How Much Do You Know About the Non-Proliferation Treaty?

The year 2008 was filled with anniversary commemorations and remembrances of the many epochal historic events that had taken place four decades earlier, during the seminal year of 1968. The Tet offensive in Vietnam, which for the first time caused many Americans to comprehend that this was a war we might actually lose. The assassination of Martin Luther King, and the riots that ensued around the country. The assassination of leading presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy two months later. The melee at the Chicago Democratic convention. The Mexico City Olympics, and the black power salutes of Tommie Smith and John Carlos. The tumultuous three-way November presidential election and the victory of Richard M. Nixon. And – at the very end of the year, on Christmas Eve – the flight of Apollo 8 from the earth to the moon, and the first view that any humans had ever been granted of our single, borderless, breathtaking planet, lonely and fragile and whole, suspended among the blazing stars.

Yet one anniversary, that largely escaped public notice in 2008, may have consequences in the end greater than any of these.

The 1968 Deal

After you finish reading this chapter of Apocalypse Never, go out and try an experiment. Enter a Starbuck’s, or some locally owned alternative, and see if you can chat up 100 people waiting in line. There are always people waiting in line at these places. Tell them that on July 1, 1968, in Washington, London, and Moscow, world leaders signed something called the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, commonly known as the "NPT."

Then ask them to tell you what it says. In this age of vast civic disengagement, probably around 90 will respond, "I don’t know. I never heard of it." Of the remaining ten, probably eight or nine will tell you, "It’s about preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. It’s about keeping countries like North Korea and Iran from getting The Bomb."

Those eight or nine respondents will be half right. In the NPT, the human race endeavored to offer a permanent solution to the great problem of the nuclear age. The grand bargain of the NPT was that the many "nuclear have-nots" agreed forever to forego nuclear weapons, while the few "nuclear haves" agreed to get rid of theirs.

No, that is not a misprint. Of your 100 interlocutors, quite likely no more than one or two will know that more than forty years ago, the U.S. government committed itself to eliminate its entire nuclear arsenal. And -- in conjunction with the other nuclear weapon states -- to abolish nuclear weapons from the face of the earth forever.

Really. Try the experiment today.

The NPT does not just impose non-proliferation obligations on countries like Iran and Syria and Libya. The NPT imposes disarmament obligations on us. Article VI of the Treaty commits the nuclear states "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to a cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date, and to nuclear disarmament … under strict and effective international control."

Lest anyone assert any ambiguity in those words, one need turn only to the treaty’s preamble, which states that the signatories are "desiring to further the easing of international tension and the strengthening of trust between States in order to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons …" It was the first time since the dawn of the age of atomic weapons, nearly a quarter century earlier, that the human race had formally expressed its intent to bring that age eventually to a close.