The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and the Quest to Ban the Bomb.

• Author: Fay, Matt
• Position: Book review

The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and the Quest to Ban the Bomb

Philip Taubman

New York: Harper, 2012, 496 pp.

Can four former Cold War policymakers and a prominent physicist of the era change the world through sheer force of personality? Former New York Times columnist Philip Taubman certainly thinks so, and in his new book he attempts to be the first to tell their story. The Partnership is the chronicle of how George Shultz, Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sidney Drell decided to take up file cause of nuclear abolition.

Unfortunately, The Partnership is a weak argument for nuclear abolition, and its analysis of how to achieve disarmament obscures far more than it illuminates. To start, terrorism is cited as the main justification to abolish these weapons. Taubman rehashes frightening stories of poor security at civilian nuclear facilities in various corners of the world and conveys how criminal or terrorist organizations might acquire enriched uranium. These are legitimate concerns but wholly separate from whether the world's nuclear arsenals should be abolished. Such stories deal with civilian nuclear facilities, not nuclear arsenals maintained for military purposes.

This confusion appears early on when Taubman raises the specter of the catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan to highlight the dangers radiation can pose to civilian populations. While what happened in Japan was obviously tragic, the existence of nuclear weapons is a separate matter entirely. Taubman also fails to engage any scholars who question whether terrorists could easily construct and deliver a functional nuclear weapon and whether terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda are determined to acquire nuclear weapons. For example, Michael Levi of the Council Foreign Relations provides a balanced account of the daunting challenges a terrorist group would Face constructing or acquiring a nuclear weapon, and research by Anne Stenersen of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment demonstrates serious disagreements among al Qaeda leaders about the wisdom of undertaking such a monumental effort.

Moving beyond nuclear terrorism, far too much of Taubman's analysis is focused on the United States and Russia. Obviously the former superpower rivals will be at the center of any discussion about disarmament, but it does not follow that any example set by Washington or Moscow...