The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

The only ones that stood out, in that sense, were Russia and North Korea. The U.S. already had a well-defined security arrangement—an acknowledged state of mutual deterrence—with Russia. That left North Korea, and the one distinctive thing about North Korea was that, several years earlier, it had withdrawn from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Obama suggested this for a policy: the United States will not use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against countries that had no nuclear weapons and that were abiding by the NPT. Neither he nor the others in the room knew or remembered, but thirty years earlier, during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Paul Warnke, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and his deputy, Spurgeon Keeny, had come up with the same idea and summarized it in a speech for Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. (A decade before then, back in 1965, Keeny had been staff director of the Gilpatric Committee, which first proposed an international treaty to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.) But the name they gave the idea—“negative security assurances”—was the opposite of catchy, and it went nowhere.