Bombs away? Even as Iran, North Korea, and terrorists race to get them, President Obama says his goal is a world free of nuclear weapons. Six decades after hip, Oshima, is it possible?

• Author: Sanger, David E.
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

Early in August 1945, near the end of World War II, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two bombs killed an estimated 200,000 people and Japan soon surrendered. Sixty-four years later, the U.S. remains the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons in war.

But the threat of nuclear conflict may be greater now than at any time in decades. Eight countries are known to have the bomb, and others, including Iran and North Korea, are believed to be close to building one, if they haven't already. A black-market network of nuclear sales was uncovered in Pakistan a few years ago, and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda are trying to get hold of nuclear weapons to attack the West.

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Amid this new nuclear-arms race, President Barack Obama says he wants to eliminate all nuclear weapons. He says it is vital for the security of the world, but his critics call it wishful thinking, at best.

"I'm not naive," Obama told a cheering crowd in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, in April. "This goal will not be reached quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence."

The idea of eliminating nuclear weapons has been on Obama's mind for years. In 1983, as a senior at Columbia University in New York, he wrote an article in a campus magazine about his vision of a nuclear-free world, and called for the elimination of nuclear arsenals holding tens of thousands of warheads.

"People assume he's a novice," says Michael L. Baron, who taught Obama in a Columbia seminar on international politics and American policy. "He's been thinking about these issues for a long time." In fact, in a paper for Baron's class, Obama considered how a President might negotiate nuclear-arms reductions with the Russians. (He got an A.)

Twenty-six years later, as President, Obama has a chance to translate that vision into policy. And the President says his agenda is actually the best way forward in today's turbulent world.

"It's naive for us to think," he says, "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."

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But critics say the United States win only weaken itself if k pursues a path to a nuclear-weapons-free world.

"If the implications were not so serious, the discrepancy between Mr. Obama's plans and real-world conditions would be hilarious," says Frank Gaffney, who worked on defense issues for President Ronald Reagan. "There is only one country on earth that Team Obama can absolutely, positively de-nuclearize: ours."

THE COLD WAR

Indeed, the nuclear world Obama studied and wrote about at Columbia bears little resemblance to the world today. Russia--for decades, America's Cold War adversary--is in many ways the least of Obama's challenges. Far more complex are the problems posed by North Korea, which has now conducted two nuclear tests, and Iran, which experts say will be able to build a warhead soon, if it cannot already.

The U.S. was the first nation to develop atomic weapons, based on Einstein's famous formula, E=[mc.sup.2], which says that enormous amounts of energy can be unleashed by nuclear chain reactions. Between 1945, when the U.S. dropped the two atom bombs on Japan, and 1964, four other nations developed nuclear weapons: the Soviet Union (now Russia), China, Great Britain, and France (see timeline, p. 16).

During the Cold War (roughly 1945-91), the U.S. and the Soviet Union became locked in a nuclear-arms race and wound up with nuclear arsenals so vast that each nation could blow up the other--and the world many times over...