If Barack Obama sent the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to Congress for ratification early in the new session, that would be an excellent start. Since it was signed in 1996, 148 other countries have ratified it, but it cannot come into effect until the US does, too. And then he could get on with banning the nuclear weapons themselves, not just the tests.
There's another initiative, launched in Paris on Tuesday under the title Global Zero, in which more than 100 world leaders endorse the goal of abolishing nuclear weapons completely. That may have a slightly antique ring to it - don't they know the cold war ended ages ago? - but, in fact, the nuclear weapons are still there. Some 20,000 of them, in fact. And, last July, at a rally in Berlin, Mr Obama publicly adopted the same goal. 'This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons,' he said.
What makes Global Zero more than the usual empty talk is the fact that, this time, all the leaders of the major powers seem to be on the same page. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in March that Britain is ready to work for 'a world that is free from nuclear weapons'.
Last June, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh backed the same goal, saying that 'the only effective form of nuclear disarmament and elimination of nuclear weapons is global disarmament'. Pakistan and China have said explicitly that they support Global Zero. In fact, the only countries that actually own nuclear weapons that have stayed silent are North Korea and Israel.
North Korea is less of a problem than it seems, because it could probably be persuaded to give up its few weapons in return for security guarantees and lots of foreign aid, especially if the US were getting out of the nuclear weapons business, too. Israel is a knottier problem, because it doesn't even admit that it has nuclear weapons. But, for the first time, it could face pressure from the one country that really has leverage over its policy, the US.
One of the most striking aspects of the Global Zero meeting in Paris was the remark by Richard Burt, who handled the press conference, that Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal would have to be part of the process. This will have raised concern in Israel, because while Mr Burt holds no official position in the US government, he was the chief US negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks with the Soviet Union, and he probably wouldn't have said it if US policy were not moving in that direction.