Bruce Blair

With growing consensus that the utility of nuclear weapons has declined since the end of the Cold War, some of history’s most ardent proponents of a strong U.S. nuclear posture -- former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, to name a few – are now calling for a “world free of nuclear weapons.” For Bruce Blair, founder and president of the World Security Institute, this is the first time in the nuclear age that eliminating nuclear weapons has become feasible. To realize the promise of this unprecedented moment in history, Blair recently launched Global Zero, a new worldwide popular drive for an international agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons by a date certain. If that sounds like a lofty ambition, think Al Gore and the movement to reverse global warming. Indeed, the Academy Award-winning producers of An Inconvenient Truth are now working on a major documentary film on Global Zero. Blair’s vision and determination are grounded in his service as a Minuteman ICBM launch control officer in the U.S. Air Force during the early 1970s. “That experience revealed to me that despite the enormous dangers, public and political comprehension of nuclear weapons was misinformed and stood in the way of rational nuclear policy.” Later, Blair took up what he thought was the most urgent task facing the world -- taking nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert – and spearheaded a public campaign to reduce the risk that human error or technical malfunction would result in an unintentional nuclear strike. “What I learned from the de-alerting campaign on one hand, and the near-universal awareness about global warming on the other, is that to engage the public, to achieve the transformation we are calling for, you need a simple idea and a moral vision that people can adopt. Zero is a concept everyone can understand.“