When I tell people that I'm the Coordinator of the Campaign for a Nuclear Weapons Free World, their response is often something along the lines of: “Good luck with that.” But we should be careful about what we rule out, and be ready to expand our horizons.
Late in 2007, during a presentation he was giving at the Brookings Institute, I heard Barry Blechman say, “What is feasible is what people say is feasible.” In 2008, the American voters declared that it is feasible for a black citizen to become the President of the United States. In this lifetime. Let's expand our horizons further to declare that a nuclear weapons free world is not only feasible, but necessary.

On inauguration day, President Obama inherited some weighty “baggage” handed down from president to president. On Fox
News Sunday, Dec 21, Vice President Dick Cheney shed some light on this mysterious briefcase: “The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.”
(The photo below is of the “football” used during the Clinton era, on display at the newly re-opened National Museum of American History in DC.)
Prior to his inauguration on January 20, President-elect Obama was ushered into a windowless conference room in the Pentagon known as the “tank,” where Strategic Command chief Genl. Kevin Chilton and others briefed him on the protocols for swift decision-making and launching a nuclear attack using the “go codes” kept in this briefcase. It's a sobering meeting for a president-elect. It may be a cold war ritual, but from the moment he was sworn into office, Obama has been shadowed by a military officer bearing the football.
When Cheney said “a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen,” it's no exaggeration. At any given moment, night and day, the Commander-in-Chief is authorized to launch at least 1,000 nuclear weapons on land and submarine-based missiles (not counting the bombers and weapons in reserve), armed with 250,000 kilotons of nuclear explosives. That's 20,000 times the firepower of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Every one of these weapons can be delivered to its target within 45 minutes of the President's order.
Please join with the Campaign for a Nuclear Weapons Free World to dismantle every nuclear weapon, globally. We look forward to the day when an incoming president can be spared this particular initiation ritual.
For more info: David Wood in the Baltimore Sun, Nov 30, 2008. To assess the current U.S. arsenal, see the Nuclear Notebook, US Nuclear Forces, 2008 by Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS is a CNWFW Coalition Partner).

In his December 29 “Chain Reaction” blog, John Isaacs reported that “the first key appointments below the cabinet-level have been made and the news is good.” Isaacs is executive director of Council for a Livable World, a CNWFW coalition partner. Read John's blog for the scoop on John Holdren, appointed Science Advisor to the President, James Steinberg, Deputy Secretary of State, and Antony Blinken, Assistant to the Vice-President for National Security Affairs.

While a global, bipartisan consensus is building for a nuclear weapons free world, the newly re-appointed U.S. Secretary of Defense is saying that the United States should hang on to our nuclear arsenal for the foreseeable future – and while we are at it, we better field a new nuclear weapon. Those of us advocating for concrete steps toward abolition of nuclear weapons have our work cut out for us.
Didn't Gates get the memo?
Back in October, at a major address at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, SecDef Robert Gates insisted “we must always hedge against the dangerous and unpredictable world. That is still true today and maybe even more so. Rising and resurgent powers, rogue nations pursuing nuclear weapons, proliferation of international terrorism, all demand that we preserve this hedge.”
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“Try as we might and hope as we will, the power of nuclear weapons and their strategic impact is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle, at least for a very long time. While we have long-term goal of abolishing nuclear weapons once and for all, given the world in which we live, we have to be realistic about that proposition.”
Gates went on to champion funding for a new American nuclear weapon, the Reliable Replacement Warhead, which Congress has repeatedly rejected. Gates reiterated this position again on December 1 in a speech at Minot Air Force Base.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, directly challenged nations with nuclear weapons to give up their “status symbols” in his keynote address to an October 24 East-West Institute conference. Saying “a world free of nuclear weapons would be a global public good of the highest order,” Ban (who is from South Korea) urged the nuclear weapons states to multilaterally eliminate their arsenals. “Nuclear weapons produce horrific, indiscriminate effects. Even when not used, they pose great risks. Accidents could happen at any time. The manufacture of nuclear weapons can harm public health and the environment. And of course, terrorists could acquire nuclear weapons or nuclear material.”
Noting that the very first General Assembly resolution, in 1946, called for eliminating “weapons adaptable to mass destruction,” Ban urged both nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states to pursue his five point proposal to “revitalize the international disarmament agenda.” In this proposal, Ban endorsed the Hans Blix proposal for a “World summit on disarmament, non-proliferation and terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction.”
According to the Secretary-General,”when disarmament advances, the world advances.” Ban delivered his remarks at the East-West Institute “Seizing the Moment” conference at the UN, with cosponsorship from Campaign coalition partners BASIC and Global Security Institute.