The end of the Cold War has seen a dramatic transformation of the nuclear arms race. Throughout the 1990s the US and the former USSR have been destroying some 2,000 nuclear weapons a year. Yet the reality is that when the currently agreed disarmament process, Start II, is completed in 2003 the two countries will retain 3,000 and 3,500 strategic weapons each respectively.
While the Hiroshima bomb was the equivalent of some 20,000 tons of TNT, each of those in the armouries of today is now measured in megatons (one million tons of TNT) - a one-megaton bomb dropped over a large city would destroy all brick houses within a radius of three and a half miles and kill half a million people immediately and many more from wounds and radiation later. Humanity still has the capacity to destroy itself many times over.
Yet while 182 states have committed themselves, through the Non-Proliferation Treaty, not to sell nuclear armaments to non-nuclear states, the treaty also provided an obligation on the five nuclear powers (the US, Britain, France, Russia and China) to work to negotiate genuine total disarmament.
That has patently not happened, with the result that many sizeable powers in the developing world - including nuclear newcomers India and Pakistan - see the treaty in an increasingly jaundiced light as an attempt by the great powers to retain their policing role in the world. The message from the five, they say, is, "Do as we say, not as we do!"
Ireland's main contribution to international security has been in the realm of peacekeeping, where it has shown a willingness to go beyond what might otherwise be seen as an isolationist, neutralist position to assume responsibilities for world peace.
But it has also played a role in the international general disarmament process that goes back to the fiasco of the 1932 League of Nations Disarmament Conference.
In the run-up to that conference, the then Minister for External Affairs, Patrick McGilligan, made much in speeches of the Irish reduction in spending on arms - in part a result of the peace following the end of the Civil War, in part the product of constraints imposed on the State by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.
With the change of Government in 1932 the issue became less important to the Government, while the Conference itself collapsed.
Some 25 years later, Mr McGilligan's successor, Frank Aiken, saw the opportunity for a small nation to use its good offices to broker a nuclear arms reduction agreement between the superpowers.
In 1961 in the UN, the so-called Irish resolution - Resolution 1665 (XVI) - was to be the first which dealt with the proliferation of nuclear weapons and was to be followed by lengthy negotiations leading to the signing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968.
Aiken's contribution to the treaty was recognised at the signing ceremony in Moscow - his was the first signature.
In the following two years, after Aiken's retirement, Ireland sponsored a total of 11 resolutions on the issue, its representative at the UN, Sean Ronan, complaining, however, that "while the pace of disarmament negotiations is poised between torpor and glacial advance . . . the rate of advance of nuclear technology is anything but glacial."
That immobility led gradually to the issue leaving the centre stage of Irish foreign policy, although it has remained one of its fundamental tenets.
In its relations more recently with its European partners Ireland has insisted on maintaining an independent anti-nuclear line. It was the only EU country to support the case to the International Court to have the use of nuclear weapons declared illegal.
The result was a judgment which, while allowing the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons in self-defence, also imposed an obligation on nuclear weapons states to pursue disarmament actively.
The decision has strengthened the moral hand of the non-nuclear states against the argument of the five that their disarmament obligations are to be seen only as being in the context of general and complete disarmament.
In the internal EU debate about its own collective defence, and notably the possibility of a merger with the Western European Union, the nuclear issue is the ghost at the feast. While an unwillingness to give commitments to mutual defence may be a primary obstacle to such a merger, the nuclear-based strategy of the WEU would be a major obstacle if Ireland were to change its mind on neutrality.
As an observer at the WEU, Ireland joined Sweden, Finland and Austria in 1995 in demanding that a joint review of Europe's defence strategy would make clear in a footnote that the nuclear-based defence strategy of the WEU was not subscribed to by them.
The EU declaration on India and Pakistan on Monday night, moreover, reiterates, partly at Irish instigation, the obligation on the five nuclear powers to disarm.
Yet while it is clear that yesterday's New Agenda initiative would never have been agreed through the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy mechanisms, and hence had to be a separate initiative, that very fact may undermine Ireland's ability in future to complain about unilateral actions by the French and others.
Ireland in the past has been strong supporter of collective EU action, seeing it as a way of constraining the self-seeking diplomacy of the former imperial powers like the Middle East or China.
And there is no doubt that the initiative reflects an important change of approach, a move away from a recent diplomacy based on exercising an influence on the world through first influencing our EU partners, to one based on moral appeals direct to the world community. "Megaphone diplomacy" was how one unimpressed diplomat put it.
But striking out on our own, however effectively, will certainly appeal domestically and will provide useful ammunition against those who argue that Ireland has through total immersion in the EU lost its identity on the world stage.