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On the day after a nuclear bomb annihilates Washington, New Delhi, Islamabad, Seoul, Tel Aviv or Moscow, vaporizing and burning to death hundreds of thousands of people, our present complacency about nuclear proliferation will look like daylight madness. Even the chilliest of realists have shuddered at our capability for radioactive massacre. In 1977, the strategist George Kennan declared, “No one is good enough, wise enough, steady enough, to have control over the volume of explosives that now rest in the hands of this country.” Nuclear arms, he concluded, “shouldn’t exist at all.”

Philip Taubman’s fascinating, haunting book, “The Partnership,” is about the drive to abolish nuclear weapons; and, implicitly, about why it will probably fail. Taubman tells the stories of five American national security mandarins who, in the twilight of their illustrious careers, stunned their peers by campaigning to scrap all nuclear arms. They are not exactly pacifist hippies: Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, Republican secretaries of state; William Perry, a Democratic secretary of defense; Sam Nunn, a Democrat who had been chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; and Sidney Drell, an influential Stanford physicist.

Their continuing activism, Taubman writes, “has induced sitting presidents and foreign ministers to embrace ideas not long ago ridiculed as radical and reckless” and has “powerfully influenced Obama,” who advocates a world without nuclear weapons.

These five men had done much to foster a nuclearized world and had prospered for their contributions to its infernal machinery. Much of “The Partnership” consists of eerie tales of the atomic Cold War, charting the upward progress of these grandees.

The core of the book is Shultz, the group’s “undeclared leader” and its “most committed” member. Taubman affectionately writes that he “radiated probity, pragmatism and Republicanism.” “I had never learned to love the bomb,” Shultz says. At the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, he had a heartbreaking brush with nuclear abolition. The American and Soviet chiefs came close to a historic deal to eliminate all their nuclear weapons. But the agreement foundered over Reagan’s “quixotic quest to build a missile shield,” which Mikhail Gorbachev rejected. Shultz, skeptical about the missile defense project, was disappointed.

Some of Taubman’s heroes scored more tangible successes. Kissinger is the odd man out. Taubman is skeptical that he has reinvented himself as a nuclear abolitionist. Kissinger has privately told Perry and other friends that he has doubts about the group’s endeavor. After all, as Taubman notes, Kissinger used nuclear force exercises in 1969 and 1973 to spook the Soviet Union. In 1987, Kissinger, with Richard Nixon, scathingly denounced Reagan and Shultz’s gullibility in falling for Gorbachev’s invocations of a nuclear-free world. Kissinger’s real complaint about nuclear arms may be more Clausewitz than Jonathan Schell: these weapons are too lethal to be used to make credible threats or to achieve political goals. Taubman tellingly quotes Kissinger saying that his problem is consequences “out of proportion to anything that you might want to achieve.”

Kissinger’s doubts hang ominously over “The Partnership.” The technology cannot be uninvented; when one country goes to zero, its enemy is sorely tempted to cheat.

Still, even for skeptics, Taubman’s book provides an important public service by concentrating on nuclear perils that continue to slip our day-to-day notice. Taubman’s group realized that the anxieties of the Cold War have been supplanted by the kaleidoscopic menaces of widespread proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Kissinger notes, “It is not possible for the United States to say nobody else can proliferate or build up nuclear arsenals while we continue to rely entirely on nuclear weapons.”

Some of the most volatile regional conflicts (between India and Pakistan, on the Korean Peninsula, in the Middle East) now involve nuclear weapons. Nuclear deterrence between, say, Israel and Iran may prove a lot less stable than the Cold War kind. Worse, fledgling nuclear powers, lacking the safeguards that the United States and the Soviet Union eventually developed, will risk fatal misjudgments or accidents.

The newer nuclear states are vulnerable to coups, infiltration, profiteering or theft. At least three terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, have sought nuclear arms. Taubman warns that as nuclear technology spreads around the globe, there are at least 18 documented cases of plutonium or highly enriched uranium being stolen or lost, with Georgia as “ground zero for nuclear smuggling.” North Korea, desperate for cash, is dangerously irresponsible: In 2007, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a North Korean-designed nuclear reactor in Syria. Pakistan is nightmarishly unstable, and the United States government is deeply worried about the security of that country’s nuclear arsenal.

All this may be awful news, but Taubman’s thought-provoking book offers sober reason for some optimism, too. Still, so long as the likes of Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao indulge the likes of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the late Kim Jong-il, these hopeful visions of disarmament may have to wait until the day after it is too late.

 

The New York Times

Gary J. Bass is writing a book about the Nixon administration and the 1971 massacres in Bangladesh.
The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb

Philip Taubman

Harper/HarperCollins