Transcript

STROBE TALBOTT: The second point has to do with another important theme of the last half-century, and that is the extent to which bilateral arms control created the environment or the conditions for multilateral nonproliferation. In a bipolar nuclear world, that is, a world where you have two superpowers each armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, the antagonism between them was trumped by the need for survival which led them into this process of bilateral arms control that I was referring to a moment ago, but that made it both possible and desirable to bring other countries into the process as well, and while the United States and the Soviet Union were against each other in many, many respects, they both had an interest in holding down the number of states, this was before we or they were terribly worried about nonstate actors which we are today, but holding down as much as possible the number of states that also had nuclear weapons. Which is to say that the process that began between the White House and the Kremlin was very quickly broadened to bring about a series of test bans leading ultimately to the Nonproliferation Treaty which the vast majority of the countries on Earth now belong to.

Here flashing forward to the present we have kind of a back to the future situation where the effort on the part of many countries but now I think led very much by the United States to revitalize multilateral nonproliferation measures is going to be in the first instance about bilateral U.S.-Russian arms control, and the hope on the part of the administration is that as they hit the now famous although occasionally mistranslated reset button in U.S.-Russian relations, that will initially be with regard to a success to the START Treaty, but will lead very quickly they hope early next year, some would hope that it was even sooner than that, to the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and also a more robust set of nonproliferation policies in the part of national governments and also on the international community as we had into the NPT review.

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