A 1971 file photo of a French nuclear test at Mururoa atoll, French Polynesia.The Associated Press
"Peaceniks" is not the word that comes to mind as you contemplate this array of smartly dressed current and former presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, generals and ambassadors, their neat if thinning coiffures reflected in the gilded mirrors of an ornate hall in one of Paris's grand hotels. Yet, they have come together to advance a goal as ambitious as any pony-tailed peacenik ever had: the total elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2030. Global zero.
The obstacles along the road to zero are enormous. They include the country in which we sit. France's approach recalls the name of one of its nuclear submarines: L'Inflexible . As the head of the French foreign service told this audience, nuclear deterrence had served his country well for half a century.
Russia has joined with the U.S. in supporting the initiative, in principle, and envisaging further big cuts in their still outsize nuclear arsenals. But if the U.S. Senate were to demand the introduction of a modernized nuclear weapon as its price for ratifying a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, there would be angry Russian voices asking what was going on.
The smaller the nuclear arsenals become, the heavier America's superiority in so-called conventional weaponry would appear to weigh. Although this is a cosmopolitan gathering, the driving voices here are American. Suspicious Russians and Chinese will say there is a reason for that.
Effective nuclear disarmament will require intrusive verification, which most of the sovereignty-conscious great powers are extremely reluctant to concede. Indeed, when it comes to sovereignty, they are more French than the French. It is not just Iran that is working to move in the opposite direction, to acquire a nuclear weapon capacity. Dictatorships around the world may survey the past decade and say: Well, Iraq didn't have nuclear weapons and got invaded; North Korea did, and didn't.
As a justification for the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair's invocation of the diabolical mixture of terrorists, rogue or failed states and weapons of mass destruction has lost any credibility it ever had. This does not mean those three ingredients won't come together somewhere else. A very impressive report from an international commission on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, chaired by former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans and former Japanese foreign minister Yoriko Kawaguchi, has a little diagram showing the likely impact of a Hiroshima-size bomb detonated inside a van in Trafalgar Square. Estimated fatalities: 115,000.
There's a story about a French nobleman who, having been executed, lifted up his own head, placed it under his arm and walked 50 paces. Asked how he did it, he replied: "Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte" - the first step is the hardest. But, in this case, that does not apply. The first step is hard; then it gets harder. The most difficult would be the last stage: from very low nuclear stockpiles to zero.
As the skeptical strategic thinker Thomas Schelling points out, if you get it wrong, the world could become a more dangerous place. Most of today's nuclear powers, he writes, would have "hair-trigger mobilization plans to rebuild nuclear weapons and mobilize or commandeer delivery systems, and would have prepared targets to pre-empt other nations' nuclear facilities, all in a high-alert status. ... It would be a nervous world." And that's not to mention the danger of terrorists getting a weapon, then holding the world to ransom.
To avert this danger would require intrusive, coercive forms of global government that even today's sovereignty-sharing European states would find hard to accept, let alone the great powers. Since uranium used for peaceful nuclear energy can be relatively easily enriched to weapons grade, it would also require effective international control of all nuclear fuel used anywhere - a very tall order.
Faced with the daunting requirements of the last mile, the Evans-Kawaguchi report declines to give a target date for global zero. They content themselves with identifying a "minimization point," with no more than 2,000 nuclear warheads in the world, by 2025. This has the advantage of not provoking a premature hypothetical debate about unprecedented arrangements, but the disadvantage of not giving any clear target to mobilize toward.
On balance, I come down in favour of the target date: 0 in 2030. But what happens after 2025 is not the most important subject to be debating now. The big issue is what happens in 2010. In May, there is a major conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Article 6 of that treaty commits signatories to work toward the reduction and eventual elimination of their nuclear weapons. That was always supposed to be the other side of the non-proliferation coin. Will they finally get serious about it? Will they then find a way to bring along non-signatory nuclear-armed states, such as India, Pakistan and Israel? Will they convince the rest of the world they mean what they say?
What matters is the direction of travel. To decide which way you're heading, it usually helps to identify a final destination. At the moment, the world is heading in the opposite direction. We are close to a nuclear proliferation tipping point. As strategic expert François Heisbourg warns in an interview in Le Monde, "if the non-proliferation regime is not reinforced, we risk returning to the dynamics of the 1950s when every country wanting the bomb could have it - except that now it's much easier to get."
If the established nuclear weapons states do not take a decisive lead in reducing the number and diffusion of nuclear weapons, it may soon be too late. So we need less of L'Inflexible and more of L'Inspiration . Paris may be a good place for the world to start being a little less French.
Timothy Garton Ash is a professor of European studies at Oxford University.