The life's work of a Cold War veteran

Yes, I am flying the flag of the United States of America today.

A few months ago, caught in the summer breezes, I wrote about the flag and was blistered by diligent readers who chided anyone who is a fair-weather patriot and takes the red, white and blue in for the winter. But today is Veterans Day, signified by the end of World War I, which came to its bloody end on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

Veterans are honored today, even if some cannot reach peace themselves. A national poll showed an alarming number of the permanent homeless are vets. Some struggle constantly with their generation's war, whichever one caught up with them: in North Africa, Europe, the Pacific, India-Burma, Korea, Vietnam, the terrorist attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq. Even the stress and undeniable secret war dead of the Cold War.

But there were few battlefield deaths in the Cold War. The cruel fight for the Korean peninsula, with 140,200 U.S servicemen and women killed or wounded, aside, the great forces of the Cold War — the nuclear-tipped Soviet Union and the nuclear-cocked United States — stood down from that war, perhaps the last one we would have had on a smoldering Earth.

Ambassador Thomas Graham was truly a soldier and a veteran of that Cold War.

At the University of Washington's Kane Hall Thursday night, Graham spoke for 45 minutes on the victories and the frightful uncertainties of the staging for nuclear war in the 1970s and 1980s.

Graham worked in the highly complicated and textually nuanced field of anti-proliferation of nuclear arms, a package of work that succeeded, he said, under President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The Cold War ended with only the occasional shot fired, but why?

Graham thinks diplomacy and mutual fear worked. He believes in the power of the treaty, the enduring rule of law by which many nations abide, to the power of individuals on both sides of the treaty table who looked into the maw of nuclear war, and backed away.

But what about now?

"Nuclear weapons are no longer a deterrence to war," Graham said. In the post-Cold War world, some 50 to 70 nations are failed states. They either have no working government or are caught in an endless pit of poverty. In some of these places — Graham calls them "machine-gun societies" — the rule of law and the power of the treaty are abandoned.

Graham sat in an office in Moscow, about a month after Sept. 11, and talked with his counterpart about the location of the nuclear weapons held by Pakistan. He said he suggested to the Russian deputy minister that for both our countries, it would be a good idea to know exactly where the Pakistanis had moved their nuclear devices.

"There is no difference between us on that," the Russian replied, and to Graham's mind it meant the U.S. and Russia were cooperating on locating Pakistan's arsenal.

But today's uncertain world lacks the structure of professor Graham's treaty-sealed Cold War. Proliferation has been caused by the high political value of the bomb; not the need to use it, but the need to have it at any cost.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: seattletimes.com">jvesely@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com