| Excerpt / Summary In the Prague speech I outlined a vision of a world without nuclear weapons, but said that that was unlikely to be achieved even during my lifetime. But I said that there were a series of specific steps that we could start taking to move in a direction that lessens the threat of nuclear weapons.
The first is to make sure that we have a much stronger NPT. President Kennedy, when he gave his famous speech about possibilities of nuclear proliferation, feared that in the matter of a few years you could start having scores of countries with nuclear weapons. His worst fears weren’t realized because you had a nuclear proliferation treaty that essentially helped. But what we’ve been seeing is it’s starting to fray around the edges over the last several years. So one of my principal concerns has been to strengthen it.
Part of that involved making sure that the United States was abiding by its obligations under the NPT. And that’s why we pursued the Start treaty so aggressively, to send a clear signal to the world that we were in the business of reducing our stockpiles in concert with the other major nuclear superpower, Russia." |