In their fourth The Wall Street Journal OpEd promoting the need for global nuclear disarmament, former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn call for nations to begin moving now toward a new, safer and more stable form of deterrence with decreasing nuclear risks and an increasing measure of assured security. As with their previous articles, they attempt to balance the global need to reverse reliance on nuclear weapons, to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear arsenals, with support for an evolution in nuclear deterrence and continued deployments in the shorter run. They argue that our dependency upon deterrence cannot be wished away, but neither can we cling to concepts and deployments that may have worked in the past but that will drive us to ever increasing insecurity in the future.
The full text of the op-ed can be found at http://www.nti.org/c_press/Deterrence_in_the_Age_of_Nuclear_Proliferation.pdf