Retired generals are starting to campaign against nuclear weapons. Australia is pushing the nuclear powers to move to a nuclear-free world. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences will soon call for massive reductions in nuclear arsenals.
With all the promising developments elsewhere, it's now the U.S. government that holds the key to ending the Cold War belief that nuclear weapons ensure security, Professor Joseph Rotblat, winner of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize, said Monday."If we can convince the United States government it is time to eliminate nuclear weapons, it will happen," said the 87-year-old nuclear physicist. Rotblat has spent the past 50 years campaigning to rid the world of the weapon he helped to create.
But the Clinton administration doesn't see any political capital to be gained from changing its Cold War policy, Professor Steve Fetter, a former Clinton adviser on nuclear issues, told a major conference on the problems and possibilities of a nuclear-free world.
"And I'm afraid that until people like President Clinton, or the current secretary of defense, perceive that there will be a political payoff, there really won't be prog-ress," he said.
Five years after the end of the Cold War, the once utopian idea of returning to a nuclear-free world increasingly is being embraced by soldiers, scientists, diplomats and politicians.
"We're persuading people who 10 years ago would have (thought it) inconceivable," said Frank Blackaby, former director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
But new converts and old peace campaigners recognize that they have not yet achieved a breakthrough in the mind-set of old Cold Warriors in Washington and Moscow. They also have failed to mobilize public opinion.
"The world has more than 1 million kilograms (2.2 million pounds) of plutonium in at least 35 countries - and the world neither knows nor cares," said U.S. nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor, who helped design the fission bomb and later became a nuclear opponent.
"I hope it doesn't take a terrorist nuclear explosion to get the world to care," Taylor said.
The growing band of anti-nuclear campaigners hopes that by the end of the century, it will be able to galvanize public opinion and put the issue on the political agenda of countries around the world.
Two months ago, an international commission established by the Australian government urged the five declared nuclear powers to take the lead in moving to a nuclear-free world. Australia has since asked the United Nations to back the commission's recommendations.
The five nuclear powers and more than 70 other countries last month signed a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty - long a goal of Rotblat, the only scientist to quit work on the Manhattan project for reasons of conscience.
Rotblat, who served on Australia's commission, said he was encouraged by support from fellow members including former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.