Almost from the moment the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the menacing shadow of the nuclear age has inspired visions of a world free of nuclear weapons.
In June 1946, the US delegate to the UN Atomic Energy Commission, Bernard Baruch, tabled a bold plan for the international control of atomic energy.
The key to the Baruch Plan was the establishment of an international institution that would control all nuclear production in the world and have the right of access to state territories for the purposes of verification and inspection.
Once this internationalisation process was achieved, the United States would end production of its own nuclear weapons.
The Baruch Plan was a farsighted and generous initiative, considering America still had at that time an unbroken nuclear monopoly.
But the Soviet Union rejected the plan on the grounds that its own sovereignty would be compromised and that the new United Nations organisation was dominated by the United States and its allies in Western Europe, and could not therefore be trusted to exercise authority on nuclear matters in an even-handed fashion.
The plan collapsed and the nearly half-century of Cold War that followed was dominated, above all, by the threat and fear of nuclear destruction.
The two superpowers raced to produce a greater arsenal than their adversaries, leading to the point where they had the ability to destroy the world several times over.
On at least three occasions - the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the Yom Kippur war in 1973 and the Nato Able Archer exercise in 1983 - the world teetered on the brink of Soviet-American nuclear conflict.
Nuclear war between the two superpowers was a prospect so harrowing that American and Soviet leaders eventually embraced the concept of ''mutual assured destruction'' in which neither side dared risk the retaliation that a first strike would trigger.
In 1968, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty was signed.
Indeed, there was a moment when the world came close to abolishing nuclear weapons.
In October 1986, at Reykjavik, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev tried to eliminate American and Soviet nuclear arsenals, but Reagan's refusal to abandon America's missile defence research programme scuttled the deal.
The end of the Cold War, however, has changed the nuclear equation.
Over the past two and a-half decades, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the impact of globalisation - a restless and overarching ''mega trend'' - has radically redefined the structure of the international environment.
On the one hand, the prospect of a global nuclear war has significantly receded.
On the other hand, the old assumption that we live in a compartmentalised world where sovereign states hold exclusive and constant forms of power has been shown to be erroneous and concerns about the risks of nuclear proliferation have risen.
Established nuclear powers - the US, Russia, Britain and France- have seen their ranks swelled by India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.
It is feared Iran will soon join them.
As the nuclear club expands, the security of weapons and technology tends to diminish.
In particular, there is a growing possibility in a world characterised by various civil conflicts that nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of terrorist groups.
For example, the turbulence in Pakistan has raised the prospect that the Taliban could some day control Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
Conscious of the difficulties of managing nuclear dangers, the Obama Administration has broken new ground in office and made nuclear disarmament a centrepiece of American defence policy.
In the short term, the Obama Administration has supported measures to reduce nuclear weapons threats. The New Start Treaty of 2010 limited US and Russia to 1550 strategic warheads.
President Obama also proposed in June 2013 that the US and Russia should further cut their strategic warheads by one-third, which would leave the two countries with slightly more than 1000 nuclear weapons each.
But such steps are seen by the Obama Administration to be part of a broader, long-term strategy to abolish nuclear weapons from the world in the 21st century.
Among other things, the abolitionists maintain that the massive, indiscriminate destructive power of nuclear weapons makes them morally repugnant; the deployment of nuclear weapons as a strategic deterrent falsely legitimises these weapons and actually encourages their proliferation in the international arena; and the idea of a ''nuclear deterrent'' is no longer relevant in today's world where there is no Cold War balance of power and intra-state conflict is a major security trend.
Yet the case for nuclear abolition has been strongly opposed.
It is said that nuclear weapons are a ''necessary evil'' because they inhibit war by restraining aggression through fear of escalation and certain destruction.
The use of nuclear weapons would indeed be a great tragedy but so, to a greater or lesser extent, is any war; and nuclear weapons technology is an existing reality and there is no way of safely ''disinventing'' this capability.
At the same time, the long-running debate over the abolition of nuclear weapons is being given a new twist by the unfolding post-Cold War environment.
Today, the diffuse process of globalisation has accelerated to the point where the barriers of national sovereignty that once stood in the way of the Baruch Plan have substantially eroded.
The proliferation of nuclear weapons can no longer be controlled by states alone in the current global era. It is high time, therefore, to revisit the Baruch Plan as a possible way of imposing international control over the nuclear threat.
However, there is a paradox.
While the pressures for international solutions like the Baruch Plan are growing, many sovereign states remain in stubborn denial about the realities of growing interdependence in the world.
Thus, it is difficult to be optimistic about success in reviving the Baruch Plan without some clear leadership on the issue.
In many ways, New Zealand is well placed to provide that leadership.
It has a strong track record in opposing nuclear proliferation and Wellington's current bid to win a place on the UN Security Council in October 2014 provides an opportunity to make the case for finally bringing all nuclear weapons under a system of international control.
• Robert Patman is a professor of international relations in the department of politics at the University of Otago.
