The Future of the Non-Proliferation Treaty
By Joseph Preston Baratta
 
My response to the dreadful breakdown of the NPT regime and to the resumption of a headlong nuclear arms race (like that before 1970) is that the WFI Fellows should make some principled statement to guide negotiations toward strengthening the regime, for it has always been a mistake for world federalists to remain aloof to the most difficult practical issues of what is really the transition to the ideal, if not to such a throwback as empire.
 
But I would like to dissent a bit and to suggest that we must next draw back from this kind of problem, choose new political ground, and aim to restore the Republic.  I read the speeches of James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt and compare them with what passes for enlightened political discourse since, say, Jimmy Carter, and I hardly recognize my country.  Perhaps nothing will improve until public campaign financing is achieved, but at least we could, again, lend our voices to a greater vision of the United States as an enlightened world leader.
 
It seems to me that the conclusions of the Stanley Foundation conference are reasonable and supportable:  Strong and creative U.S. leadership is needed to save the NPT regime (weapons, power, non-proliferation).  The goal must be a robust and comprehensive rules-based multilateral system.  The security concerns of North Korea and Iran must be accommodated in any immediate solution; they cannot be expected to disarm in a vacuum, and threatening them with attack like that on Osiraq only further alarms them.  Compliance, verification, monitoring, and effective diplomatic or legal means of peaceful resolution of non-compliance will have to be elements of the solution.  Nuclear disarmament in accordance with Article VI must increase its pace above that of the START agreement.  An international multinational fuel bank will be key to bringing nuclear power within reach of non-nuclear weapons states without tempting them to go the last step to enrichment and weaponization.  Cooperative threat reduction programs are conceivable and should be added. 
 
The summary of Didier Jacobs seems to me reasonable in the very short term, but I doubt that it would significantly reduce the threat of nuclear war, for, in the present anarchic world order, nuclear war will remain an ultimate recourse in cases of non-compliance, and in the long term, judging by historic arms races, is inevitable.  Something like "general and complete disarmament under effective international control," in the old formulation of Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn, McCloy-Zorin, and the early U.N. Disarmament Conferences, will be necessary. 
 
But perhaps all this is idle.  As Lucy Webster says, in seven years within the Disarmament Committee, it became very evident that the United States was not willing to be bound by the international law of Article VI.  Condolezza Rice and the circle of neoconservatives (she says neoliberals) around President Bush seem content to continue to try to maintain leadership in the arms race, as U.S. leaders have since the Baruch plan was abandoned (December 1946).  Thomas Schelling is quite perceptive in pointing to the "taboo" against use of nuclear weapons, which has held since Nagasaki, even without effective international law.  But all one has to do is to imagine a supreme challenge to the survival of a nuclear weapons state, or a potential nuclear weapons state (of which the CTBT lists 44), to realize that no such state would fail to try to preserve itself by using the ultimate weapon.
 
I sometimes doubt William Faulkner's faith, on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950:  "I believe that mankind will not only endure. He will prevail."  I think that registering our protest against the drift of nuclear policy, or making our own enlightened suggestions for policy, when we do not have the power outside of responsible government, is not enough.  We must do what others are not doing – thinking through a vision of a better, more lawful world.  People must come to love "global solutions" as much as they now love their country.  We should be preparing the position papers for the redesign of the United Nations – a third generation world organization, as Maurice Bertrand called it – come the next general crisis.  It will be some breakdown of the international system on the order of nuclear war. 
 
As Jean Monnet once said, "For the hard work of uniting sovereignties, humanity will not act until faced by a crisis."  Thomas Jefferson said much the same thing in a famous document of American history:  "All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by changing the forms to which they are accustomed."  I myself tried to do this with a history of the world federalist movement, for there was much credible and practical high idealism in that movement, and the vision, consistent with our Revolutionary heritage, was once clearly staked out.  I've found quite a bit of unworked literature in the field.  But such a history does not reach the politically articulate class.
 
I continue to think that the project of a world federalist political party would be adequate to the problem.  But that is beyond our power too, though there have been crises, like the crisis of the Union when the Republican party was formed in 1856, when the right solution lead to massive action.  Currently I am a bit encouraged by strange noises to the effect that the Democratic party is developing a true liberal vision to seize the opportunity of the November elections.  The New York Times Magazine just had a story about Howard Dean, "the only man in Washington with a long-range vision."  From a historical point of view, I think it is fatuous for those who think in terms of permanent peace to limit themselves only to systemic U.N. reform or a revolutionary appeal to the sovereignty of the people.  We must organize for the whole of politics—defense, welfare, justice, liberty, tranquility, and a more perfect Union.