Bush's Nuclear Revolution: A Regime Change in Nonproliferation

George Perkovich

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2003

Summary:  The White House's radical new strategy to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction will likely make the world less secure, not more.

George Perkovich is Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of India's Nuclear Bomb.

The radicals' concern for enforcement, therefore, suffers from triple selectivity. It deems some states' nuclear weapons good, while others' are bad. It selects one treaty, the NPT, for enforcement while dismissing others. And it selects only some provisions of the NPT -- the constraints on others -- for enforcement. Such selectivity mocks the equitable rule of law and engenders apathy and resistance from other states that makes stopping WMD proliferation even harder than it would otherwise be.

WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER

Real security against weapons of mass destruction requires all relevant states and individuals to enforce vigorously the treaties, rules, laws, and procedures that have been established to outlaw chemical and biological weapons and to contain, and ultimately eliminate, the threats posed by nuclear arsenals. Some argue that this is a fantasy because nuclear weapons, and chemical and biological weapons, cannot be disinvented. This ignores the fact that they do not have to be. The Reagan administration and Moscow did not disinvent intermediate-range nuclear missiles, but they eliminated them from their arsenals. South Africa did not disinvent its nuclear arsenal, but it did decommission it.

As Ronald Reagan, for one, envisioned, nuclear weapons can be verifiably withdrawn from the serviceable arsenals of states. This will take many decades to accomplish and will be finished only if and when the world in general has achieved the sort of integration and obedience to the rule of law that the Western hemisphere and Europe have developed in the past 50 years. This rule of law will have to be backed by internationally legitimate and robust instruments of coercion for the dangers to be kept at bay. Merely stating such a goal makes clear how far we are from it at present. But unless the United States and other leading countries vigorously proffer this vision the proliferation problem will get more dangerous rather than less.