Dream of Total Disarmament Could Become Reality : Arms Control: With the recent world events--and the U.S. atomic energy agency--the machinery is in place for an end to nuclear proliferation.

As the Soviet empire unravels, it is ever more obvious that the only real threat to U.S. national security is nuclear proliferation. It is quite possible that such new republics as Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus will retain nuclear technology, and that expertise could be sold to the highest bidder on a global black market. Last fall, President George Bush announced a series of unilateral cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal and Moscow reciprocated with similar reductions. But even the most radical arms-control measures fail to address the central problem of proliferation.

Even after the Commonwealth of Independent States matches the U.S. reductions, the world will still be threatened by more than 20,000 active nuclear warheads--and nations like Pakistan, Iraq and North Korea are trying to obtain their own nuclear weapons.

Moreover, at least 25 nations have acquired--or are trying to acquire--ballistic missiles, including Algeria, Brazil, Egypt, India, Libya, South Africa, Israel, Pakistan and the two Koreas. Even without ballistic-missile delivery systems, a small nation like Iraq, armed with a single crude atomic weapon, could inflict more casualties than America sustained in all the wars of the nation’s existence.

In addition, Bush’s proposals do not make it possible to denuclearize Europe. In fact, Britain and France have announced they will continue to modernize their nuclear deterrent. It is also obvious, even to the post-coup, reformist military leaders in the commonwealth, that Bush has not given up much by withdrawing tactical nuclear weapons that have no logical target in Eastern Europe. Especially in the formerly Soviet republics bordering Europe, there is a danger that, if the process of nuclear disarmament in Europe stops, progress already achieved could be reversed.

By retaining effective elements of the nuclear triad--submarines, single-warhead ballistic missiles and long-range bombers--and coupling this with a call for increased expenditures on “Star Wars”--Bush has, in some ways, made the U.S. strategic force leaner and meaner.

The U.S. posture is inherently threatening to a variety of other nations--and may be planting the seeds for a renewed arms race--not only with the new commonwealth republics, but with China and numerous Third World nations.

Bush demonstrated during the Gulf War that a determined President has the power to mobilize world opinion in support of bold action. How might the United States proceed if Bush were to decide to take leadership and “step down the thermonuclear ladder?”--as Gen. Colin L. Powell has described the problem.

A systematic strategy could build on numerous precedents from previous comprehensive U.S. disarmament plans. The first serious U.S. initiative was devised, in early 1946, by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who built the atomic bomb. As a consultant to the Acheson-Lilienthal Committee--a group of “wise men” selected by President Harry S. Truman to devise a plan for controlling atomic technology--Oppenheimer proposed that all nations agree to a “partial renunciation of sovereignty” over nuclear matters. A key element of the plan was a U.N. International Atomic Authority that would own and operate all aspects of nuclear technology--from uranium mines to waste-storage facilities.

In the spring of 1946, Truman appointed Bernard M. Baruch to submit the plan to the United Nations. Baruch, however, put his own imprint on the plan--and by most accounts made it unacceptable to the Soviet Union. Under the plan, the United States would keep its monopoly of nuclear weapons until a full U.N. control system was established--but the Soviet Union would have to forgo building its own atomic arsenal and submit to intrusive inspection. Baruch also inserted strong language saying any violation would meet with “condign punishment.”

We shall never know whether the Russians would have rejected the original Oppenheimer proposal. But clearly, Baruch was proposing an atomic league designed to prolong the U.S. monopoly. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson later put it, “It was Baruch’s ball and he balled it up . . . he pretty well ruined the thing.”

Elements of the Oppenheimer proposal are now far more feasible. Not only have attitudes changed, some of the institutional structures necessary for a realistic disarmament system have been established. For example, we have an International Atomic Energy Agency, empowered to carry out inspections of nuclear facilities around the world and ensure nuclear fuel is not diverted. What the agency is now doing in Iraq illustrates how a security system based on disarmament could be monitored.

Moreover, existing regulatory powers could be strengthened. For example, the agency could be given regulatory rights over all global atomic-energy facilities. The United States and other countries currently refuse to apply agency safeguards to nuclear plants of “national and security significance.” The Non-Proliferation Treaty should be amended to allow the agency access to all nuclear facilities--civilian and military.

In 1952, the Truman Administration also endorsed proposals for a U.N. Disarmament Commission to develop plans for a balanced reduction of all conventional forces and the elimination of nuclear weapons. The gap between the superpowers seemed to have suddenly been bridged on May 10, 1955, when Josef Stalin’s successors agreed to the basic U.S. proposal for nuclear and general disarmament. Unfortunately, no sooner had the Soviet Union made this concession, than the Eisenhower Administration announced it was “reserving” the U.S. position: arms control was now the official U.S. position, not nuclear disarmament. At the height of the Cold War, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had convinced the President that existing means of verifying a disarmament treaty were inadequate.

A modern-day approach could implement the U.N. plan and supplement it with an updated version of Eisenhower’s 1955 “Open Skies” proposal. Under such a plan, the United States could turn the best satellite technology over to the United Nations, allowing the IAEA to verify each step of disarmament. After the Gulf War, the United States unofficially passed highly classified satellite information to the United Nations to assist agency inspectors in their search for Iraqi nuclear facilities.

A fully developed modern initiative could also build on the 1961 McCloy-Zorin “Agreed Principles.” Endorsed by the Kennedy Administration and accepted by the Soviet Union, McCloy-Zorin embraced an overall plan for implementing complete disarmament. Both nuclear and conventional disarmament would proceed according to a negotiated timetable. In the end, all states would keep “only those non-nuclear armaments, forces, facilities and Establishments as are agreed to be necessary to maintain internal order.”

In 1962, the Kennedy Administration submitted a detailed disarmament plan to the United Nations, which called for a three-stage program following the outline of the agreed principles. By Stage III, “no state would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened United Nations Peace Force and all international disputes would be settled according to the agreed principles of international conduct.”

Today, we could refine and implement the McCloy-Zorin and 1962 disarmament plan by requiring all countries to cut defense budgets by, say, 15%-20% per year. If the major powers proceeded in this way, other nations not complying with the agreed goals might become ineligible for World Bank loans, International Monetary Fund monies and access to foreign markets. Particularly egregious pirate nations could be penalized with economic sanctions or--in the extreme--military intervention.

Is the idea of moving toward global disarmament utopian? Perhaps. However, at the dawn of the nuclear age, many leading Americans recognized that nuclear weapons had made the United States--a nation protected from conventional invasion by oceanic “moats”--vulnerable for the first time in its history.

Some of the most conservative figures of the American Establishment--including Acheson, Henry L. Stimson, John J. McCloy, James B. Conant and Leslie R. Groves and Vannevar Bush--signed their names to the Oppenheimer plan. As McCloy put it: “The only way really to win an all-out war of the future is to prevent it, for such a war has become synonymous with suicide.”

If such American leaders could take the idea of disarmament seriously when superpower rivalries were intense, perhaps it is not impossible that we, too, might think unthinkable thoughts about disarmament now the Cold War has ended.