Current U.S. policy on this issue is not encouraging. The Pentagon has already decided that when President Clinton meets President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in June, the United States will not agree to the Russian proposal to cut nuclear arsenals to 1,500 for each country. Therefore, they do not have to worry about a few missile defense sites in Alaska aimed at a mere handful of North Korean or Libyan missiles. At its ratification 30 years ago, the Non-Proliferation Treaty was a Faustian bargain between the five countries that then possessed nuclear weapons and the rest of the world. Every state today except India, Pakistan, Israel and Cuba has promised, in accordance with the treaty, not to develop or acquire nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons are morally abhorrent, militarily useless and illegal under international law.
A single bomb would destroy hundreds of thousands of lives. Peter Weiss is president of the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy in New York.