Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, former US Secretaries of State, William Perry, former US Defence Secretary, and Sam Nunn, former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee surprised the world with an article in the Wall Street Journal of January 4, this year, pleading for a world free of nuclear weapons, and urging the US to take a bold initiative. The first two are Republicans; the latter two are Democrats. All of them were proponents of nuclear arms control, and not of disarmament, when they held high office.

But the timing of this statement is significant. It comes at a time when the US weapon laboratories have submitted their new designs of nuclear warheads which are to replace the existing warheads. A decision is expected to be taken in the near future for a 100 billion dollar programme of modernisation of the US nuclear arsenal. This bipartisan statement by perhaps the most influential US statesmen outside office cannot be taken lightly.

The authors refer back to the Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik in 1986 when they came close to an agreement to get rid of all nuclear weapons. Though they do not say so, it failed because President Reagan’s advisers pulled him back from the agreement. At that time George Schultz was his secretary of state. Now the authors, as they recount past initiatives in this respect, cite Rajiv Gandhi’s fervent plea for nuclear disarmament when he submitted his plan to the Special Session of the UN General Assembly on June 8, 1988.

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