Closing the Nuclear Umbrella

Ted Galen Carpenter

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994

Article preview: first 500 of 2,618 words total.

Summary:  The nonproliferation regime is unraveling, and the Soviet rival is gone. The first goal of U.S. policy should be to keep America out of potential nuclear crossfire.

Ted Galen Carpenter is Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is ?A Search for Enemies: America's Alliances after the Cold War.?

The recent crisis over North Korea's nuclear program is merely the latest evidence that the global nonproliferation regime, symbolized by the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), is inexorably breaking down. Although U.S. concessions may ultimately induce Pyongyang once again to allow international inspections, that will be a meager accomplishment. It will hardly offer reliable guarantees that a regime as secretive and politically opaque as North Korea's cannot evade International Atomic Energy Agency scrutiny while pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Iraq, for one, was certainly able to do so while complying with all IAEA inspection requirements.

North Korea is only one of several states with nuclear ambitions. India and Pakistan have also emerged as threshold aspirants to, if not already full-fledged members of, the once-exclusive global nuclear club. Persistent reports surface of Iranian and Libyan efforts to exploit the political chaos in the former Soviet Union to purchase their own small arsenals. Even Ukraine's agreement with the United States and Russia to turn over its nuclear warheads is far from certain, given the foot-dragging and obstructionist tilt of the Ukrainian parliament as well as the widespread public sentiment for retaining the weapons. These worrisome trends more than offset any positive developments, such as France's and China's decisions to adhere to NPT provisions or South Africa's announcement that it has given up the arsenal it had developed surreptitiously in the 1980s.

It is time for U.S. leaders to reassess Cold War policies on nonproliferation, security commitments and extended deterrence and to adapt them to changed international circumstances. These commitments may once have made sense, given the need to thwart the Soviet Union's expansionist agenda. But they are highly dubious in the absence of the superpower rivalry. They now threaten to embroil the United States in regional conflicts where nuclear weapons have already proliferated or will inevitably proliferate soon. Washington should give up its fruitless obsession with preserving the NPT and the unraveling nonproliferation system that it represents.

ENTANGLING NUCLEAR ALLIANCES

Proliferation is frequently occurring in areas where bitter regional rivalries, ethnic or religious tensions, and raging border disputes could potentially involve the United States. Stalinist North Korea's hostility toward South Korea has already produced one major war, and the ironically named demilitarized zone between the rival states remains the most heavily armed area on the planet. Relations between India and Pakistan are only slightly less acrimonious. The two countries have fought three major wars since independence in 1947, and border skirmishes over the disputed province of Kashmir are commonplace. Iran has ambitions to become the preeminent power in the Persian Gulf region, a prospect that alarms Saudi Arabia and other neighbors. Ukraine jealously guards its newly won independence from Moscow and worries that Russia will someday attempt to reassert its imperial prerogatives. Those fears are not unfounded, as Russian politicians across the political spectrum openly express irredentist sentiments toward Ukraine. A simmering dispute involving the Crimea, a Ukrainian territory inhabited predominantly by Russians, is an especially dangerous flashpoint.

The prospect ...

End of preview: first 500 of 2,618 words total.