I think the reason we hear less, or have heard less, of the issue in recent years in Canada is because of the end of the Cold War and the fact that people concluded that particular nightmare could be put in the past and forgotten. Now the threat is looming again, not in the form we knew a generation ago but, as I suggested, because of these various contemporary pressures, like the pressure to build new civil power reactors in many places in the world, which increases the proliferation risk and the risk Peter Harder has alluded to, the risk that arises because there are a growing number of unstable states in the world. The combination of instability plus an increasing number of nuclear programs that can be abused for weapons purposes is a dangerous combination.
I think, for the United States, one of the appeals of resuming a policy of pursuing nuclear disarmament is obviously that it has the bipartisan appeal to which I referred, and that it would chime very much with the note of change the new President is striking. It requires, as I've suggested, a great deal of preliminary work, and I suppose that when the vice-president spoke as he did in Munich about opening a new dialogue with Russia, one of the things envisaged was that eventually—perhaps not immediately, but eventually—the question of further steps of nuclear disarmament by the Russian republic and the United States would be taken up.
Some of the advocates of nuclear disarmament believe, and argue, that this may not be the wise way of doing it, that Russia is one of the hardest nuts to crack, with the largest stock of nuclear weapons, and that it might be better if the United States were to pursue this objective by starting somewhere else. There are other places that could easily be a focus of efforts—Iran, obviously, where the effort to contain an incipient weapons program is already well launched and being pursued with great difficulty; North Korea, which remains a danger, but where there's already a long history of negotiation. In fact, there are so many risks here and there in the world that the United States could have its hands full approaching one or the other without ever getting around to touching the question of a further dialogue with the Russians for some time.
The optimists, on the other hand, would probably remember that when Gorbachev and President Reagan, who only a few years before had been talking about the evil empire, got together in Reykjavik in 1986 just by themselves, they almost succeeded in agreeing to do away with both Russian and American nuclear weapons stocks as they stood then. An astounding result, that would have been. Even what they achieved was really astounding, because at one time, at its worst, I think there were over 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world. That, at least, has been reduced by a considerable proportion, as has the balance of terror that we used to have nightmares about, which arose from having airborne weapons, seaborne weapons, land-based weapons, long-range weapons, short-range weapons, and medium-range weapons in the tens of thousands in existence in the world, and some of them, more or less, on hair trigger. That situation was defused pretty well, largely in the time of George Bush Sr. as president.
But the process has stalled since. It stalled basically under the Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies, I think because the strategic reviews that the Americans conducted then led to the conclusion that, yes, they could indeed reduce their stocks much further, but that they would have to keep, they believed, thousands of weapons still in reserve. That was a kind of hedge against a return of Russian aggressiveness. And of course if you want to argue that case, the behaviour of Russia in the last few years provides certain evidence that would leave you uneasy and would give a certain justification to that thesis.
Nonetheless, there was very substantial progress before. And what is now being argued by these very impressive American witnesses is that the United States should take a lead to resume that process. If it did, I'm sure any such initiative would be warmly welcomed in Canada and we would see a return in our own public debate to a discussion that has been suspended, in effect, for the last twenty-odd years.