WASHINGTON — The latest salvo in President Barack Obama’s campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons was fired Wednesday, delivered not by the administration, but by the man who presided over the collapse of America’s Cold War rival.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union when it fell apart in 1991, called on the U.S. to ratify an accord to ban all nuclear test blasts, saying it would strengthen U.S.-led efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.
“We have seen that dialogue with even the most recalcitrant governments is possible,” Gorbachev wrote in a New York Times op-ed column, apparently referring to North Korea and Iran. “Yet dialogue can work only if the United States abandons the hypocritical position of telling others what they must do while keeping its own options open.”
Gorbachev, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, is a leading advocate of nuclear disarmament. His call for U.S. ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty foreshadows the next major battle over arms-control policy following Obama’s victory on Dec. 22, when the Senate ratified a new U.S.-Russia nuclear-arms reduction treaty, known as New START.
