Ambassador Max Kampelman on Nuclear Disarmament

Ambassador Max Kampelman, the Democrat who became President Ronald Reagan’s arms control negotiator and who is argued to have initiated the new political momentum behind nuclear disarmament, addressed faculty and students at the Elliott School of International Affairs on November 9, 2009. Ambassador Kampelman recommended research and policy engagement by institutions of higher education to respond to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. Observing that “political scientists ought to know how to get things done,” he contended that academic research should include questions of how policy might shape political outcomes. He suggested additional research focused on how to build consensus domestically and globally around how the world “ought” to be and the steps necessary to move in that direction. He also suggested research into how the historic experience of arms control could inform policy to respond to today’s challenges. Noting an absence of institutional and coordinative mechanisms for resolving policy uncertainty related to nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, Ambassador Kampelman emphasized the value convening and policy engagement to bridge different perspectives on the challenge of nuclear disarmament, as well as new research on how to advance toward this increasingly important policy objective. Watch the video of Ambassador Kampelman’s public remarks here.

Planning a generation of research on abolition

Over the weekend I finished the late Sir Michael Quinlan’s ultimate contribution to public discourse on nuclear weapons, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects (Oxford, 2009). I will be wrestling with the breadth of his important insights for some time, but one observation stood out to me immediately: the specific scale of time over which those who support (and those who contest) the nuclear disarmament enterprise need to be thinking:

“Neat prediction is plainly impossible, but few informed commentators would be likely to rate at better than fifty-fifty the changes of [existing nuclear armouries] being entirely dissolved before, say, the centenary in 2045 of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki catastrophes.” (page 166)

The figure of 36 years isn’t shocking, but the act of suggesting a specific date brings the need to plan, institutionalize, and establish a sustainable tempo for the project of nuclear disarmament into clearer focus – perhaps comparable to the specific challenge established by the Millennium Development Goals in creating a fifteen-year timeframe for reducing poverty. Quinlan identifies new research as am important early step:

“The aim of study would be in the first instance not to establish or advocate a program of action or to inaugurate a negotiation, but simply to lay a better foundation of understanding upon which debate about prospects, options, and possible path-clearing work might be advanced.” (page 164)

He also observes that this research:

“needs to be tackled whether or not one believes in the realism of [nuclear weapons abolition] – optimists and sceptics can find common ground.” (page 166).

Aligned with these important insights, I offer a piece in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists today:

“The trade-offs between uncertain paths forward should be explicitly debated both by today's experts and tomorrow's nascent explorers. These tensions of zero--institutional transformation, universality, peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and deterrence--will never be cleanly resolved. But if we're lucky, we will be managing them long after the legal abolition of nuclear weapons. Learning to do so effectively is the work of a generation, and we are a generation behind in preparing our best and brightest for this work.”

Can universities respond to nuclear dangers?

eGov monitor posts a letter from David Willets, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Shadow Universities Secretary, to John Denham who sits on Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Cabinet as Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities, and Skills concerned about Iranian students studying proliferation-sensitive subjects at British universities. A particularly important observation emerges from among Mr. Denham’s several specific concerns:

“We have a clear obligation to ensure that our own universities, even inadvertently, do not contribute to nuclear proliferation.”

This obligation is particularly relevant as humanity faces an imminent future that George P. Schultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn have called:

“a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence.”

These notable authors gathered last week at Stanford University to further explore these new dangers and possible solutions at Stanford University. This work is to be applauded, but as institutions engaged in seeking knowledge and truth, universities can and perhaps must do more to respond to the emerging truth of new global dangers posed by nuclear weapons. The voice of universities may be especially relevant now as the production of nuclear warheads of new designs is reportedly being considered in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia.

It is not immediately obvious what sort of response would be appropriate, but three ideas emerge easily that seem appropriate points of departure for how universities might best respond to this global danger:

First, universities could make a statement of policy supporting compliance with the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and related agreements, particularly including the 1995 Statement of Principles and Objectives for Non-Proliferation and Disarmament which is an integral element of the indefinite extension of the NPT. Not only would such a statement be consistent with the educational mission of these institutions, it would also be consistent with emerging university practices such as Tufts University’s April 24, 1999 commitment to “meet or beat the Kyoto [Protocol] goal of a seven percent reduction below 1990 in our carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2012.”

Second, universities could convene institutional review boards, faculty governance groups, or other deliberative bodies composed of experts from relevant disciplines to consider how the work of their institutions might be prevented from inadvertently contributing to the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

Third, universities could form a network to explore the conditions under which the NPT Article VI obligation to work toward a world free of nuclear weapons could be achieved and how they might contribute to the necessary technical and knowledge basis for meeting these conditions.

The danger nuclear weapons pose to humanity is immediate, global, and complicated, and it may be that much work remains to be done to provide uncover new knowledge and prepare today’s graduates to live with the evolving danger of nuclear weapons. Restricting access to education may prove necessary in some unfortunate cases, but it is certainly not the limit of higher education’s obligation to meet this challenge.