“There is indeed a race between disarmament and proliferation,” said Knut Langeland, Ambassador for Disarmament from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, addressing an overflow audience at IPI.
“In the future,” he continued, “the question is not whether we will have status quo, but rather if we have zero or many nuclear weapons states.”
Amb. Langeland made his comment Thursday evening, May 13th, following a screening at IPI of the film Nuclear Tipping Point, which is a conversation between four men intimately involved in American diplomacy and national security over the past four decades. The four, former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn, have galvanized thinking around the possibility of a world free of nuclear weapons through a series of public appearances and three widely noted op-ed columns in The Wall Street Journal.
The film begins with an introduction by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and is narrated by the actor Michael Douglas. It includes interviews with California Govenor Arnold Scwarzenegger and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
The event was hosted by the Permanent Mission of Norway to the UN, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the International Peace Institute (IPI) and was co-chaired by Amb. Langeland and Joan Rohlfing, NTI’s President and Chief Operating Officer.
They guided the discussion and were joined by a three-person panel: Irma Arguello, Chair of the Nonproliferation for Global Security Foundation in Argentina; Dr. Rebecca Johnson, Executive Director of Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, in the United Kingdom; and Dr. Alexander Pikayev, Director of the Department for Disarmament and Conflict Resolution at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow.
Warren Hoge, IPI’s Vice President for External Relations, made brief welcoming remarks.
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