In an article to be published on Friday in the Izvestia daily, former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov, former foreign minister Igor Ivanov and two other top Russian strategic thinkers argue that the logic behind nuclear disarmament was at times an obstacle to broader action better-adapted to today’s security realities.

The nuclear disarmament process, though important in itself, keeps the world locked in the nuclear “ideology” of mutual deterrence, a paradigm that has largely outlived its usefulness and that no longer offers an adequate basis for addressing new types of international security threats.

“Nuclear deterrence is impotent in responding to threats of the 21st century: the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their means of delivery, international terrorism, ethnic and religious conflicts, transnational crime, etc.,” the article says.

“Worse still, nuclear deterrence in many ways encourages the proliferation of WMD and missile technologies and hampers deeper cooperation among the leading powers in taking action against such threats (as in joint development of missile defense systems, for example).”

The authors, which also included former Russian armed forces chief of staff Mikhail Moiseev and Yevgeny Velikhov, president of the Kurchatov Institute Russian Science Center, praised the new START nuclear disarmament treaty, which was signed by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and US President Barack Obama earlier this year.

They also noted the Obama administration’s stated intention to seek a multilateral approach to dealing with matters of international security in equal cooperation with Russia and called on Washington to apply this principle at a practical level on a range of security issues.

What was ultimately needed however was a new paradigm in global security thinking capable of taking the world beyond the Cold War-era logic centered on mutual deterrence and piecemeal disarmament and towards a new, cooperative system for addressing 21st-century security threats effectively.

“Fulfilling the goal of nuclear disarmament, which should remain a strategic objective, is possible only in the context of a deep reorganization of the entire international system,” the group writes.

“This will obviously help resolve other key problems of the 21st century related to the global economy and finance, energy supply, the environment and climate, demographics, disease, transnational crime and religious and ethnic extremism,” the article states.

“In such a context, nuclear disarmament is not so much an end in itself as it is an important direction in which to head, a precondition and a means for reorganizing international life on a more civilized basis in the direct sense of the word and in accordance with the imperatives of our century.”