1317) A ideia politicamente ingenua da abolicao da arma nuclear

Op-Ed Columnist
The Dream of Zero
By ROSS DOUTHAT
The New York Times, February 7, 2010

MUNICH
In many ways, Barack Obama has taken a more cold-eyed approach to foreign affairs than George W. Bush. He’s emphasized realism over human rights, negotiation over regime change, the national interest over the promotion of democracy.

But there’s been one great exception to this realpolitik revival: the realm of nuclear strategy.

There Obama has been all about idealism. His speeches have committed the U.S. to the pursuit of a “world without nuclear weapons,” and linked the fight against proliferation to the goal of total nuclear abolition. His policy priorities have included a new arms control agreement with the Russians, the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a Nuclear Posture Review, to be released next month, that may limit both the size of the American arsenal and the circumstances it which it could be used. Two decades after the end of the cold war, Obama has put the dream of disarmament back on America’s agenda.

The world has noticed. Last week in Paris, the antinuclear “Global Zero” movement staged its coming-out party, with a summit meeting and keynote speech by George Shultz, the former U.S. secretary of state and a late-in-life convert to the cause of abolition. And over the weekend, the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of global power players, convened a panel on the question, “Is Zero Possible?” The panelists, who included former defense officials from Russia, India and Germany, as well as Senator John Kerry, answered unanimously in the affirmative.

It’s doubtful that they all believed it. But the fact that they felt obliged to offer lip service to the ideal of disarmament marks an important victory for Obama, and for the antinuclear cause.

The only question is whether this is good news for global security.

Certainly the United States has room to reduce its nuclear arsenal. As an aspirational flourish amid our negotiations with the Russians, a nod toward the dream of a nuclear-free world may be harmless enough.

But the argument for chasing “Global Zero” can also turn dangerously naïve. This is particularly true of the conceit, touted by Obama, that by reducing or eliminating our nuclear stockpiles, we can dissuade other nations from pursuing nuclear weapons of their own.

In reality, the reverse is likely true. The American nuclear arsenal doesn’t encourage local arms races; it forestalls them. Remove our nuclear umbrella from the North Pacific, and South Korea and Japan would feel compelled to go nuclear in a hurry. If Iran gets the bomb, the protections afforded by American missiles may be the only way to prevent nuclearization in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. (In the panel immediately following the “Is Zero Possible?” colloquy, the Turkish foreign minister declared that his country has no need of nuclear arms — because, he quickly added, “we are part of the NATO umbrella, so that is sufficient.”)

The notion that lesser powers only want nuclear weapons because the United States has so many reflects a peculiar kind of American provincialism. In reality, nuclearization is usually driven by regional concerns — from India’s rivalry with Pakistan to Israel’s fear of Middle Eastern encirclement. So is disarmament, when it happens: South Africa gave up its nuclear capability only after it gave up apartheid, and Brazil and Argentina dropped their nascent programs as part of a broader march toward regional détente.

Moreover, even when the fear of American power is a factor in a country’s quest for W.M.D., the fear of our nuclear weapons usually isn’t. Saddam Hussein wasn’t chasing fissile material because he thought the United States would drop an ICBM on Baghdad. For rogue states, the bomb is an obvious way to offset America’s enormous conventional military advantage — and this will hold true no matter how low our nuclear stockpiles go.

This doesn’t mean that America shouldn’t enter into reasonable arms control agreements. But linking the antiproliferation agenda to the dream of universal abolition makes an already difficult problem even harder to solve.

It’s precisely because the proliferation problem is so difficult, though, that the “Global Zero” movement can feel superficially appealing. The Munich nuclear-abolition panel took place just 24 hours before Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ordered his scientists to forge ahead with uranium enrichment. Faced with yet another round of Iranian brinkmanship, you can understand why Western leaders might prefer to talk about a world without nuclear weapons. By making the issue bigger, more long-term and more theoretical, they can almost make it seem to go away.

But when it comes to containing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, the existing American arsenal simply isn’t part of the problem. And if Iran does acquire the bomb, our nuclear deterrent will quickly become an important part of the solution.