YOU MAY SAY JONATHAN SCHELL is a dreamer, but he's not the only one.

Heck, the nuclear abolitionist is in good company.

As Schell notes in his new book, "The Seventh Decade," Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly proclaimed that a "nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought" and, with the goal of abolition in sight, set a course for decisive cuts in their arsenals at 1986's Reykjavik Summit. (The negotiations ended in an impasse over America's quest for a missile defense shield.)

Twenty-two years after Reykjavik, the great powers maintain their arsenals, lesser powers pursue the bomb doggedly and furtively and the specter of a mushroom cloud looms over America's cities at least as menacingly as it has for the previous seven decades.

Schell's book, subtitled "The New Shape of Nuclear Danger," is rather slim, but it covers a lot of ground, tracing the path of nuclear proliferation and its attendant theories in the years since the U.S. rained hell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"The Seventh Decade" reads like course material from an international relations class: It is crammed with information, clear-eyed and nicely written, though somewhat dry.

Schell, a frequent contributor to The Nation and an erstwhile professor at several august universities, gives Reagan a lot of credit and believes American administrations since the Cold War's end have failed to pursue policies capable of slowing the bomb's proliferation. He explains these policies — and the theories girding them — in great detail and ends by outlining a path to a nuclear weapon-free world.

The author contends that if American families want freedom from fear of annihilation, they must relinquish the option to nuke the world. As Schell notes, "Nuclear weapons produce more nuclear weapons."

"During the Cold War, people understood that nuclear danger was the most urgent and the greatest of the dangers that faced the human species," Schell said. "That remains true today, though the shape of the danger is different.

"We have fewer weapons, but they're in the hands of more people, so there's a greater likelihood of a comparatively small nuclear event and a lesser danger of a world-ending one, although all those thousands of weapons are still here," he continued. "But since the end of the Cold War, people have let that slip out of their minds. We could get a very rude wake-up call."

Schell spoke to Express before his Monday appearance at Politics & Prose.

» EXPRESS: You argue that an important shift in U.S. nuclear strategy has occurred under the Bush Administration. Can you explain the shift?
» SCHELL: The Cold War's end raised a very important question: What was the American arsenal for? During the Cold War, its alleged purpose was to deter the Soviet Union. But with the enemy gone, what were those weapons for?

The answer given was that they were to stop proliferation and, in a quiet and unannounced way, to support the Bush program of global military supremacy. And the targeting was widened from merely the formerly Communist counties — which remain targeted — to all of the countries which might one day make a nuclear weapon. So, the new target became, in a sense, the earth.

At the same time, the line between conventional and nuclear weaponry was blurred, and the proof of that was the global strike command, which Bush ordered and now permits the United States to deliver a conventional — or a nuclear — warhead, at any point of the earth on very short notice.

I don't want to exaggerate this — I'm not imagining that the U.S. will start raining nuclear weapons on Africa or South America. But in a strategic sense, it was revolutionary: It expanded the target range of American nuclear forces to, potentially, the earth as a whole. And, of course, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Libya and so on got more attention. So it wasn't a policy empty of content.

That policy shift was a statement that there was no need to have a large and powerful global foe to justify nuclear arsenals in the thousands. Such an arsenal is the normal equipment of a great state. It's something you keep around for a rainy day.

In that sense, there was a much deeper embrace of nuclear weapons than we even had in the Cold War. During the Cold War, at least one could think, "Well, if this ends, maybe we can get rid of the weapons, too." Well, it ended. We didn't. This new justification amounts to saying, "No matter what, we're going to hold on to a very large nuclear arsenal." So, we learned to love the bomb even more deeply after the Cold War.

» EXPRESS: Why do we still target Russia with nuclear weapons?
» SCHELL: I ask audiences that question: "Can you tell me why we target Russia — and why we endure being targeted by their rotting, old nuclear arsenal — rather than making a deal to end mutual assured destruction?" If they can tell me, they're smarter than I am. I'm not confident it's the right one, but the best answer I can come up with is: We don't target them for any particular reason. After all, we don't have a quarrel with them that's worth a pistol shot, much less blowing ourselves off the map.

But the people in and around the government don't have the imagination to realize that it's possible to live in a world in which these weapons are absent. It's an inability to believe in an alternative rather than any positive reason for having them. It's as if we're threatening each other with annihilation simply because we can't think of anything better to do.

» EXPRESS: What about the notion that we must fear renewed hostilities with Russia?
» SCHELL: Well, I think the transformation of Russia into a sort of proto-authoritarian state is one of the greatly underestimated tragedies of the post-Cold War period. I think it's very serious and I see the potential for a revival of the kind of great power competition that is endemic in history. We have no right to suppose any of that's gone away, and there are plenty of flashpoints already between the United States and Russia, and quite bitter arguments. And these, of course, can be quite serious — as we saw with World War I, which started over this kind of thing rather than any ideological struggle.

» EXPRESS: Isn't that a reason to keep our nuclear weapons?
» SCHELL: It's a reason to get rid of them. If we are heading into a situation of rivalry with Russia, would we prefer them to be nuclear-armed? I would prefer to go into such a rivalry otherwise.

» EXPRESS: Which countries are likely to get the bomb in the near future?
» SCHELL: Iran has to be at the top of that list.

There are 12 countries — just in the past year — that have expressed a renewed interest in acquiring nuclear power, which is, of course, is one of the pathways to the bomb technology. That's true of Egypt and Syria, which have to be on the list. Turkey has traditional interest in nuclear power and a quiet interest in the bomb. If North Korea is not willing to get rid of its nuclear arsenal, then you have to start looking at South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

Those are the top candidates. If proliferation continues, North Asia and the Middle East are full of candidate countries. ... Nuclear weapons produce more nuclear weapons; countries get the bomb because other countries have it. Deterrence theory holds that the only way to face a nuclear-armed adversary is to have nuclear weapons. So, deterrence is a proliferation machine.

» EXPRESS: I like the way you present a nuanced view of the Bush administration, praising it for acting boldly to stop proliferation but arguing that it pursued the wrong tack.
» SCHELL: My point in giving credit to the Bush administration is to say that their mistakes were not gratuitous. They were recognizing a crisis that is global and real and getting more urgent every day: The crisis of nuclear proliferation — including the danger of nuclear terrorist attack. They recognized an urgent problem. Many others did not.

» EXPRESS: You argue that Clinton did not.
» SCHELL: Yes, Clinton really took his eye off the nuclear ball and just let it slip out of awareness. Of course, Bush got a big wake up call on September 11, but they did recognize the dimensions of the problem and they adopted a policy that, in theory, was adequate to the problem. And this was the policy of military supremacy on a global basis wedded to preventive war to stop proliferation wherever it might arise.

The problem was that the policy was entirely unworkable. We see that in Iraq. We see that in Iran. North Korea became a nuclear power on their watch. And now we see it in spades in Pakistan, where the nuclear dangers are very serious.

So, my conclusion is that we need a 180 degree different policy, but one that has the audacity and the resolve and the staying power that the Bush people have shown. My own feeling is there has to be a negotiated solution. And we need a united world against anyone having nuclear weapons. That seems a sensible solution.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Mon., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness)

Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Photo by Martha Stewart

Posted by Express at 7:33 AM on January 7, 2008
Tagged in Books , Entertainment , The District , Top Stories , Van Ness