22 February 2010

About This Issue

This article appears in the February 2010 issue of eJournal USA, A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.

“I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.”

—U.S. President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

In 1931, Albert Einstein described himself as “not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist.” Eight years later Einstein wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt that “it may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated … it is conceivable — though much less certain — that extremely powerful bombs of this type may thus be constructed.” Einstein warned the president that Nazi Germany already had prohibited the export of uranium, and he suggested that the U.S. government speed up atomic research.

Roosevelt launched the Manhattan Project, the top secret U.S.-U.K.-Canada crash effort that produced the world’s first atomic bomb. When it detonated, on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo Test Range in New Mexico, the project’s scientific director, Robert Oppenheimer, recalled the words of the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer later would oppose, unsuccessfully, development of the still more fearsome hydrogen bomb.

Speaking last year in Prague, President Barack Obama affirmed a U.S. commitment to seek a world without nuclear weapons. But he also acknowledged that the objective might not be achieved in his lifetime. How that goal might be attained, and why getting there is so difficult, is the subject of this eJournal USA.

Our contributors approach the issue from every angle. Most agree with President Obama’s objective, although one, a former U.S. national security adviser, argues that the world may be safer with a few acknowledged nuclear weapons than with promises that all have been foresworn. Feature essays explore the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and consider what a treaty abolishing nuclear weapons might look like. We review Obama administration policy, and also how the issues look from the Russian vantage point, and from the perspective of nations that choose not to proliferate. We outline past arms control efforts — some produced better results than others. We ask the question: Why did some nations build thousands of nuclear weapons? And we profile a program that already has eliminated some 15,000 nuclear warheads.

When a leading pacifist calls for an atomic bomb and the man most responsible for producing it opposes its growing destructiveness, we know that the issues are tangled. When the leader of the United States of America sets a goal and in the next sentence suggests it may not be fully achieved in his lifetime, we know the issues are difficult. We hope readers of this eJournal come to appreciate just how difficult and, most importantly, leave us this month determined along with President Obama to build a safe and peaceful world, no matter how long it takes.

—The Editors

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)