Executive Director John Tierney spoke with The Diplomat about the need for renewed arms control efforts.
According to John Tierney, executive director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation, today there is a tremendous lack of political leadership in pursuing arms control.
He said it’s important to insist on a return to arms control in the face of an existential nuclear threat – which he notes, unlike a global pandemic, economic upheaval, or climate change, could lead to unimaginable catastrophe that would unfold not in months or years, but in mere minutes. “If you have a problem whose immediacy goes to the top, it would be the nuclear issue,” Tierney said.
At a time of international rancor, conflict, and an absence of trust, when nuclear arsenals are controlled by what Tierney describes as “authoritarians and dictators,” he understands why ordinary people may feel discouraged and without agency, but he pointed to the CTBT and Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones as important vehicles for applying pressure on nuclear armed states.
And while it may prove more difficult than some had imagined, he sees value in the TPNW as a forum for non-nuclear states to tell the nuclear armed states that not only are they failing to meet their disarmament obligations, but they are headed in the wrong direction. “We’re not going to put up with this anymore,” Tierney said should be the message to nuclear powers. “Whatever you do is going to affect us.” Read more
