Abstract
It's time to revive and update Tom Lehrer's famous ODE to nuclear proliferation, “Who's Next?,” a mid-1960s song that began: “First we got the bomb and that was good, ‘cause we love peace and motherhood. Then Russia got the bomb, but that's OK, ‘cause the balance of power's maintained that way! Who's next? France got the bomb, but don't you grieve, ‘cause they're on our side (I believe)…. Who's next?” And so on.
So who was next? The Nixon administration played the nuclear version of “Twenty Questions” with France, answering non to certain questions, saving the French much trouble and expense in learning how best to go boom. Even before the French had mastered the latest U.S. technology they were overcome by the persuasive Shimon Peres, committing themselves to sharing nuclear know-how with Israel. The Soviet Union had friends who stole U.S. secrets, and used kidnapped Nazi scientists to help develop its bomb, which it shared with its one-time buddy China, which lent nuclear weapon designs to Pakistan, which paired the designs with stolen European technology to “invent” the Islamic bomb, which it shared with Libya and Iran–and with North Korea, from whom it obtained what one imagines Pakistan likes to call Islamic missiles. (Whew!)
Time to end pass-the-nukes? In late March the United States introduced a draft U.N. resolution designed to keep bombs out of the hands of terrorists. The measure, supported by the Security Council's permanent members (the five big cheeses of nuclear weapons), asks individual governments to try to prevent illicit trafficking in weapons materials and to report their actions to a U.N. committee. The resolution is an extension of the Bush administration's Proliferation Security Initiative, announced in May 2003 to a chorus of “Well, duhs” by proliferation experts.
It would be so nice to believe that something as simple as a handshake solution could cure the painful failures of the long-running and more important Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), now under siege both from within and without. Pakistan has spread nuclear technology far and wide, and Middle Eastern states, though pledged to remain non-nuclear, would like to match non-NPT-member Israel bomb for bomb. Pakistan claims that its nuclear salesman A. Q. Khan was a solo act, but in any case, it (like Israel and India) has never signed the NPT and so cannot be accused of violating the treaty.
What can be done to save the NPT? Some quick fix–closing a loophole? Trouble is, the treaty is the loophole. If they promise not to build bombs, non-nuclear members get help with nuclear power technology–in other words, a headstart on what they need to build a bomb. And what can be done about bomb-wielding non-members? How can they be integrated into a single, workable system?
In this issue: Jack Boureston and Charles Ferguson explain how hard Iran has worked to school itself in nuclear science. Leonard Weiss, a long-time Senate staffer, weighs in on the need to end U.S. indifference to Pakistan's transgressions. And two major proposals, one by Avner Cohen and Amb. Thomas Graham Jr., the other by Bennett Ramberg, suggest very different ways NPT non-members might be drawn into a more universal nonproliferation regime.