How to put nuclear disarmament back on the political agenda

Gone Nuclear: How the World Lost Its Way
Richard Falk, Mary Kaldor, Randall Caroline Forsberg & George Perkovich

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Reykjavik Summit in October 1986 will long be remembered because the leaders of the world's two superpowers, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, seriously entertained for one brief moment the goal of a non-nuclear world. The end of the cold war reduced the fear of a nuclear exchange, but it did not bring us closer to a world free of nuclear weapons. Indeed, with the subsequent proliferation of nuclear weapons to India, Pakistan and North Korea, and with concerns growing about Iran's nuclear program, the idea of a non-nuclear world seems more distant than ever. As the report of the International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction issued earlier this year makes clear, even the limited goals of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation have been set back by the lack of leadership on the part of the United States and by the proliferation of new weapons states. And as worrying, the goal of nuclear disarmament no longer seems to animate the progressive community or the peace movement, let alone figure into today's discussion of American national security policy.

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the Reykjavik Summit, The Nation invited Richard Falk, Mary Kaldor, Randall Caroline Forsberg and George Perkovich, all leading figures of the nuclear disarmament movement at the time of Reykjavik, to reflect on what went wrong and to consider how to put nuclear disarmament back on the political agenda.

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