The nuclear option: why nations want the bomb.

The background to the controversy over Iran's nuclear program is an American position on nuclear nonproliferation that is unsustainable in the long term. Much of the international policy community understands that this is so. It is time for Washington to come to terms with this reality.

America's determination to stop nuclear proliferation produces perverse results. At a time of mounting Middle Eastern instability and American engagement in two wars in Islamic countries, it increases the allure of nuclear weapons to governments that do not have them, and reinforces their perceived value as political assets and as deterrents against foreign attack.

Nuclear proliferation does not itself promote aggression. Take the alarmist scenarios routinely cited by American and Israeli officials. There is no imaginable way in which nuclear aggression by Iran against Israel could have other than catastrophic results for the attacker. The same is true for any attack by North Korea on an American base in East Asia, or by India on Pakistan, or Pakistan on India.

The existing nuclear states, on the other hand, could attack a nonnuclear nation and probably escape military retaliation, although not huge political and moral opprobrium. Since everyone sees this, it adds to the perceived injustice of the American position defending the nuclear monopoly of these states.

John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, an eminent member of the "realist" school of policy analysis, notes that everyone understands that the implicit aim of U.S. nonproliferation policy is to prevent limits being placed on U.S. freedom of action in dealing with other countries. He writes, "The country that acquires nuclear weapons becomes unattackable. It is precisely for that reason that it wants them."

The usual antiproliferation argument contends--to quote a recent French analysis--that "a world in which twenty or thirty states have the bomb would be uncontrollable." Usually added to the argument is the proposition that some weapons might fall into the hands of terrorists. Indeed they might, but is it any less likely now, when much ex-Soviet nuclear material is still unsecured?

The aim of the governments that want to acquire nuclear weapons is security. This implies more stability, not less. The leading American academic authority on proliferation, Kenneth N. Waltz of Columbia University, makes an argument for proliferation by saying that, since the only real utility of nuclear weapons is dissuasion, proliferation should "contribute to stability, peace, and prudence." This again is a rational argument made by a political realist.

The American position is politically unsustainable in the long term (and morally unsustainable as well, to the extent that the moral case carries weight) because it comes down to an implied claim that the United States should have permanent nuclear superiority, as demanded in the administration's 2001 National Strategy statement, because it claims responsibility for maintaining global security. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, argued last year, "American power is uniquely central to world peace." Hence the United States has "the right to seek more security than other countries." It and Britain can be trusted to use nuclear weapons responsibly.

Washington would undoubtedly concede that the current existence of six other nuclear powers is probably irreversible (although undesirable). France has the weapons because it was, and is, determined to be a leading global player--and at the time the French program began, Washington considered a French deterrent a useful complication of Russia's strategic calculations. It did not take account of how large the French deterrent force would eventually become.

Israel has them because it was impossible for domestic political reasons for Washington to prevent it. Odd as it may seem today, American relations with Israel were cool at the time the Israeli nuclear project began, and it was France that supplied Israel with the essential technology.

Russia and China have them because the United States couldn't stop them. Pakistan and India have them because U.S. intelligence didn't notice they were getting them, and Washington would have found them hard to block. But to the rest of the world, the United States is saying that the nuclear club now is closed. This is not likely to prove true.

In the nonproliferation treaty (NPT) signed in 1970, to which 188 states formally adhere, the existing nuclear weapons states, led by the United States, committed themselves to eventual nuclear disarmament. But that is not happening. This, plus the senior nuclear states' admittance of India and Pakistan to the club, is a source of tension with such major states as Japan and South Korea, and with many of the nonaligned countries.

A situation has been created in which eight countries--nine, should North Korea actually have a nuclear weapon, however undeliverable--are conceded power to destroy another country. None gives signs of respecting the NPT members' obligation to disarm. (Israel, India, and Pakistan never ratified the treaty.)

The NPT is in the process of collapsing under pressures of conflicting geopolitical interests, the power of nationalism, fear in the states that consider themselves discriminated against, the unilateralist ambitions of the United States, and the bad faith of too many of the governments involved. To admit this could be a step toward realism.

[c] 2005, Tribune Media Services International