Gareth Evans: Nuclear arms remain a threat to us all

PEOPLE sometimes forget that the boy who cried wolf ended up being eaten.

True, nobody has been killed by a nuclear weapon since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 65 years ago this month. And, with Cold War tensions long passed, it is all too easy to be complacent about the threats that these weapons continue to pose.

But the truth is that it is sheer dumb luck that has let us survive so long without catastrophe. With 23,000 nuclear weapons still in existence, more than 7,000 of them actively deployed, and more than 2,000 still on dangerously high alert, we cannot assume that our luck will hold indefinitely.

We know now - with multiple revelations about human error and system breakdown on both the American and Russian sides during the Cold War years and since - that even the most sophisticated command and control systems are not foolproof. We know that some of the newer nuclear-armed states start with systems much less sophisticated than these. And we know that, across the spectrum of sophistication, the risk of destabilising cyber attack is getting ever higher.

Moreover, there is the real risk of proliferation, especially in the Middle East, multiplying the dangers that nuclear weapons will be used by accident as well as design.

President Barack Obama came to office alert to all these threats and determined, as no other US president has been, to eliminate them. His leadership has brought some modest gains.

They include the conclusion of the new US-Russia Start treaty, which would reduce deployed strategic weapons; some modest limitations on the role of nuclear weapons in US nuclear doctrine; a Washington summit that reached useful agreement on the implementation of improved nuclear security measures; and hard-to-achieve consensus at the recently concluded pentannual Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference on useful steps forward, including a 2012 conference on achieving a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East.

But Start treaty ratification is going nowhere fast in the US Senate and progress on other key issues has been slow: bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force; starting negotiations on a new treaty to ban the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons; strengthening the non-proliferation regime with effective measures to detect violations; reaching agreement on some form of international management of the most sensitive aspects of the fuel cycle; and, above all, starting new rounds of serious disarmament talks, involving not just the two nuclear superpowers but all eight nuclear-armed states.

Arms control and disarmament is an unglamorous business that brings few quick returns. With domestic issues now dominating most political agendas, it will be all too easy for commitment to wane. If that is to be avoided, continued leadership from the top - above all from Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev - will be indispensable. But there are a number of major contributions that less powerful states and leaders can make.

The most immediately important task is for those with credible voices to take every opportunity to bridge the complacency gap. The message must be stark: nuclear weapons are not only the most indiscriminately inhumane weapons ever invented, but the only ones capable of destroying life on this planet as we know it.

The second major task is to set a clear global disarmament action agenda - with credible timelines and milestones. It is not incredible to set a date like 2025 as a target for minimising the world's nuclear arsenal to less than 10 per cent of its current size.

l Gareth Evans is co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament and professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne.