Four senior American statesmen have proposed that the United States start a new drive toward worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons. Their case is timely, detailed, closely reasoned, and maybe even practical. But if it is to go anywhere, it needs public discussion and determined U.S. leadership.

The authors are former Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, and former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn, D.-Georgia. Their proposal appeared as an opinion article in the Jan. 4 Wall Street Journal under the title “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.”

So far, it has laid an egg. No group or publication immediately picked it up. The Journal published a sharply critical letter to the editor the next day headlined “Four Pollyannas of the Apocalypse.” It said that a key flaw in the argument for nuclear disarmament was that “the Islamic-fascist terrorists cannot be deterred by force or threat of force” and one way or another will acquire nuclear weapons.

A close reading of the proposal shows that it takes full account of that and other objections. It would start with an agreement by the present nuclear powers on the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. By persuasion and pressure, that goal would be spread to all other nations. Strict controls would be imposed on existing weapons stocks and the refined plutonium and uranium that are raw material for weapons production. Worldwide monitoring and ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would increase confidence in the process.

One requirement for the United States would be a study of how our armed forces could defend the country without the backup threat of a nuclear strike. Other nuclear nations and prospective nuclear powers would have to satisfy themselves on the same matter.

A determined world community would have to eliminate any source that could supply any terrorist group with nuclear weapons, material or technology.

Visionary? Of course, just as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech in 1953 and President Ronald Reagan’s and the leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s failed joint proposal at Reykjavik in 1986 were visionary.

The issue is far more urgent today. Nonproliferation has failed, with eight or nine nations with nuclear weapons, a half-dozen more close to it, some with U.S. approval and others despite U.S. disapproval.

Does North Korea really want a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula? Would Iran feel relief if the United States and Israel destroyed their nuclear weapons?

We won’t know unless we try. But we can be sure that most of the men and women of the world would welcome a time when there was no longer any threat of nuclear war.