A senior American diplomat with decades of international disarmament experience called on the United States to lead the world toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. Speaking to a Los Alamos arms control committee this week, Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr. warned the group that his views have evolved from those he may have had as a former Special Representative of the President for Arms Control, Nonproliferation and Disarmament.

Graham held senior positions in every major round of disarmament negotiations since the 1970s, but he has concluded now that "the centerpiece of world security," the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is in danger.

The NPT came into effect in 1970. It was successful, Graham said, because it relied on a bargain between non-nuclear nations that agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons states that said they would negotiate the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals. The nuclear powers promised the non-nuclear nations access to peaceful nuclear technologies in exchange for their forbearance and submission to international inspections.

A big problem, Graham said, is that the nations that have the nuclear weapons, led by the United States and Russia, didn't carry out the disarmament part of the bargain.
"(A)nd the United States in recent years appears to have largely abandoned it," he said.

Now, the other side of the deal has begun to fall apart, as exemplified by the addition of India, Pakistan and Israel as nuclear weapons states outside the treaty, and North Korea and Iran as nuclear aspirants and other countries once again talking provocatively about joining the nuclear club.

Graham said he had reached the conclusion that a much more aggressive effort was necessary after watching the failure of the talks with North Korea and the way the problem with Iran has been allowed to fester.

He was also disappointed with what he called "the failure" of last year's international review of the NPT, considered "a bust" by many.

"The U.S. was not willing to talk to anybody in a serious way," he said. "Throw the Indian agreement on top of that," he said, referring to a proposed U.S.-India nuclear pact that he believes would validate proliferation outside the treaty and open the way for Russia to make bilateral proliferative deals with Iran and China with Pakistan.

In a preface to his remarks, Graham related a frightening, what-if scenario, that he imagined taking place at 10 a.m. on Oct. 15, 2008. A 15-ton kiloton bomb, detonated in downtown Manhattan by an Al-Qaeda cell in New York City, sets off a chain of events that leads to an American nuclear attack on Iran, which sets off the overthrow of a moderate governments in Pakistan and elsewhere by hard-line Muslims.

"Twelve days after the initial attack on New York," the scenario concludes, "Osama Bin Laden meets to congratulate his lieutenants on the complete collapse of international law and the beginning of an East vs. West holy war that will threaten mankind's very existence."

The risk of something like this happening has become almost obvious and ordinary, but the alternatives have not been urgently explored.

"There are a number of former senior officials from the Reagan and Bush One era that share this view," Graham said.

During a vigorous discussion that followed, members of the audience asked for a plausible agenda for reversing the course of proliferation.

Graham said it would take leadership at the highest level. He said the President should go to the United Nations and ask the General Assembly to charge the Security Council to negotiate a treaty for eliminating all weapons of mass destruction.

He foresaw a process that might go on for "many, many years" and that would require intrusive verification and resolute economic and military consequences for cheaters and states that didn't go along with the plan, as well as security guarantees for countries like Israel, North Korea and Pakistan, that might be most vulnerable in the process.

An interim reduction would take the major powers down to 300 weapons each, with proportionate reductions for the smaller powers as well. A second phase would move toward zero, with only a small amount of fissile material permitted to the 8 nuclear states as a hedge. Even this would be eliminated in the more distant future.

Former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Sig Hecker, now a visiting professor at Stanford University, said he liked the part about the President going to the U.N.

"But the back end is technically not achievable," he said, because of the impossibility of accounting for the plutonium. "And the highly enriched uranium raises even greater uncertainties."

Graham said, "The system would have to address that."

He admitted that some optimism and faith in prospective solutions would be needed to get a new initiative out of the gate.

"Nothing good is ever impossible," said Graham, citing the collapse of the Soviet Union and how close Reagan and Gorbachev came to eliminating nuclear weapons in 1986.

"On Sept. 12, 2001, the United States had the trust of the world," he added.

But after a ruinous run of undercutting international law - from a refusal to sign the Ottawa treaty banning landmines, to withdrawal from the Kyoto climate treaty, to the invasion of Iraq, to the flouting of the Geneva protocols to the prison scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo - he said, "Now that trust is gone."

Regaining trust, he concluded, means rejoining the world community on some of these issues, ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, becoming a part of the International Criminal Court and "establishing ourselves as strong advocates of the international rule of law."