Actor Michael Douglas
has been in Washington all week to advocate for nuclear non-proliferation and
funding for diplomacy in today's budget-cutting environment. He and
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Ellen
Tauscher sat down on Thursday at the State Department for an interview with
The Cable.
"I'm here to see if anything can be accomplished in the area
of nuclear disarmament before the elections," Douglas said in our interview.
"You get a message constantly that nothing is going to be done between now and
[the election]... but I don't think we can wait around for a year and half."
Calling himself a "messenger of peace" in the area of
disarmament, Douglas said he was "try[ing] to see if Congress won't calm down a
little bit" in its efforts to cut funding for nuclear non-proliferation
programs.
Douglas met for 30 minutes Thursday with Tauscher, Deputy Secretary Tom Nides, Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller, and Assistant Secretary Tom Countryman.
"Obama is not the
first president to talk about going to nuclear zero, but he is the first one to
put a blueprint forward and to have acted on it," Tauscher told The Cable, noting that the New START agreement
was ratified in a politically fraught environment. "That victory is momentous,
but it's not the end of the agenda."
Tauscher said the drive to work toward a world without
nuclear weapons will continue from now until the election, but warned that the
prospects of seeing a Senate ratification of key agenda items, such as the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), is "very unlikely." She noted, however,
that "there is a lot of work to do" in the meantime to explain why CTBT is needed and why it is more verifiable in 2011 due to the advances in policy and technology compared to when it last came up for Senate
ratification in 1999.
Douglas has been making the rounds in Washington since his
arrival in town last week. We spotted him at the reception to celebrate the Diplomatic
Reception Rooms on Oct. 18 and then met him again at a Nov. 1 meeting on
Capitol Hill of the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund, an organization that
supports the arms control agenda.
Douglas also sat down on Thursday morning with some members
of the State Department press corps to make the case for defending spending on
diplomacy and development.
"These soundbites about why are we spending money overseas
when we have such economic times in this country, people don't take the time to
understand just how important diplomacy is," Douglas said. "It takes a lot of
time, it's quiet, but it certainly is a lot less expensive than going to war."
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