The question of nuclear arms control has been lost in the debate this primary season because of other pressing issues such as Iraq and healthcare, and less pressing ones including the exact number of illegal immigrants who worked in the homes of anti-immigrant crusaders like Mitt Romney and Tom Tancredo. While this lack of focus might be understandable, it is also unfortunate since there are few topics of greater consequence for the United States and the world.

During the 2004 presidential debates John Kerry and George W. Bush agreed that nuclear proliferation was the top issue facing the nation. The simplest way to prevent nuclear weapons from spreading is to make them less desirable. The countries that seek nuclear arms today, including rogue states such as Iran, are not driven by “insanity” but by the belief that nuclear weapons are an effective deterrent — a belief that is shared by the incumbent nuclear powers, including the United States, Great Britain and Israel. While concrete diplomatic initiatives are clearly necessary for specific cases such as Iran, we should also reduce the climate of international tension that makes nuclear weapons appealing.

As long as weapons are seen as virtually unanswerable security guarantees and as long as some countries have nuclear weapons, other countries will seek nuclear arms. Since the development of the atom bomb, ten nations have joined the “nuclear club.” It is bad enough that North Korea and perennial foes India and Pakistan already have nuclear weapons — we can ill-afford additional nuclear powers. The more countries that possess nuclear weapons, the greater the risk that an international conflict will turn into a global catastrophe when one country or another decides to play its ultimate trump card. A growing global nuclear arsenal also increases the probability that one day a terrorist organization will be able to get its hands on nuclear materials.

President Bush’s approach to the nuclear proliferation problem, preventive war, has proven to be costly and counterproductive. All but the most dedicated partisans have now come to recognize that the situation in Iraq is a disaster and the decision to invade was a mistake. In addition, it is a near certainty that our invasion of Iraq has inspired other countries to redouble their efforts at developing nuclear weapons to avoid a similar fate.  Unfortunately, it seems as though many political leaders have not learned from this debacle. All of the Republican presidential candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, said that they would consider launching a nuclear first strike against Iran. 

Outside the fever swamps of the Republican primary there is a re-emerging consensus in favor of nuclear abolition. Even Ronald Reagan, ostensibly a hardliner, advocated disarmament and, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, successfully eliminated thousands of nuclear weapons.

Earlier this year former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) penned an essay for the Wall Street Journal titled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” Barack Obama and John Edwards have both explicitly endorsed nuclear abolition. Somewhat more ambiguously, Hillary Clinton has written that she supports “reducing reliance on nuclear weapons” and pledged to make major reductions in our nuclear arsenal.

Nuclear proliferation will remain a key issue and nuclear abolition must be an integral component of a practical counter-proliferation program. To achieve this goal, it is essential that the next president take the first steps by negotiating for arms reductions with the existing nuclear powers and using diplomacy, not force, to prevent the emergence of new nuclear powers, and lead by example, getting Congress to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and halting the ongoing multibillion dollar expansion of our nuclear stockpile. Nuclear abolition is not a utopian project but a vital national security issue. Once the world is safe from nuclear war, the United States will be, too.