Nuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also an historic opportunity. U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage -- to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.

Nuclear weapons were essential to maintaining international security during the Cold War because they were a means of deterrence. The end of the Cold War made the doctrine of mutual Soviet-American deterrence obsolete. Deterrence continues to be a relevant consideration for many states with regard to threats from other states. But reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.

North Korea's recent nuclear test and Iran's refusal to stop its program to enrich uranium -- potentially to weapons grade -- highlight the fact that the world is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era. Most alarmingly, the likelihood that non-state terrorists will get their hands on nuclear weaponry is increasing. In today's war waged on world order by terrorists, nuclear weapons are the ultimate means of mass devastation. And non-state terrorist groups with nuclear weapons are conceptually outside the bounds of a deterrent strategy and present difficult new security challenges.

Apart from the terrorist threat, unless urgent new actions are taken, the U.S. soon will be compelled to enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence. It is far from certain that we can successfully replicate the old Soviet-American "mutually assured destruction" with an increasing number of potential nuclear enemies world-wide without dramatically increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used. New nuclear states do not have the benefit of years of step-by-step safeguards put in effect during the Cold War to prevent nuclear accidents, misjudgments or unauthorized launches. The United States and the Soviet Union learned from mistakes that were less than fatal. Both countries were diligent to ensure that no nuclear weapon was used during the Cold War by design or by accident. Will new nuclear nations and the world be as fortunate in the next 50 years as we were during the Cold War?

Leaders addressed this issue in earlier times. In his "Atoms for Peace" address to the United Nations in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower pledged America's "determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma -- to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life." John F. Kennedy, seeking to break the logjam on nuclear disarmament, said, "The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution."

Rajiv Gandhi, addressing the U.N. General Assembly on June 9, 1988, appealed, "Nuclear war will not mean the death of a hundred million people. Or even a thousand million. It will mean the extinction of four thousand million: the end of life as we know it on our planet earth. We come to the United Nations to seek your support. We seek your support to put a stop to this madness."

Ronald Reagan called for the abolishment of "all nuclear weapons," which he considered to be "totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization." Mikhail Gorbachev shared this vision, which had also been expressed by previous American presidents.

Although Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev failed at Reykjavik to achieve the goal of an agreement to get rid of all nuclear weapons, they did succeed in turning the arms race on its head. They initiated steps leading to significant reductions in deployed long- and intermediate-range nuclear forces, including the elimination of an entire class of threatening missiles.

What will it take to rekindle the vision shared by Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev? Can a world-wide consensus be forged that defines a series of practical steps leading to major reductions in the nuclear danger? There is an urgent need to address the challenge posed by these two questions.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) envisioned the end of all nuclear weapons. It provides (a) that states that did not possess nuclear weapons as of 1967 agree not to obtain them, and (b) that states that do possess them agree to divest themselves of these weapons over time. Every president of both parties since Richard Nixon has reaffirmed these treaty obligations, but non-nuclear weapon states have grown increasingly skeptical of the sincerity of the nuclear powers.

Strong non-proliferation efforts are under way. The Cooperative Threat Reduction program, the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Additional Protocols are innovative approaches that provide powerful new tools for detecting activities that violate the NPT and endanger world security. They deserve full implementation. The negotiations on proliferation of nuclear weapons by North Korea and Iran, involving all the permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany and Japan, are crucially important. They must be energetically pursued.

But by themselves, none of these steps are adequate to the danger. Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev aspired to accomplish more at their meeting in Reykjavik 20 years ago -- the elimination of nuclear weapons altogether. Their vision shocked experts in the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, but galvanized the hopes of people around the world. The leaders of the two countries with the largest arsenals of nuclear weapons discussed the abolition of their most powerful weapons.

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What should be done? Can the promise of the NPT and the possibilities envisioned at Reykjavik be brought to fruition? We believe that a major effort should be launched by the United States to produce a positive answer through concrete stages.

First and foremost is intensive work with leaders of the countries in possession of nuclear weapons to turn the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise. Such a joint enterprise, by involving changes in the disposition of the states possessing nuclear weapons, would lend additional weight to efforts already under way to avoid the emergence of a nuclear-armed North Korea and Iran.

The program on which agreements should be sought would constitute a series of agreed and urgent steps that would lay the groundwork for a world free of the nuclear threat. Steps would include:

• Changing the Cold War posture of deployed nuclear weapons to increase warning time and thereby reduce the danger of an accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon.

• Continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them.

• Eliminating short-range nuclear weapons designed to be forward-deployed.

• Initiating a bipartisan process with the Senate, including understandings to increase confidence and provide for periodic review, to achieve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, taking advantage of recent technical advances, and working to secure ratification by other key states.

• Getting control of the uranium enrichment process, combined with the guarantee that uranium for nuclear power reactors could be obtained at a reasonable price, first from the Nuclear Suppliers Group and then from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or other controlled international reserves. It will also be necessary to deal with proliferation issues presented by spent fuel from reactors producing electricity.

• Halting the production of fissile material for weapons globally; phasing out the use of highly enriched uranium in civil commerce and removing weapons-usable uranium from research facilities around the world and rendering the materials safe.

• Redoubling our efforts to resolve regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers.

 
Achieving the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons will also require effective measures to impede or counter any nuclear-related conduct that is potentially threatening to the security of any state or peoples.

Reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and practical measures toward achieving that goal would be, and would be perceived as, a bold initiative consistent with America's moral heritage. The effort could have a profoundly positive impact on the security of future generations. Without the bold vision, the actions will not be perceived as fair or urgent. Without the actions, the vision will not be perceived as realistic or possible.

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal, beginning with the measures outlined above.

Mr. Shultz, a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, was secretary of state from 1982 to 1989. Mr. Perry was secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997. Mr. Kissinger, chairman of Kissinger Associates, was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. Mr. Nunn is former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

A conference organized by Mr. Shultz and Sidney D. Drell was held at Hoover to reconsider the vision that Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev brought to Reykjavik. In addition to Messrs. Shultz and Drell, the following participants also endorse the view in this statement: Martin Anderson, Steve Andreasen, Michael Armacost, William Crowe, James Goodby, Thomas Graham Jr., Thomas Henriksen, David Holloway, Max Kampelman, Jack Matlock, John McLaughlin, Don Oberdorfer, Rozanne Ridgway, Henry Rowen, Roald Sagdeev and Abraham Sofaer.

Earlier this month Chinese revelers welcomed the new lunar year with a few more candles than usual. The country was gripped by a crisis in electric power production that caused California-style blackouts across the central and southern parts of the country. Power plants could not keep up with demand, especially because they didn't have enough coal on hand to burn.

The immediate causes of China's power crisis are straightforward. Snow storms disrupted the railroads that carry most coal to power plants. Record low temperatures also boosted demand for electricity and coal. But there was a deeper cause at work. China's free-market policies—the same ones that led to China's extraordinary growth in the past decade—have eroded the government's ability to control its economy. Economic activity, by design, is shifting away from state-owned enterprises and central planning. But Beijing doesn't have structures in place to control those aspects of the economy it doesn't own outright. Market reforms are making Beijing less and less relevant to what's really going on in the economy, threatening to turn China into a "weak state." And it's not just China—India, too, is having trouble regulating its industry and economy. The phenomenon is a dark cloud on the Asian century.

If this all sounds abstract, consider that China's blackouts were mainly a byproduct of the government's struggle to manage the planned and market-based parts of the economy side-by-side. Today, the Chinese leadership is worrying about inflation, but they have few useful tools to slow the rise in prices. A few years ago, Beijing might have dampened industrial growth by closing the spigot of finance from state-owned banks. But many newly deregulated state enterprises, as well as new privately owned companies, have found other sources of capital, including caches of massive profits accumulated over the years. One of the few industries Beijing still controls is power—it owns nearly every aspect of the grid, from generators to distributors. So Beijing decided to try and quell inflation by lowering electricity prices.

The energy industry, however, is bigger than just power generation and distribution. It includes the coal industry, which has been the object of market reforms. Starting two years ago the country largely abandoned the traditional planning system for allocating and pricing coal, the main fuel for power generators and one of the power companies' largest costs. Suppliers and buyers were allowed to negotiate on their own terms. With demand for electricity skyrocketing, suppliers had the upper hand, and coal prices rose. With Beijing keeping prices artificially low, power plants could not pass these costs to the consumer. They responded by cutting back on coal orders. As coal inventories dwindled, power generators cut back on capacity, and the lights went out.

Beijing's lack of practical control over large swaths of industry explains an increasing number of China's woes. The environment is a case in point. The government has an elaborate apparatus for environmental regulation, with strict laws on the books, but it is unwilling to enforce the measures for fear of stepping on the toes of local authorities, who usually push industrial development at the expense of greenery. Changing that power structure will require politically dangerous rewiring of the ruling Communist Party's power base. To be sure, Beijing is still powerful in some areas such as Internet regulation. And its recent success in imposing safety standards to close dangerous small coal mines, another area where Beijing is flexing its muscle, probably inadvertently contributed to the current coal crisis. Overall, however, what's most striking is Beijing's inability to impose needed regulation nor to predict what will happen when it does regulate. For example, a keystone in the government's effort to avoid future energy crises is an aggressive plan to improve energy efficiency about 4 percent per year over the current decade. The actual effect of Beijing's efficiency policies is barely one third that level.

These are not passing problems. They reveal a deep weakness in China's administration because the government has been unable to replace its Soviet-style planning system with an alternative scheme that is better suited to a market economy. Like an American film on the Wild West, much of the economy is governed by central strictures that don't really have much impact.

India is also plagued by administrative weakness—and the problems are getting worse as the Indian economy takes off and government struggles to address the byproducts of rapid economic growth. Large pockets of the Indian power grid are unreliable because Indian policymakers tinker with electricity prices in an effort to deliver political favors. (Electricity supplied to most Indian farms costs almost nothing and in some parts of the country is actually free. India has many farmers and they vote; politicians court them with stunts like free power. Poor accounting systems allow others who steal power to blame the farmers.) That tinkering has put most Indian power utilities into bankruptcy. The problems would be even worse if most of the power sector were not actually owned by the central and state governments in India, which shuffle money around to keep the companies afloat. Unable to get reliable power that is essential to industrial production, most large power users build their own power supplies. By some estimates, one third of the country's power plants are of this "captive" variety—by design, disconnected from the government-controlled grid so they are more reliable and also immune from political meddling.

The rise of weak states on the world stage will affect every aspect of international relations. It could send globalization astray. It will be hard to realize the full benefits of trade, for example, if essential countries are unable to enforce safety standards and trade laws. Fixing these problems may require a new style of international diplomacy that relies less heavily on deals such as treaties with central governments. Instead, specific contracts might be written directly with the segments of society that are best administered and most able to change their behavior. Taming the volcanic growth in Chinese emissions of greenhouse gases, for example, may depend less on whatever deal is crafted with Beijing and more on specific commitments that the West can work out with bosses in the Chinese power sector. How can China be a "responsible stakeholder" in the world economy if it can't actually follow through with commitments it makes in the international arena?

As the pundits gaze at the coming Asian century, they have wondered how Asia's new powers will reshape the world. But the big challenge in the coming Asian century may not be these new countries' burgeoning strength but their weakness.

Democrats voting in Ohio and Texas may well decide the shape of the U.S. presidential election. Regardless of who they choose to run against Sen. John McCain, the all but certain Republican candidate, it is likely that energy issues will figure more prominently in the election than at any time in the last generation. High prices are sapping economic growth, the No. 1 concern across most of the country. Gasoline is now approaching $4 a gallon; natural gas and electricity are also more costly than a few years ago. Global warming has become a bipartisan worry, and solving that problem will require radical new energy technologies as well. All this is good news in the rest of the world, which is hoping that a new regime in Washington will put the United States on a more sustainable energy path.

It may be a vain hope. It is extremely unlikely that Washington will ever supply a coherent energy policy, regardless of who takes the White House in November. That's because serious policies to change energy patterns require a broad effort across many disconnected government agencies and political groups. Higher energy efficiency for buildings and appliances, a major energy use area, requires new federal and state standards. Higher efficiency for vehicles requires federal mandates that always meet stiff opposition in Detroit. A more aggressive program to replace oil with biofuels requires policy decisions that affect farmers and crop patterns-yet another part of Washington's policymaking apparatus, with its own political geometry. New power plants that generate electricity without high emissions of warming gases require reliable subsidies from both federal and state governments, because such plants are much more costly than conventional power sources. Approvals for these new plants require favorable decisions by state regulators, most of whom are not yet focused on the task. Expanded use of nuclear power requires support from still another constellation of administrators and political interests. And so on.

Whenever the public seizes on energy issues, the cabal of Washington energy experts imagines that these problems can be solved with a new comprehensive energy strategy, backed by a grand new political coalition. Security hawks would welcome reduced dependence on volatile oil suppliers, especially in the Persian Gulf. Greens would favor a lighter tread on the planet, and labor would seize on the possibility for "green-collar" jobs in the new energy industries. Farmers would win because they could serve the energy markets. The energy experts dream of a coalition so powerful that it could rewire government and align policy incentives.

This coalition, alas, never lasts long enough to accomplish much. For an energy policy to be effective, it must send credible signals to encourage investment in new equipment not just for the few months needed to craft legislation but for at least two decades-enough time for industry to build and install a new generation of cars, appliances and power plants, and make back the investment. The coalition, though, is politically too diverse to survive the kumbaya moment.

Just two weeks ago the feds canceled "FutureGen," a government-industry project to develop technologies for burning coal without emitting copious greenhouse gases, demonstrating that the government is incapable of making a credible promise to help industry develop these badly needed technologies over the long haul. (The project had severe design flaws, but what matters most is that the federal government was able to pretend to support the venture for as long as it did and then abruptly back off.) Similarly, legislation late last year to increase the fuel economy of U.S. automobiles will have such a small effect on the vehicle fleet that it will barely change the country's dependence on imported oil and will have almost no impact on carbon emissions. Democrats and Republicans alike claim they want to end the country's dependence on foreign oil, but neither party actually does much about it.

The only policies that survive in this political vacuum are those that target narrower political interests with more staying power. Thus America has a highly credible policy to promote corn-based ethanol, because that policy really has nothing to do with energy; it is a chameleon that takes on whatever colors are needed to survive. It is a farm program that masquerades as energy policy; at times, it has been a farm program that masquerades as rural development. As an energy policy it is a very costly and ineffective way to cut dependence on oil. As a global warming policy it is even less cost effective, since large-scale ethanol doesn't help much in cutting CO₂ and other warming gases. Similarly, the United States has a stiff subsidy for renewable electricity-mainly wind and solar plants-because environmentalists are well organized in their support for it. The coal industry periodically gets money for its favored technologies, as in FutureGen, but even that powerful lobby has a hard time getting the government to stay the course.

Europe is in danger of contracting the same affliction. To be sure, most European countries long ago started taxing energy as a convenient way to raise revenues, which fortuitously also makes energy more costly and creates a strong incentive for efficiency. That approach did not originate as an energy policy, but it has emerged as a keystone of Europe's more successful efforts to tame energy consumption. And Europe is in the midst of shifting policymaking from the individual countries to Brussels, which may create a more coherent approach. But despite these advantages, Europe is notable for its inability to be strategic. For example, Brussels is touting a new pipeline called Nabucco that would help Europe cut its dependence on Russia for its natural gas. So far, Brussels is good at talking about the Nabucco dream but can't agree on a route, financing, or even on where to get the gas that would replace Russia's.

The rising powers in Asia are also finding that they, like America, have a hard time developing and applying strategic energy policies. China develops energy policy through its economic planning system, with mixed results. The country doesn't even have an energy ministry, and efforts to create one are being stymied by the bureaucracy and companies that fear they will lose influence. India has four energy ministries and no real central strategy. Like America, India is very good at declaring visions for strategic energy policy but dreadful at putting them into practice. The Japanese public is just as fickle, but the government bureaucracy is entrenched and far-sighted enough to keep its focus long after public interest has waned.

All this means that the underlying forces that are causing high demand for energy (and high prices) and emitting greenhouse gases will be hard to alter. The effort to solve global warming might change this pessimistic iron rule of energy policy, because the environmental community that is the core of the coalition in support of global warming policy is becoming much stronger and has shown staying power. For the moment, however, that is a hypothesis to be proved.

PESD has concluded a two year collaborative study on the Indian natural gas market with three India research groups- A.T. Kearney, Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad, and Integrated Research and Action for Development (IRADe). The study explores gas demand to the year 2025 in the three main gas consuming sectors within India - electricity generation, nitrogenous fertilizer production, and industrial applications - under a range of different policy and economic scenarios.

Regional air pollution constraints in the power sector - already underway in certain parts of India could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by over 100 million tonnes per year. Reforms underway in the Indian coal sector, however, could bring a surge in new supplies, which would undermine the opportunities for gas in the power sector.

From an international supply standpoint, India doesn't appear able to guarantee the offtake of a proposed large natural gas pipeline from Iran within the next 10-15 years, making the project very difficult to justify from a financial risk standpoint.

Coal is dirty. But coal is driving the U.S., Chinese and Indian economies. And therefore, coal is not going away. Renewable energy sources like solar and wind generate only 1 percent of the world's electricity. Do the math: Making coal burn cleaner might be the most pressing environmental problem that no one talks about.

Despite recent estimates that pollution from China's booming coal industry reaches U.S. shores in as little as five days, the green-tech investment boom that has funded the rise of biofuels has bypassed coal. Even the head of the World Coal Institute recently proclaimed the last 10 years "a lost decade" for clean coal, saying it's time to play catch-up.

Stanford's Jeremy Carl, a research fellow in the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, couldn't agree more. He spoke on the phone with Wired News to discuss China, the holy grail of clean coal and how many coal plants he'd trade for Kyoto's accomplishments.

Stanford research fellow Jeremy Carl says, "Coal is as dirty as it gets," but warns against throwing the possibly cleaned-up baby out with the dirty bathwater.

Wired News: Why'd you get into clean coal?

Jeremy Carl: I looked at the numbers. It's a question of where the big sources of emissions are and where we can attack them.

WN: Can you give us an idea of the scale of coal power? Can you put coal in context as an energy source?

Carl: Only oil makes a bigger contribution to global energy. In terms of energy in the industrial world, it's about 40 percent of electricity production.

WN: How dirty is coal?

Carl: Coal is as dirty as it gets. Coal has every element in the periodic table. And depending where in the world you get it from, "coal" can mean 100 different substances. If you sent the sort of coal you might use in a typical Indian plant to a supermodern boiler in Japan, it would shut the place down.

WN: But there's got to be good things about coal.

Carl: It's cheap. And coal doesn't have the kind of extreme risk that nuclear power has. You're not going to build a dirty bomb out of coal. And unlike other fossil fuels, it is really widely distributed, so there is less of a coal OPEC.

WN: And that distribution would seem to make resource wars less likely to break out over coal?

Carl: Yes.

WN: Is there an energy source that could replace coal?

Carl: Natural gas is the only viable replacement, and it's not clear that the natural-gas supply could scale up to replace coal.

WN: So, how can we can make coal cleaner?

Carl: The most-well-known is flue-gas desulfurization, which takes sulfur dioxide out of smoke stacks, and came out of concerns about acid rain. There are other pollution-control devices for nitrogen oxide and mercury filters.

WN: What about up-and-coming technologies like carbon capture and sequestration? Can you tell us about that?

Carl: You're taking carbon from a smokestack and pressure-injecting it into a geological formation of some sort. We actually already do this process at an industrial level. We know how this works.

WN: Seems like we're spending a lot of time on the backend scrubbing pollutants out. Should we be designing in a cleaner process on the front end?

Carl: A lot of people point to integrated gasification-combined-cycle (IGCC) plants, which gasify coal before burning it, as the holy grail because they get you a cleaner process. It gives you a more concentrated stream of carbon that you can sequester underground more cheaply. The capital cost is very high, though, and we don't have a lot of experience in designing them.

WN: We hear a lot about China's coal industry. Can you compare it with the U.S. industry, which ranks second in the world?

Carl: We mine about (1.1 billion tons) of coal per year. China was at about 1.4 billion tons seven years ago. Now they are at 2.4 billion tons. So, they essentially took the second-biggest coal industry in the whole world and replicated it in seven years. And if you look at the Chinese plans, they plan to ramp it up even more in the future.

WN: Given the obvious environmental impacts of these plants, why don't we have better answers for these problems than the Kyoto Protocol (which the United States didn't sign, and which exempted China and India from emissions restrictions)?

Carl: I'll give you a speculative, personal answer. It has to do with the politics of the type of people who were negotiating Kyoto. And the pressure put on by environmental groups that were uncomfortable with coal. There was just so much pressure on the symbolic importance of getting a deal done.

WN: What would you have rather seen?

Carl: I think there has been some really good criticism that says, "Was the U.N. really a good forum for this? Or would it have been better to have taken the 10 countries who consume 60 percent of global energy and do something with real teeth in it?" I think that would have been a much better approach.

I would have happily traded every emissions gain from Kyoto for eight clean coal plants sequestering carbon in different countries. Because then we could have a real discussion that says, "This works. Now let's see who has to bear the cost."

WN: Why would that be such a big deal?

Carl: Because right now we're having a conversation with China and India where we're trying to get China and India to build clean coal plants by saying, "Here's this thing that's never been tried before at a mass scale. You should build one." And that's not going to work.