The nuclear debate
The Riz Khan show asks if eliminating nuclear weapons will really make the world safer.
The US president is pushing hard to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and to keep them from falling into the hands of extremist groups.
Barack Obama has made it clear he wants a world free of nuclear weapons. He is hosting the leaders of 46 other countries at a summit in Washington to address the global threat from nukes.
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Last week, Obama also signed an important deal with Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian president, to reduce their nuclear stockpiles by a third each.
But critics of Obama’s policy say the world needs more – not less – nuclear weapons to prevent conflict.
They cite the example of the Cold War where both the US and Russia built vast stockpiles of atomic warheads as an effective deterrent against conflict.
On Monday’s Riz Khan we ask: Is the world better off without nuclear weapons or do we need more of them to keep the peace?
Discussing this will be Lord David Owen, a former British foreign secretary who is a member of the international initiative ‘Global Zero: A world without nuclear weapons’, Ohio State University professor John Muller, who is the author of the book: Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, and Ariel Cohen of the Washington DC-based Conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.
This episode of the Riz Khan show aired on Monday, April 12, 2010.