Toward zero: The path to nuclear disarmament

Read the sidebar article, "A good START."

After the end of the cold war, a new global movement arose seeking nuclear disarmament. The movement was sparked in part by a remarkable initiative by four self-described former cold warriors—former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former defense secretary William Perry and former U.S. senator Sam Nunn. In editorials published by the Wall Street Journal in 2007 and 2008, these four called for abolishing nuclear weapons.

The statements by the "four horsemen of disarmament" emerged from an October 2006 conference at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Reykjavík summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. It was at that 1986 meeting in Iceland that Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to the idea of eliminating all ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Their verbal agreement foundered on differences over cuts in strategic missile defense, but the meeting nonetheless laid the groundwork for significant arms reduction and helped to end the cold war.