Multilateral Ban on Nuclear Weapons: Lessons from the Cwc

Dr. Jonathan B. Tucker directs the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies. Prior to this appointment, he worked on chemical and biological weapons issues at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and on the staff of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses. In 1993-95, he served on the U.S. delegation to the Preparatory Commission for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, and in 1995 he was a biological weapons inspector in Iraq with the United Nations Special Commission. The once utopian idea of total nuclear disarmament is now being taken seriously by the nuclear weapon states, at least rhetorically. At the 1995 Review and Extension Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in New York, the five nuclear weapon states reaffirmed their earlier commitment in Article VI of the NPT to the “determined pursuit... of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons....” In an interview published in August 1997, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen said with respect to nuclear arms reductions, “I feel that we are on the right track, that the Joint Chiefs are committed to going lower, that there is a national commitment to get lower and lower levels— to the point where we don’t have them.” Similarly, Deputy National Security Advisor James Steinberg stated in June 1997 that the United States was committed to total nuclear disarmament by the end of the next century.