As a student, Barack Obama questioned the goal of freezing nuclear arsenals.

Obama’s Nuclear-Free Vision
Shaped by Youthful Ideals


By WILLIAM J.BROAD and DAVID E.SANGER

IN THE DEPTHS of the cold war, in 1983, a senior at Columbia University in New York wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of “a nuclear free world.” He railed against discussions of “first- versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.



The student was Barack Obama, and he was clearly trying to sort out his thoughts. In the conclusion, he denounced “the twisted logic of which we are a part today” and praised student efforts to realize “the possibility of a decent world.” But his article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” which only recently has been rediscovered, said little about how to achieve the utopian dream.

Twenty-six years later, the author, in his new job as president of the United States, has begun pushing for new global rules, treaties and alliances that he insists can establish a nuclear-free world.

“I’m not naive,” President Obama told a cheering throng in Prague this spring. “This goal will not be reached quickly - perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.”

On Monday, on his first visit to Russia since taking office, he signed an agreement to cut American and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals by at least one-quarter, a first step in a broader effort intended to reduce the threat of such weapons drastically and to prevent their further spread to unstable regions.

No previous American president has set out a step-by-step agenda for the eventual elimination of nuclear arms. In an interview on July 4, Mr.Obama, conscious of his critics, stressed that “I’ve made clear that we will retain our deterrent capacity as long as there is a country with nuclear weapons.”

But reducing arsenals, he insisted, would be the first step toward giving the United States and a growing body of allies the power to remake the nuclear world. Among the goals: halting weapons programs in North Korea and Iran, discouraging states from abandoning the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and ending global production of fuel for nuclear arms.

Even before those battles are joined, opposition is rising. “This is dangerous, wishful thinking,” Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Richard Perle, an architect of the Reaganera nuclear buildup that appalled Mr.Obama as an undergraduate, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal. They contend that Mr.Obama is, indeed, a naif for assuming that “the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces.”

In the interview, the president described his agenda as the best way to move forward in a turbulent world.

“It’s naive for us to think,” he said, “that we can grow our nuclear stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we’re going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves.”

Though he has written two memoirs, Mr.Obama has volunteered few details about his two years at Columbia.

“People assume he’s a novice,” said Michael L.Baron, who taught Mr.Obama in a Columbia seminar on international politics and American policy around the time he wrote the Sundial article. “He’s been thinking about these issues for a long time.”

In a paper for Dr.Baron, Mr.Obama analyzed how a president might go about negotiating nuclear arms reductions with the Russians - exactly what he just did.

Now both he and his agenda face the ultimate test: limiting nuclear arms at the very moment many experts fear the beginning of a second nuclear age and a rush of new weapons states.

As a student “interested broadly in foreign policy,” Mr.Obama recalled in the interview, he focused on “a central question: how would the United States and the Soviet Union effectively manage these nuclear arsenals, and were there ways to dial down the dangers that humanity faced?”

It was during Dr.Baron’s seminar that Mr.Obama wrote his Sundial article, profiling two campus groups, Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism. The two groups, he wrote, “visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track.”

The article seemed to question the popular goal of freezing nuclear arsenals rather than reducing them. Mr.Obama wondered if the freeze movement “stems from young people’s penchant for the latest ‘happenings.’”

What clearly excited him was the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which would have ended the testing and development of new weapons. The Reagan administration vehemently opposed the treaty. One Columbia activist, Mr.Obama wrote, argued that the United States should initiate the ban “as a powerful first step towards a nuclear free world.” That phrase - a “nuclear free world,” which was Mr.Obama’s paraphrase - would re-emerge decades later as the signature item of his nuclear agenda.

The nuclear world Mr.Obama studied and wrote about at Columbia bears little resemblance to the one he faces today. Russia in many ways is the least of his challenges. More complex are problems posed by the rise of new nuclear states, chiefly North Korea, which has now conducted two nuclear tests, and Iran, which experts say will be able to build a warhead soon. Pakistan has the fastest-growing arsenal, India’s is improving, and Israel’s nuclear capacity has never been publicly discussed, much less dealt with, by the United States.

Mr.Obama and his aides say they want to address all these issues. “We tried the unilateral way, in the Bush years, and it didn’t work,” a senior administration official said recently. “What we are trying is a fundamental change, a different view that says our security can be enhanced by arms control.”

Mr.Obama and like-minded leaders will have to establish a new global order that will truly restrain rogue states and terrorist groups from moving ahead with nuclear projects.

“I don’t think I was that unique at that time,” the president said of his Columbia days, “and I don’t think I’m that unique today in thinking that if we could put the genie back in the bottle, in some sense, that there would be less danger - not just to the United States but to people around the world.”

In a college magazine in 1983, Barack Obama wrote about how a president might go about negotiating nuclear arms reductions with the Russians.