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He adds, "If we wait — if a nuclear accident occurs — the world will be changed so dramatically that we will not recognize it. So wake up, everybody."

This conviction led Shultz on January 4, 2007, and again on January 15, 2008, to join fellow Republican Henry Kissinger and two hawkish Democrats, William Perry and Sam Nunn, in authoring Wall Street Journal op-eds calling for complete nuclear disarmament. Their rationale is simple: A nuclear arsenal, regardless of size, cannot deter a terrorist bomb with no return address. And the continued insistence of the nuclear weapons powers that such weapons are indispensable for their own security is the single greatest stimulus to other nations wanting to acquire them.

In other words, the United States presently faces a rapidly-closing window of opportunity — the "tipping point" referred to by Shultz, above. We can either doggedly cling to our own arsenal, ensuring that such weapons will eventually be used against us, or lead an international process toward a world with zero nuclear weapons.

If this world sounds like a hippie, leftist fantasy, consider that a non partisan supermajority of the former secretaries of state, defense, and national security advisers have endorsed the vision and a process to get there — including Colin Powell, Jim Baker, Frank Carlucci, and Melvin Laird, as well as a dozen additional top foreign-policy officials from the Reagan administration. And newly declassified documents offer overwhelming historical evidence that Ronald Reagan was a fervent — and utterly misunderstood — abolitionist.

The cause catalyzed and now led by the WSJ co-authors — being conducted soberly by men and women in dark suits, at venues like the notoriously conservative Hoover Institution — couldn't be further removed from marchers wielding "no nukes" signs.

And conservative evangelicals, who have been historically leery of the liberal peace movement, are finding a place in this burgeoning coalition. The Biblical Security Covenant, which works with Shultz and affiliated efforts, is marshaling a theologically orthodox evangelical commitment to work for a world beyond nuclear weapons.

We're not talking about unilateral disarmament; no, the proposals currently underway describe an international framework that would combine prohibition and verifiable elimination, along with a mechanism to prevent nuclear breakout by potential cheaters.

But neither are we talking about a pie-in-the-sky "someday" goal that can be supplanted by a mere laundry list of policy goals. The vision of a world without nuclear weapons gives urgency and moral nobility to the political process needed to get to zero.

Nuclear weapons can seem so faceless, so distant, that ordinary people feel paralyzed to act on their convictions. But the good news is that right now, in 2008, we face a once-in-a-generation opportunity, like the one that slipped through our fingers at the Cold War's end. In the past couple of months, Congress has mandated two blue-ribbon commissions to investigate our national nuclear-weapons policies. The first, appointed by Congress, will report this December. The second will be conducted by the next White House and report in early 2010.

This means we're on the cusp of a national conversation about what kind of world we want to live in. And everything could change if the American President embraced this vision and made zero nuclear weapons worldwide a personal and administration priority.

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March (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52