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Tomdispatch: So, take us on a little tour of our world in terms of nuclear weapons.
Jonathan Schell: The way I think of it, in the Cold War, the nuclear age was in a sort of adolescence. Just a two-power or, at most, a five- or six-sided affair. Now, it's in its prime. We already have nine nuclear powers, with lots of aspirers to the club waiting in the wings. The nuclear weapon is fulfilling its destiny, which was known from the very beginning of the nuclear age: to be available to all who wanted it, whether or not they choose to actually build the thing.
In a certain sense, we're just beginning to face the nuclear danger in its inescapable, quintessential form. At key moments in the nuclear age, the public has suddenly gotten very worked up about its peril. Now, if I am not mistaken, could be another such moment. Everybody who has ever marched or spoken up against nuclear weapons should dust off their hiking boots and get back in the fray.
TD: Once upon a time, of course, we would have said that the Cold War superpower stand-off with tens of thousands of such weapons was its quintessential form.
Schell: But that was not correct. The Cold War was in fact a temporary two-power disguise for a threat that was essentially universal in double sense: Number one, it could destroy everybody; number two, over the long run, anybody was going to be able to acquire it. There's still a ways to go, but we've already reached the verge at which it's imaginable that a mere terrorist group could get its hands on the bomb technology, or even on a ready-made bomb.
That's part of the universalization that was written into the bomb's genetic code. Once a terrorist group has such a weapon, deterrence -- a relic of the Cold War -- is no longer operable. So this supposed solution, which seemed to work, after a fashion, for more than four decades, is now essentially out the window and we're in the market for another solution, which must be geared to this matured form of danger in which the weaponry can pop up anywhere.
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