On the twenty-first anniversary of United States President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's Reykjavik summit, a conference was held at Stanford to discuss laying the groundwork for a world free of nuclear threats. The following steps were discussed:
• Changing the cold war posture of deployed nuclear weapons to increase warning time and thereby reduce the danger of an accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon
• Continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them
• Eliminating short-range nuclear weapons designed to be forward-deployed
• Initiating a bipartisan process with the Senate, including understandings to increase confidence and provide for periodic review and to achieve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, taking advantage of recent technical advances and working to secure ratification by other key states
• Providing the highest possible standards of security for all stocks of weapons, weapons-usable plutonium, and highly enriched uranium everywhere in the world
• Getting control of the uranium enrichment process, combined with the guarantee that uranium for nuclear power reactors could be obtained at a reasonable price, first from the Nuclear Suppliers Group and then from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or other controlled international reserves. It will also be necessary to deal with proliferation issues presented by spent fuel from reactors producing electricity
• Halting the global production of fissile material for weapons: phasing out the use of highly enriched uranium in civil commerce, removing weapons-usable uranium from research facilities around the world, and rendering the materials safe
• Redoubling our efforts to resolve regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers
• Continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them
Photo courtesy The Stanford Daily
• Initiating a bipartisan process with the Senate, including understandings to increase confidence and provide for periodic review and to achieve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, taking advantage of recent technical advances and working to secure ratification by other key states
• Providing the highest possible standards of security for all stocks of weapons, weapons-usable plutonium, and highly enriched uranium everywhere in the world
• Getting control of the uranium enrichment process, combined with the guarantee that uranium for nuclear power reactors could be obtained at a reasonable price, first from the Nuclear Suppliers Group and then from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or other controlled international reserves. It will also be necessary to deal with proliferation issues presented by spent fuel from reactors producing electricity
• Halting the global production of fissile material for weapons: phasing out the use of highly enriched uranium in civil commerce, removing weapons-usable uranium from research facilities around the world, and rendering the materials safe
• Redoubling our efforts to resolve regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers
These steps were originally published in a Wall Street Journal article by George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn. This article is also available in Hoover Digest 2007 No. 1.
