Nuclear deterrence will eventually be a relic of the Cold War, said former ambassador Richard R. Burt '69 in a talk addressing the new role of nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War international sphere Dec. 2 in Lewis Auditorium.

"The currency of power has changed," said Burt, the U.S. ambassador to Germany 1986-91 and today a business intelligence consultant and political strategist.

In this new international order -- more open and with a wider distribution of power -- military politics cease to be important, he said. Geo-economics, the effect of economics on power relations, has replaced military power as the primary tool of international negotiations, he added, saying that wars of territorial acquisition are unattractive and risky; power lies in a strong economy.

"Thus, the bipolar world that we were familiar with during the Cold War ... has passed away," said Burt. "What we have now is a cluster of mature economies and big emerging markets ... that will secure their interests chiefly through innovation, trade and investment in the years ahead."

Burt cautioned that this new world of great power compromise is not the whole story. It coexists with "another world, a darker world, of rogue states, like North Korea and Iran, of failing states, potentially like Pakistan, and sub-state actors, some of them entirely irrational," he said. Here, nuclear weapons are becoming ever more desirable and accessible.

Pakistan is the biggest threat to the international community, an opinion Burt shares with Vice President Joe Biden. "Think about it, it's a three-fer," he said: a failing government, an insurgency reminiscent of al Qaeda and a stash of nuclear weapons. To make matters worse, Pakistan is building weapons and manufacturing more weapons-grade material faster than any other nation in the world.

Burt was more optimistic about Iran, unconvinced that it even possesses nuclear weapons. But if it does have nuclear capability, "the danger of an Iranian nuclear weapon is not that they'll immediately ... nuke Israel or nuke Saudi Arabia," he said. He worries instead about the cascade effect, that other rival countries in the region would acquire nuclear weapons, compromising the goal of nonproliferation.

"It's hard to come up with a silver bullet solution to this problem," he said. "There's no overarching, simple solution." Financial and material incentives, military intervention and nation building have proven ineffective. Instead, Burt advocated building a strong international consensus around the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, with the ultimate goal of delegitimizing nuclear weapons.

This is a bold scheme, acknowledged Burt, but President Barack Obama has already taken the first step. The nuclear debate is back on the table, and ratification of the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty is critical.

Burt concluded, "To not be able to carry out a critical foreign policy initiative, the United States begins to resemble what Richard Nixon at the height of the Vietnam War described the United States as: 'a pitiful, helpless giant.'"

The event was sponsored by Sigma Phi's Speaker series, the Cornell International Affairs Review and Global Zero.

Erica Rhodin '12 is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.