Historical Commentary on Global Zero and Kellogg‑Briand Pact

Article 2. World Affairs Yes, Nukes: The Global Zero Utopia Richard Perle March/April 2011 -- There are many specters haunting our world, but one is of our own making—the utopian vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, the dream that has come to be called “global zero.” The vision of the total elimination of nuclear weapons is a postmodern version of an old idea, popular early in the twentieth century, when Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (reprinted in 1933) was required reading in intellectual and policy circles in the United States and Europe. Seventy-six years before Barack Obama was honored in Oslo, Norman Angell also won the Nobel Prize, having come to prominence with the argument that global economic interdependence rendered war futile and unprofitable and therefore obsolete. In the wake of the Bush administration, what lies in store for the future of America's presence abroad? Angell’s theory expressed the war-weary and wishful temper of the time. Enthusiasm for achieving peace through international institutions and legal constructs ran high in the period after the disastrous First World War, its most fulsome expression being the Kellogg-Briand Pact, named for its authors, an American secretary of state and a French foreign minister. Ratified by parliaments around the world (and by the US Senate on an 85-1 vote, with only Wisconsin Republican John J. Blaine voting against), the pact sought to deal with the problem of international aggression by simply outlawing war. Less than two years after the pact entered into force in 1929, one of the signatories, Japan, invaded Manchuria. The world “community’—that is, the rest of the treaty parties—did nothing. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023491