Back in the day, Paul Warnke and I would joke that rooting for the Red Sox was excellent training for arms control. (For non-US readers of ACW, the Red Sox are a baseball team that, until the advent of new ownership, routinely dashed the fondest hopes of its fan base.) The hopes of arms controllers have now been raised by the Obama administration and by a new wave of support — the fourth by my count — for abolishing nuclear weapons. In my view, the most distinctive feature of the fourth wave is that its hydraulics are powered from the center outward, thanks to Messrs. Shultz, Nunn, Kissinger and Perry. Abolitionist waves don’t have much staying power when they move from left to right.

Two comprehensive surveys have been produced describing the many positive steps required to proceed, step by step, toward abolition — the Carnegie Endowment’s Universal Compliance (2007), and the WMD Commission’s Weapons of Terror (2006), chaired by Hans Blix. Each of these fine surveys uses the words “should,” “must,” and “need” over 400 times. A new set of studies, fueled by large grants from private foundations, are taking a closer, prescriptive look at daunting problems such as verification, international fuel cycle management, and dealing with noncompliance and breakout. Unless politically-savvy strategies can be devised to secure progress toward abolition, climbing this mountain of “shoulds” will end, once again, in heavy disappointment.

Laying out necessary steps toward abolition is actually the easy part; establishing the political conditions and coalitions necessary to make significant headway is much harder. Implicit in abolition agendas is the avoidance of disasters, which can undue the work of many positive steps and nullify the entire enterprise. In a retrospective look at arms control, Thomas Schelling, a founding father, wrote,“Holding off disaster was what most of us aimed for in 1960.” (“The Thirtieth Year,” Daedalus, 1991)

Holding off disaster is a noble calling, and arms controllers contributed to this result during the Cold War in significant ways. Now Mssrs. Shultz, Nunn, Kissinger, Perry and many others have reached the conclusion that holding off disaster requires a far more ambitious undertaking than arms control.

What disasters most need to be avoided at present and for the foreseeable future? I tried my hand at identifying and prioritizing the nine worst drivers for a negative nuclear future in my new book, Better Safe than Sorry, The Ironies of Living with the Bomb (2009). Number 1 is obvious: avoiding the disaster of another detonation of a nuclear weapon in warfare between states. The rest of my list, which is not exhaustive, is presented in the order of the event’s prospective damage rather than its likely occurrence. My reasoning fits within one chapter, but not in this post. Here we go:

2. Failure to stop, safeguard or reverse the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs.
3. The breakdown and radical change of governance in Pakistan. (Note: I do not consider this scenario likely.)
4. The further spread of enrichment and reprocessing facilities to states that are hedging their bets.
5. Failure to lock down and properly safeguard dangerous weapons and materials.
6. Acts of nuclear terrorism directed against states.
7. The demise of international inspections and other nuclear monitoring arrangements.
8. A resumption and cascade of nuclear weapon testing.
9. Continued production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for nuclear weapon programs.

Arguments are hereby solicited.

Being explicit about disasters and prioritizing them can be a useful analytical device, but no base can be left uncovered, which accounts for the long list of “shoulds” we now face.

Why, in the face of such daunting challenges, do serious people articulate and pursue abolition as a goal? Because no other central organizing principle offers more leverage against nuclear dangers, or more glue for global nonproliferation efforts. How long a procession do you think would form behind the banner of “managed proliferation”?