President Ronald W. Reagan with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev chatting outside Hofdi House during their summit meeting in Reykjavik on October 1, 1986. (Photo by Dirck Halstead/Getty Images)
The much anticipated summit earlier this month in Anchorage was a flop: Putin rebuffed Trump’s request for a ceasefire, and the woefully unprepared Trump seemed more intent on finding a way to earn a Nobel Peace Prize than striking a realistic bargain on Ukraine.
What was missing in the public exchanges between Trump and Putin was any talk of a revitalized international treaty that would bar any nation from first use of a nuclear weapon, though I was told that the issue of mutual arms control was raised by Putin at the summit. Nonetheless, nuclear disarmament, once the most important response to a burgeoning nuclear world, is clearly out of favor in this White House.
This terrifying state of affairs was spelled out in a recent essay by Mark Medish, a Washington attorney and arms control and disarmament expert who spent years working at high levels in the Treasury, the State Department, and the White House.
In 2000 he helped prepare the first US-Russia summit meetings after Putin took office. Writing in the Washington Spectator, Medish argued that a renewed major power interest in nuclear freeze talks is urgently needed because “the complexity of this subject has increased due to major technological advances in the nuclear, space, rocketry, biological and cyber/AI/quantum areas.”
I asked Medish about the importance of nuclear disarmament talks and why there are not any going on today.
HERSH: I have been a reporter covering international affairs for six decades, but I’ve never paid much attention to disarmament. The issue was just too boring. I remember in early 1973 when Leslie Gelb, a former Defense Department official, joined the New York Times after a stint as a fellow at the Brookings Institution. I had returned from a visit to Hanoi the year before and had had a helpful chat with him there about the state of the peace talks then being led by Henry Kissinger. I came away thinking the guy knew his stuff.
Gelb came to the Times primarily as a specialist on arms control and so he handled the ongoing talks between Kissinger and his Soviet counterparts on nuclear weapons disarmament. Despite my instinctive distrust of those who worked for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, one of the major American liars on the progress of the Vietnam War, I found Les to be a delight as a colleague and a fellow skeptic on the war. (I would not learn for years that he was the director of the Pentagon Papers, a detailed account of the lies and blunders that turned the war into a civilian bloodbath.)
What Les could not understand, as he reported on Kissinger’s vital disarmament talks with Russia and China in the early 1970s, was the near total ignorance of some of the Times editors about the intricacies of those talks. Time after time Les would come to me in shock at the inability of the senior editors to know what was important and what wasn’t. Stories that he deemed vital would be whittled down in the editing process and consigned to the back pages of the paper. When the stories did make page one, they often were rewritten, to Les’s dismay, in nonsensical ways. (Gelb went on, nonetheless, to become a columnist for the Times and later served for a decade as president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He died in 2019 at the age of 82.)
So my first question to you is why does the media here and around the world have so little interest in international arms talks? Is it just too complicated? Or does other international wrongdoing—the ongoing horrors committed by Israel in Gaza, for example—suck the air out of that issue, and its need?
MEDISH: It’s up to our political leaders to focus on these paramount national security issues and explain why they are doing it to the public.
“Strategic stability” is not a catchy phrase. Arms control has never been a terribly sexy topic, but before the Cold War ended it could get some attention, for example when we came to the brink of nuclear confrontation with the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis and a couple of other times. Of course, the blockbuster film Oppenheimer, which grossed nearly $1 billion, showed that the story of nuclear physics and the risk of Armageddon can still stimulate popular audiences.
HERSH: I recall being one of millions, with my family, who in the early 1980s marched and protested in Washington, New York, and scores of other cities against President Ronald Reagan’s early anti-Soviet stance on nuclear disarmament and his decision to deploy Pershing II nuclear missiles in Western Europe. The outpouring would lead to the nuclear freeze movement that is now a historical artifact. Millions cared back then—why not now?
MEDISH: In a way, it’s a healthy sign that people don’t lose sleep about the risk of nuclear holocaust, but that doesn’t mean the risk is gone and can be ignored. The American people were told that we had “won” the Cold War, the evil Soviet empire was gone, and we could move on with the “peace dividend,” globalization on our terms, etc. But the technological threat from WMD, not limited to nuclear, is still there and growing more potent and more complex. If we want peace, we need to get back to work on this topic.
Let’s also make a distinction here. There are basically three ways to respond to the rise of nuclear or any other WMD technology: prepare to win a confrontation by engaging in an arms race for supremacy, push to neutralize the dangerous technology either by fully disarming or creating a perfect defense, or accept mutual assured destruction and work diplomatically on ways to reduce the risk of accidental conflict and escalation—that means arms control treaties.
The movement to end nuclear weapons has been noble and highly aspirational—putting the genie back in the bottle. Since the 1960s, arms control diplomacy has been a pragmatic alternative to both the noble dream of disarmament and the nightmare of a nuclear-war fighting arms race.
Today we need to be equally concerned about the interlinked arms races in AI, in space, and in the biological lab. In the first Cold War, only two superpowers really mattered for the arms control talks. But now we have multiple actors, with China an absolutely necessary partner in any meaningful dialogue on strategic stability including cyber. This challenge will take more diplomacy, not less.
HERSH: As some of us remember, Reagan would do a 180 while in the White House and there was some talk late in his second term, to the dismay of Russophobic Washington, of his agreeing with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, then pursuing perestroika, to ban all nuclear weapons. That went no place and some of the disarmament agreements of the following decades—including the ABM treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty—were rebuffed by the United States.
Russia, in turn, has suspended its participation in a breakthrough New START treaty, which set limits of the number of nuclear warheads the US and Russia could have, on grounds that the US has been unfair in its participation.
MEDISH: Bilateral mistrust between the US and Russia has steadily risen since the Bush-Cheney team treated Russia as a largely irrelevant weakening power after 9/11. The US withdrawal from the ABM treaty was interpreted in Moscow as a sign that the US would pursue its own interests in the strategic sphere unilaterally and without consultation. Yet despite increasing tensions including the short Georgia war in 2008, the US and Russia managed to negotiate a landmark arms reduction agreement with New START in 2010. So nothing is inevitable, there is an opportunity to arrest and reverse the current trend of confrontation.
Let’s keep in mind that we negotiated the Limited Test Ban Treaty, ABM, and SALT I during the height of the Cold War, including the bloody Vietnam conflict with US troops on the ground. Those who say that the tragic Ukraine War must prevent us from strategic dialogue with Russia are missing the lessons of our own history. Nuclear talks and arms control treaties are not a sign of approval, but a recognition of shared interests. Nixon rightly met with Brezhnev and Mao not because they were our friends but because it was in the US national interest to do so.
Another important note: Pursuing a perfect missile defense—like the space-based Golden Dome project based on phased pulse lasers—which is the latest incarnation of Star Wars and Brilliant Pebbles is a risky game. Any non-cooperative effort to insulate from nuclear attack can easily be interpreted by the other side as an attempt to gain supremacy and first-strike capacity, in other words the ability to strike with impunity. In the nuclear game, unilateral “defense” moves of this kind are inherently destabilizing and take us further from peace.
The context of multiple technologies of mass destruction—not only nuclear but also space-based weapons, biological weapons and increasingly powerful AI that can control the other technologies—makes strategic stability even harder to achieve and maintain.
HERSH: The big issue now is the fact that Russia is nuclear-armed and Ukraine is not. There is little question that Russia is winning the war against Ukraine, in terms of territories gained and ability to sustain a higher level of violence. Is there any hope of the disarmament community finding a way to help the two powers reach a settlement? Is the community up for it?
MEDISH: I would commend the Trump administration for trying to advance talks on ending the war in Ukraine. Many critics insisted Trump should not meet with Putin in Alaska and discuss Ukraine without Ukraine at the table, and then the same people chided him for failing to deliver a deal. That view makes no sense. It’s in our interest to try to broker a Ukraine deal if we can, but also to pursue diplomacy on strategic interests which go way beyond Ukraine. The same is true of the Taiwan Straits issue and our interest in engaging China on cyber/AI arms control.
It’s noteworthy that the Trump team managed to broker a deal to resolve the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict. The devil is always in the details, but it’s a good start.
Trump should build on his array of peace efforts and consider appointing a special envoy on arms control diplomacy across all WMD technologies. It would be a smart legacy move for the president and it’s in our vital interest. The choice is once again between the arms race and the human race.
As George Kennan said in 1980 to leaders of the superpowers: “For the love of God, of your children, and of the civilization to which you belong, cease this madness. You are mortal men. You are capable of error. You have no right to hold in your hands . . . destructive power sufficient to put an end to civilized life on a great portion of our planet.” We can’t undo the technology, but we can control the risk.
What was missing in the public exchanges between Trump and Putin was any talk of a revitalized international treaty that would bar any nation from first use of a nuclear weapon, though I was told that the issue of mutual arms control was raised by Putin at the summit. Nonetheless, nuclear disarmament, once the most important response to a burgeoning nuclear world, is clearly out of favor in this White House.
This terrifying state of affairs was spelled out in a recent essay by Mark Medish, a Washington attorney and arms control and disarmament expert who spent years working at high levels in the Treasury, the State Department, and the White House.
In 2000 he helped prepare the first US-Russia summit meetings after Putin took office. Writing in the Washington Spectator, Medish argued that a renewed major power interest in nuclear freeze talks is urgently needed because “the complexity of this subject has increased due to major technological advances in the nuclear, space, rocketry, biological and cyber/AI/quantum areas.”
I asked Medish about the importance of nuclear disarmament talks and why there are not any going on today.
HERSH: I have been a reporter covering international affairs for six decades, but I’ve never paid much attention to disarmament. The issue was just too boring. I remember in early 1973 when Leslie Gelb, a former Defense Department official, joined the New York Times after a stint as a fellow at the Brookings Institution. I had returned from a visit to Hanoi the year before and had had a helpful chat with him there about the state of the peace talks then being led by Henry Kissinger. I came away thinking the guy knew his stuff.
Gelb came to the Times primarily as a specialist on arms control and so he handled the ongoing talks between Kissinger and his Soviet counterparts on nuclear weapons disarmament. Despite my instinctive distrust of those who worked for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, one of the major American liars on the progress of the Vietnam War, I found Les to be a delight as a colleague and a fellow skeptic on the war. (I would not learn for years that he was the director of the Pentagon Papers, a detailed account of the lies and blunders that turned the war into a civilian bloodbath.)
What Les could not understand, as he reported on Kissinger’s vital disarmament talks with Russia and China in the early 1970s, was the near total ignorance of some of the Times editors about the intricacies of those talks. Time after time Les would come to me in shock at the inability of the senior editors to know what was important and what wasn’t. Stories that he deemed vital would be whittled down in the editing process and consigned to the back pages of the paper. When the stories did make page one, they often were rewritten, to Les’s dismay, in nonsensical ways. (Gelb went on, nonetheless, to become a columnist for the Times and later served for a decade as president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He died in 2019 at the age of 82.)
So my first question to you is why does the media here and around the world have so little interest in international arms talks? Is it just too complicated? Or does other international wrongdoing—the ongoing horrors committed by Israel in Gaza, for example—suck the air out of that issue, and its need?
MEDISH: It’s up to our political leaders to focus on these paramount national security issues and explain why they are doing it to the public.
“Strategic stability” is not a catchy phrase. Arms control has never been a terribly sexy topic, but before the Cold War ended it could get some attention, for example when we came to the brink of nuclear confrontation with the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis and a couple of other times. Of course, the blockbuster film Oppenheimer, which grossed nearly $1 billion, showed that the story of nuclear physics and the risk of Armageddon can still stimulate popular audiences.
HERSH: I recall being one of millions, with my family, who in the early 1980s marched and protested in Washington, New York, and scores of other cities against President Ronald Reagan’s early anti-Soviet stance on nuclear disarmament and his decision to deploy Pershing II nuclear missiles in Western Europe. The outpouring would lead to the nuclear freeze movement that is now a historical artifact. Millions cared back then—why not now?
MEDISH: In a way, it’s a healthy sign that people don’t lose sleep about the risk of nuclear holocaust, but that doesn’t mean the risk is gone and can be ignored. The American people were told that we had “won” the Cold War, the evil Soviet empire was gone, and we could move on with the “peace dividend,” globalization on our terms, etc. But the technological threat from WMD, not limited to nuclear, is still there and growing more potent and more complex. If we want peace, we need to get back to work on this topic.
Let’s also make a distinction here. There are basically three ways to respond to the rise of nuclear or any other WMD technology: prepare to win a confrontation by engaging in an arms race for supremacy, push to neutralize the dangerous technology either by fully disarming or creating a perfect defense, or accept mutual assured destruction and work diplomatically on ways to reduce the risk of accidental conflict and escalation—that means arms control treaties.
The movement to end nuclear weapons has been noble and highly aspirational—putting the genie back in the bottle. Since the 1960s, arms control diplomacy has been a pragmatic alternative to both the noble dream of disarmament and the nightmare of a nuclear-war fighting arms race.
Today we need to be equally concerned about the interlinked arms races in AI, in space, and in the biological lab. In the first Cold War, only two superpowers really mattered for the arms control talks. But now we have multiple actors, with China an absolutely necessary partner in any meaningful dialogue on strategic stability including cyber. This challenge will take more diplomacy, not less.
HERSH: As some of us remember, Reagan would do a 180 while in the White House and there was some talk late in his second term, to the dismay of Russophobic Washington, of his agreeing with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, then pursuing perestroika, to ban all nuclear weapons. That went no place and some of the disarmament agreements of the following decades—including the ABM treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty—were rebuffed by the United States.
Russia, in turn, has suspended its participation in a breakthrough New START treaty, which set limits of the number of nuclear warheads the US and Russia could have, on grounds that the US has been unfair in its participation.
MEDISH: Bilateral mistrust between the US and Russia has steadily risen since the Bush-Cheney team treated Russia as a largely irrelevant weakening power after 9/11. The US withdrawal from the ABM treaty was interpreted in Moscow as a sign that the US would pursue its own interests in the strategic sphere unilaterally and without consultation. Yet despite increasing tensions including the short Georgia war in 2008, the US and Russia managed to negotiate a landmark arms reduction agreement with New START in 2010. So nothing is inevitable, there is an opportunity to arrest and reverse the current trend of confrontation.
Let’s keep in mind that we negotiated the Limited Test Ban Treaty, ABM, and SALT I during the height of the Cold War, including the bloody Vietnam conflict with US troops on the ground. Those who say that the tragic Ukraine War must prevent us from strategic dialogue with Russia are missing the lessons of our own history. Nuclear talks and arms control treaties are not a sign of approval, but a recognition of shared interests. Nixon rightly met with Brezhnev and Mao not because they were our friends but because it was in the US national interest to do so.
Another important note: Pursuing a perfect missile defense—like the space-based Golden Dome project based on phased pulse lasers—which is the latest incarnation of Star Wars and Brilliant Pebbles is a risky game. Any non-cooperative effort to insulate from nuclear attack can easily be interpreted by the other side as an attempt to gain supremacy and first-strike capacity, in other words the ability to strike with impunity. In the nuclear game, unilateral “defense” moves of this kind are inherently destabilizing and take us further from peace.
The context of multiple technologies of mass destruction—not only nuclear but also space-based weapons, biological weapons and increasingly powerful AI that can control the other technologies—makes strategic stability even harder to achieve and maintain.
HERSH: The big issue now is the fact that Russia is nuclear-armed and Ukraine is not. There is little question that Russia is winning the war against Ukraine, in terms of territories gained and ability to sustain a higher level of violence. Is there any hope of the disarmament community finding a way to help the two powers reach a settlement? Is the community up for it?
MEDISH: I would commend the Trump administration for trying to advance talks on ending the war in Ukraine. Many critics insisted Trump should not meet with Putin in Alaska and discuss Ukraine without Ukraine at the table, and then the same people chided him for failing to deliver a deal. That view makes no sense. It’s in our interest to try to broker a Ukraine deal if we can, but also to pursue diplomacy on strategic interests which go way beyond Ukraine. The same is true of the Taiwan Straits issue and our interest in engaging China on cyber/AI arms control.
It’s noteworthy that the Trump team managed to broker a deal to resolve the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict. The devil is always in the details, but it’s a good start.
Trump should build on his array of peace efforts and consider appointing a special envoy on arms control diplomacy across all WMD technologies. It would be a smart legacy move for the president and it’s in our vital interest. The choice is once again between the arms race and the human race.
As George Kennan said in 1980 to leaders of the superpowers: “For the love of God, of your children, and of the civilization to which you belong, cease this madness. You are mortal men. You are capable of error. You have no right to hold in your hands . . . destructive power sufficient to put an end to civilized life on a great portion of our planet.” We can’t undo the technology, but we can control the risk.