Jonathan Schell: The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (American Empire Project)

Regarding the START Treaty between the U.S. and Russia, Jonathan Schell recently told Democracy Now this: Well, it’s sort of garden-variety, moderate, sensible, minimal arms control. I think of it as arms control maintenance. It does basically two things that have been going on for the last 30 years or 40 years, really since Richard Nixon inaugurated arms control in 1972. And that is, it shaves the arsenals a little bit, a couple of hundred warheads, also reduces the number of delivery vehicles that are allowed. And maybe more important than that, it reintroduces inspections, which have lapsed with the lapse of the START treaty, the old START treaty. So this is what’s been going on for 40 years in arms control, and it pushes it along in a kind of minimal way. It’s a little bit like paying the mortgage on your house. You know, if you pay your mortgage, it’s not a big deal. But if you don’t, the consequences could be pretty dire. And that’s pretty much the way I look at this. [...] The best way to deal with that is to roll back the technology as a whole. And that’s really where Obama’s commitment to move to a world free of nuclear weapons comes in, because the very same steps that you would take to actually eliminate nuclear weapons are the very ones that you would take to keep that technology from spreading into other hands. In other words, you’d get it under control, you would actually liquidate it so it didn’t exist. That would be an important step. And then you—so you’d solve really the two problems with one stroke. See that full transcript here. You can also download the podcast of this Democracy Now show, here. See also: The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.