Politics
At Chicago Conference, Nobel Laureates and Nuclear Experts Push for Increased Diplomacy
The Trinity Test, 80 years ago Wednesday, ushered in a new nuclear era.
No nuclear weapons have been deployed since their devastating use in World War II. Now, amid growing global tensions, major gaps in diplomatic relations and fitful efforts to reduce the weapons stockpile, some experts are warning it’s time for world leaders to renew their focus on preventing nuclear war.
This week a group of Nobel laureates and nuclear experts from across the globe gathered at the University of Chicago for an assembly focused on just that existential issue.
The “Nobel Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War,” a three-day conference, produced a declaration to establish guiding principles for nuclear diplomacy.
“The world we built in the 1990s after the Cold War ended is not the world we’re in now,” said Ankit Panda, senior fellow at the Nuclear Policy Institute at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We have to recall the lessons of the first and second nuclear ages — arms control, risk reduction, confidence building, transparency — all the things that we built to ensure that our coexistence with the bomb would be more manageable if not entirely risk-free.”
While the United States has not tested nuclear weapons since the early 1990s, some worry that the world may be sliding toward a new atomic era. They cited a resurgence in arms development, the U.S. leaving the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and shifting doctrines that lower the threshold for nuclear use.
“The time when people used to constantly fear the possibility of use of nuclear weapons, we’ve gone past that stage,” said Manpreet Sethi, distinguished fellow at the Centre for Air Power Studies in New Delhi, where she heads its program on nuclear issues. “While we are all fearful about the nuclear risks, I think it’s also about looking at some of the positive stories that have come out of the past and how we can implement them again going into the future.”
