Throughout the nuclear age—even at the height of the Cold War—leaders foresaw a day when the world could be free of nuclear weapons.
In 1986, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan agreed that "a nuclear war could never be won and must never be fought." Reagan considered nuclear weapons "totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization."
At the United Nations in 1988, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi presented India's plan for the elimination of nuclear weapons, declaring "Nuclear war will not mean the death of a hundred million people. Or even a thousand million. It will mean the extinction of four thousand million: the end of life as we know it on our planet earth."
When the Cold War ended, calls for global zero increased. The former head of the nuclear weapons command of the U.S. military, Lee Butler, said he "could see for the first time the prospect of restoring a world free of the apocalyptic threat of nuclear weapons…. [A] world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons." In 1993, U.S. Gen. (ret.) Colin Powell said, "Today I can declare my hope and declare it from the bottom of my heart that we will eventually see the time when that number of nuclear weapons is down to zero and the world is a much better place."
In 1999, Chinese President Jiang Zemin stated, "[T]here is no reason why nuclear weapons… should not be comprehensively banned and thoroughly destroyed. What it takes to reach this objective is no more than a strong political will."
In 2001, Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto said, "A push on the button can end life before we realize what was done in desperation. We owe it to our children to build a world free of the threat of nuclear annihilation."
These leaders and many others over the last six decades have paved the way for the historical moment we face today: unprecedented worldwide support for the elimination of nuclear weapons.