A second chance
The break-up of the former Soviet Union provides humanity with its second chance in a decade to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The first was in the mid-'80s, when Mikhail Gorbachev announced a sweeping, unilateral nuclear cutback by the USSR and declared his aim of doing away with all nuclear weaponry by the year 2000.
That chance was passed up by a United States government, under Ronald Reagan, in the midst of the largest military build-up in human history. The US refused to match Gorbachev's unilateral cutbacks or to negotiate seriously for further cutbacks. The only "concessions" made by the USA in this period were designed to assist the modernisation of its arsenal and the scrapping of ageing technology.
Today, the new states emerging from the former USSR are discussing control of the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal. For the moment, control seems likely to rest with the Commonwealth of Independent States, the very weak central body set up to preside over the dismantling of the old USSR. But it seems inevitable the stronger states of the former Union will struggle with each other for control of some or all of the nuclear arsenal, just as Russia and the Ukraine have already clashed over the Black Sea fleet.
In all this, it should be asked whether it might not be preferable from every point of view to simply scrap the former Soviet arsenal. Most of the emerging republics are having difficulties just feeding and housing their people, without the burden of maintaining expensive nuclear weapons. And with the end of the Cold War, what use could the republics have for these weapons?
But even bigger questions also arise: what use does the USA now have for its nuclear arsenal, and why doesn't it initiate a round of negotiations of all the nuclear powers aimed at doing away with this blight on civilisation once and for all?
Of course, no-one familiar with US foreign policy will get too excited waiting for this to happen. The US government developed nuclear weapons at a time when no other power had them, or was expected to develop them. It developed them at a time when politicians openly spoke of the American century, meaning the rise of the USA to replace the declining British and other European empires.
Despite the collapse of the USSR, there is no move by the US to take a lead in getting rid of its nuclear weapons, or even seriously reducing its arsenal. For the millions around the world who have called repeatedly for nuclear disarmament, there will never be a better opportunity to ask why not.