The hidden stumbling block to progress on nuclear weapons

Sometimes people draw the wrong conclusion from failure. Imagine you tried to take your pants off 20 times in a row and failed every time. You might conclude that it’s just going to be impossible to get that particular pair of pants off. But, if you’d been trying to do it by pulling them off over your head, maybe you shouldn’t rush to conclusions.

Of course, eliminating nuclear weapons is a little more complicated than removing a pair of pants, but the analogy is sound. Policy makers in the United States first set about trying to eliminate nuclear weapons in 1946, when the Truman administration brought the Baruch Plan to the United Nations. Since then, efforts to reach toward global nuclear zero have mostly met with failure. For some, that implies that the challenge is impossible. But maybe they’ve been trying to pull their pants off over their heads.

Eliminating nuclear weapons is an especially important subject these days because there’s a confrontation brewing.