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process requires—and that, in turn, depends on a consensus at the
UN. For another, the NPT incorporates the utopian vision of global
zero and even sails beyond it, calling for “general and complete
disarmament that liquidates, in particular, nuclear weapons.” Since
almost no governments anywhere in the world actually believe in
“general and complete disarmament,” the effect of its inclusion in the
NPT simply robs that treaty of any gravity.
It is widely accepted among those who think the Non-Proliferation
Treaty is the key to containing the spread of nuclear weapons that
control of the international fuel cycle must be achieved by an
international consensus and administered and enforced by the UN or
comparable body. But suppose a much smaller group of nations—a
coalition of the willing, perhaps—sought to control the nuclear fuel
cycle, or at least deal with would-be proliferators in a firm, timely
and decisive manner: Could such a coalition achieve legitimacy in
light of the universalist conceit of the NPT? Would it even
contemplate action outside the treaty?
But what made the 2007 Wall Street Journal article so important was
not its prescription for obviously necessary measures such as
ensuring controls for nuclear fuel. It was that its appearance
reinforced a growing utopianism that has flowered into a movement
for “a world free of nuclear weapons,” a movement whose
momentum is reminiscent of the 1980s movement for a “nuclear
freeze”—a Soviet-manipulated protest aimed at halting Ronald
Reagan’s modernization of the American nuclear deterrent. Shultz,
Kissinger, Perry, and Nunn should have foreseen that their statement
would be seized upon by irresponsible actors. All four, after all,
opposed the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s.
The goal of a nuclear-free world was made even more emphatic in a
second article, also in the Wall Street Journal, that the authors wrote
a year after the first one (January 15, 2008): “Progress must be

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