting To The Promised Land

No one in his right mind would start for the Promised Land unless the trip was imperative and he had a travel plan. Our counterpart to the Red Sea and Pharaoh’s army is nuclear holocaust - we have to leave the Egypt of nuclear holocaust behind us. Our counterpart to Moses’ Ten Commandments, though, has yet to be drafted.

President Obama, Sam Nunn and others who advocate getting to Zero Nuclear put off describing a plan, not unreasonably, by saying that it will take decades to reach Zero. Not in my lifetime, says the President; the mountain must be scaled in stages, says Nunn. They hope that evidence of progress like the START Treaty, and improvements under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, will evidence progress enough to keep momentum.

Staged progress without a plan will not be enough for some. Examples of what Obama, Nunn, et al are up against appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (“The NPT Illusion” by Brett Stephens) and Financial Times (“A Nuclear-Free World? No Thanks” by Gideon Rachman).

Rachman predicts that a nuclear free world would herald the return of war between big powers. He says that only an “implausibly powerful international inspectorate” could calm the fears that produce nuclear arming. These are reasonable observations if one makes no effort to describe the disarmed world.

Stephens offers a good guys - bad guys analysis - if bad ones arm, good ones cannot disarm. True enough, but he can’t imagine enforced mutuality. He hits the target, offering no solution, by concluding that in the “second nuclear age” deterrence won’t work and “we haven’t even begun to think seriously about how to navigate those waters.”

The problem with long-term thinking like Zero Nuclear is, first, if you suggest details about how it might work you  are discredited as time passes because so much gets revised. Second, you will be called idealist, and vilified for suggesting a different world, which upsets the non-visionary, non-imaginative folk, those most wary of change, i.e., conservatives, though I do not mean it pejoratively.

The solution for this dilemma of how much detail to hazard when you preach vision, is to describe a means to make the journey - how to travel, not what the destination will look like. Tell who will have a say, how will we experiment, how the rule of enforced law will be expanded in stages, how will we retain the security of armed might while developing the security of enforced law, how targeted populations of different kinds of nations can make common cause against the violence lovers in all nations.

Rachman’s “powerful international inspectorate” must be shorn of implausibility by showing the partial models that already work, the stages of enlargement, the assurances that militarized security need not be surrendered until a safer model is available, and the cross border democracy that must be invented and gradually expanded to keep delegation of enforcement powers accountable.