By Peter Gaechter

Crowds formed long lines outside the UN building in Geneva to hear Gorbachev

The world missed a great opportunity to dismantle nuclear arsenals and rid the world of this danger when the Soviet Union collapsed, Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, told a Geneva audience Monday 5 October.  “We let slip a major opportunity. Too many thought it was a victory of the West in the Cold War. This was a distortion of things”, he said.

Some in the US misinterpreted the events surrounding the disintegration of the USSR as a victory for the West and especially for its one remaining superpower, he said, rather than as an opportunity to think boldly about doing away with the Cold War mentality and institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato). “We looked beyond the horizon” in Reykjavik , he said, referring to his 1986 meetings with then US President Ronald Reagan that resulted in serious cuts in both countries’ nuclear weaponry.

Resetting the nuclear disarmament agenda

Both Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations, and Gorbachev made strong cases for giving new impetus to the task of removing nuclear weapons from the world, addressing an audience of diplomats, UN employees and the general public at the third of a series of lectures on nuclear disarmament at the UN’s European headquarters in Geneva.

Ban called on the world’s nations to find the political will essential to create a nuclear-free world, and cited last September’s UN Security Council meeting of heads of state which called for just such a ban, “a world without nuclear weapons”. Ban was optimistic, and pointed out that there is unprecedented agreement by the nuclear powers on issues such as Iran and North Korea, and that the US had promised to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, CTBT.

Gorbachev’s pessimism

The keynote speaker at the event, Gorbachev cited a number of reasons why things were not going so well: despite the efforts of the last years, there is a real risk of a renewed arms race (in the Middle East and in East Asia) and of the weaponization of space. He said that the weakening of the verification process over the past few years contributes to the increased risks. Short and intermediate nuclear-armed missiles increase the dangers of an accident, or that these may fall into terrorist hands. He said it was an illusion to believe that deterrence was anything but an invitation to disaster.

The clarity of Gorbachev’s main message was unfortunately a little obscured by its delivery. He may have star drawing power in the West, but he is irrelevant in his own country now. Yet a quarter of a century ago he was very important in making the world safer when he and Ronald Reagan sat down together to reduce each country’s nuclear arsenals.

Gorbachev quoted Reagan: “Trust, but verify” as the basis for their understanding, which reduced tensions between the two countries and in the world at large.

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