Obama’s Youth Shaped His Nuclear-Free Vision

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Obama’s Youth Shaped His Nuclear-Free Vision



<sub>Chicago Tribune Photo, 2005

In college, Barack Obama wrote about nuclear arms. As a senator, he viewed a deactivated Russian nuclear missile.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: July 4, 2009</sub>

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In the depths of the cold war, in 1983, a senior at Columbia University wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of “a nuclear free world.” He railed against discussions of “first- versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.

 The student was Barack Obama, and he was clearly trying to sort out his thoughts. In the conclusion, he denounced “the twisted logic of which we are a part today” and praised student efforts to realize “the possibility of a decent world.” But his article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” which only recently has been rediscovered, said little about how to achieve the utopian dream.

Twenty-six years later, the author, in his new job as president of the United States, has begun pushing for new global rules, treaties and alliances that he insists can establish a nuclear-free world.

“I’m not naïve,” President Obama told a cheering throng in Prague this spring. “This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.”

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 Yet no previous American president has set out a step-by-step agenda for the eventual elimination of nuclear arms. Mr. Obama is starting relatively small, using a visit to Russia that starts Monday to advance an intense negotiation, with a treaty deadline of the year’s end, to reduce the arsenals of the nuclear superpowers to roughly 1,500 warheads each, from about 2,200. In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Obama, conscious of his critics, stressed that “I’ve made clear that we will retain our deterrent capacity as long as there is a country with nuclear weapons.”

But reducing arsenals, he insisted, would be the first step toward giving the United States and a growing body of allies the power to remake the nuclear world. Among the goals: halting weapons programs in North Korea and Iran, discouraging states from abandoning the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and ending global production of fuel for nuclear arms, a step sure to upset Pakistan, India and Israel.

Even before those battles are joined, opposition is rising. “This is dangerous, wishful thinking,” Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Richard Perle, an architect of the Reagan-era nuclear buildup that appalled Mr. Obama as an undergraduate, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. They contend that Mr. Obama is, indeed, a naïf for assuming that “the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces.”

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In the interview, the president described his agenda as the best way to move forward in a turbulent world.

“It’s naïve for us to think,” he said, “that we can grow our nuclear stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we’re going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves.”

Realist or dreamer, Mr. Obama has an interest in global denuclearization that arises from what can best be described as a lost chapter of his life. Though he has written two memoirs, he has volunteered few details about his two years at Columbia.

“People assume he’s a novice,” said Michael L. Baron, who taught Mr. Obama in a Columbia seminar on international politics and American policy around the time he wrote the Sundial article. “He’s been thinking about these issues for a long time. It’s not like one of his advisers said, ‘Why don’t you throw this out?’ ”

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In a paper for Dr. Baron, Mr. Obama analyzed how a president might go about negotiating nuclear arms reductions with the Russians — exactly what he is seeking to do this week.

At critical junctures of Mr. Obama’s career, the subject of nuclear disarmament has kept reappearing. Now both he and his agenda face the ultimate test: limiting nuclear arms at the very moment many experts fear the beginning of a second nuclear age and a rush of new weapons states — especially if Iran proves capable of making atomic warheads.

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The Seminar

“I personally came of age,” Mr. Obama wrote in “The Audacity of Hope,” his second memoir, “during the Reagan presidency.”

It was a time when President Ronald Reagan began a trillion-dollar arms buildup, called the Soviet Union “an evil empire” and ordered scores of atomic detonations under the Nevada desert. Some Reagan aides talked of fighting and winning a nuclear war.

The popular response was the nuclear freeze movement. Dozens of books warned that Mr. Reagan’s policies threatened to end civilization and most life on Earth. In June 1982, a million protesters gathered in Central Park, their placards reading “Bread Not Bombs” and “Freeze or Burn.” The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter denouncing nuclear war.

Many Columbia students campaigned for the freeze movement, which sought a halt to additional nuclear arms deployments. Mr. Obama explored going further.

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In 1983, at the height of the cold war, Barack Obama, then a senior at Columbia University, wrote in a campus newsmagazine about the vision of "a nuclear free world." The article in the Sundial profiled two campus groups: Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism.

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In the interview, Mr. Obama noted that he was too young to “remember having to do drills under the desk.” But as a student “interested broadly in foreign policy,” he recalled, he focused on “a central question: how would the United States and the Soviet Union effectively manage these nuclear arsenals, and were there ways to dial down the dangers that humanity faced?”

In his senior year, he began Dr. Baron’s seminar on presidential decision-making in American foreign policy. The first semester, starting in fall 1982, covered such cold-war flashpoints as the Cuban missile crisis — a dramatic study in the decision-making style of President John F. Kennedy. In the second semester, students focused on particular topics, and Mr. Obama wrote a lengthy paper about how to negotiate with the Soviets to cut nuclear arsenals.

“His focus was the nature of the strategic talks and what kind of negotiating positions might be put forward,” Dr. Baron said. “It was not a polemical paper — not arguing that the U.S. should have this or that position. It was how to get from here to there and avoid misperception and conflict.

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 “He got an A,” recalled Dr. Baron, who now runs a digital media business. Later, he wrote Mr. Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School.

It was during that seminar that Mr. Obama wrote his Sundial article, profiling two campus groups, Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism. Photographs with the March 1983 article showed students at an antiwar rally in front of Butler Library

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The Article

Mr. Obama’s journalistic voice was edgy with disdain for what he called “the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country” amid “the growing threat of war.” The two groups, he wrote, “visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track.”

Despite Mr. Obama’s sympathetic portrayal of the two groups, the article seemed to question the popular goal of freezing nuclear arsenals rather than reducing them, the topic of his seminar paper. Mr. Obama wondered if the freeze movement “stems from young people’s penchant for the latest ‘happenings.’ ”

What clearly excited him was the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which would have ended the testing and development of new weapons, and thus, in the minds of arms controllers, the nuclear arms race.

The Reagan administration vehemently opposed the treaty. One Columbia activist, Mr. Obama wrote, argued that the United States should initiate the ban “as a powerful first step towards a nuclear free world.”

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That phrase — a “nuclear free world,” which was Mr. Obama’s paraphrase — would re-emerge decades later as the signature item of his nuclear agenda.

The article was lost for years — some of Mr. Obama’s campaign advisers said they had heard of its existence and went looking for it, presumably to see if it contained anything that might prove embarrassing. It came to light on the Internet just before the inauguration, and some conservative bloggers called it naïve, anti-American and blind to the Soviet threat.

Precisely how the article found its way onto the Internet is unclear. But late last year, a Columbia alumni publication said it had learned of it from an alumnus, Stephen M. Brockmann, who also had an article in the same Sundial issue. Dr. Brockmann, now a professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University, said he found the issue “while rummaging through some old stuff.” When he saw the Obama article, he recalled, “I could hardly believe my eyes.”

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The Senator

After the Sundial article, Mr. Obama went silent on nuclear issues for the next two decades. In Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer, topics like remaking the schools, the welfare system and health care seemed a lot more urgent. The cold war ended. So did the protests.

But in 2003 Mr. Obama began his unlikely campaign for the United States Senate and answered a detailed questionnaire from the Council for a Livable World, an advocacy organization in Washington that evaluates candidates on arms control issues.