It's New START -- and a small step -- Toward a World Without Nukes

If the people will lead, the leaders will follow. The ratification of the new START treaty, without question, was uncertain as recently as one week ago. But because of the indefatigable efforts of us, citizens who stand for global solutions to global challenges, we turned the tide. We moved the mountain. We carried the day.

Imagine what other mountains we're going to move in the months and years to come.

At the heart of the new START treaty stands a Big Idea that can be expressed in a single sentence. When both we and our potential adversaries agree to mutually limit our military muscle and to mutually open ourselves to external inspections, that's better for us, for American national security, than when we insist that we cannot allow our armaments or our sovereignty to be constrained in any way (as the right demagogically demands), and consequently our potential adversaries remain wholly unconstrained as well.

Much the same Big Idea lies at the heart of my new book, APOCALYPSE NEVER, on the much bigger question of a nuclear weapon-free world. If we decide that we're going to base our national security on "nuclear deterrence" for decades to come -- as not only the right but even the Obama Administration insists that we must -- then others will make the same choice too. Consequently, today's world of nine nuclear-armed nations will head toward a world of 19 or 29 or 49 such nations. And consequently, it will then be only a matter of time before we witness the unfolding of the nuclear cataclysms described in APOCALYPSE NEVER's Chapter Three (nuclear terror), Chapter Four (accidental nuclear launches - wait until you hear how close we've already come to these), Chapter Five (nuclear crisis mismanagement - wait until you hear how close we've already come to this), or Chapter Six (intentional use according to carefully crafted nuclear weapons employment doctrines - such as in the Obama Administration's own "Nuclear Posture Review" released earlier this year).

APOCALYPSE NEVER launches a wholesale assault on the nuclear double standard, arguing that it is both morally indefensible and politically unsustainable. It makes the case that for the United States today, nuclear weapons are both militarily unnecessary and militarily useless. It decisively repudiates the most frequent objection to abolition, "the breakout scenario" -- the possibility that after abolition some nation might whip back the curtain, reveal a dozen nuclear warheads, and proceed to "rule the world." And it envisions some of the possible global governance architectures we will have to invent -- one of the central raisons d'etre of CGS -- both to bring about and to maintain a nuclear weapon free world.

A great deal of bigshot praise for the book (including from CGS's own Don Kraus), along with the entire first chapter and much else on the peril and the vision -- even audios and videos of me in action out on the stump -- is available both at www.apocalypsenever.org and at www.facebook.com/apocalypsenever.  And some very thoughtful AMAZON customer reviews are available here. I'm very pleased to report that at last count, 13 of 14 of those customer reviewers had awarded the book five stars.

The human race is not doomed to become the victims of our own folly, hapless fools devoured by our own creation, the authors of our own annihilation. The abolition of nuclear weapons -- and much else beyond that -- is something we can transform from a utopian fantasy into a concrete political goal.

As the 1995 Nobel Peace Laureate, the late Joseph Rotblat, once told me, "My short-term ambition is the abolition of nuclear weapons. My long-term ambition is the abolition of war itself."

Join us here at CGS, as together, we continue to ascend those ramparts.