nuclear-news

“I’m here to see if anything can be accomplished in the area of nuclear disarmament before the elections,” Douglas said in our interview. “You get a message constantly that nothing is going to be done between now and [the election]… but I don’t think we can wait around for a year and half.”

Calling himself a “messenger of peace” in the area of disarmament, Douglas said he was “try[ing] to see if Congress won’t calm down a little bit” in its efforts to cut funding for nuclear non-proliferation programs.

Douglas met for 30 minutes Thursday with Tauscher, Deputy Secretary Tom Nides, Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller, and Assistant Secretary Tom Countryman.

“Obama is not the first president to talk about going to nuclear zero, but he is the first one to put a blueprint forward and to have acted on it,” Tauscher told The Cable, noting that the New START agreement was ratified in a politically fraught environment. “That victory is momentous, but it’s not the end of the agenda.”

Tauscher said the drive to work toward a world without nuclear weapons will continue from now until the election, but warned that the prospects of seeing a Senate ratification of key agenda items, such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), is “very unlikely.” She noted, however, that “there is a lot of work to do” in the meantime to explain why CTBT is needed and why it is more verifiable in 2011 due to the advances in policy and technology compared to when it last came up for Senate ratification in 1999.,…….

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/11/03/michael_douglas_and_ellen_tauscher_team_up_for_global_zero