We should work to bring the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force rather than developing new, putatively more useable, nuclear weapons. At the very least we should continue U.S. adherence to the moratorium.
The urgency for such a commitment to deal with the nuclear threat — a danger with no precedent in human history — has been expressed powerfully and dramatically by Father Bryan Hehir, former dean of Harvard Divinity School, in his keynote address on “Ethical Considerations of Living in the Nuclear Age” at a Stanford University conference in 1987:
For millennia people believed that if anyone had the right to call the ultimate moment of truth, one must name that person God. Since the dawn of the nuclear age we have progressively acquired the capacity to call the ultimate moment of truth and we are not gods. But we must live with what we have created.
This is our challenge.
I couldn't find an online transcript of the 1997 speech quoted above, but I did find a talk from December 2005 which resonates in interesting ways with the John Rapley essay in the new Foreign Affairs.
