Eventually, the idea of selective proliferation gave way to a slightly more reasonable approach. As China neared its first nuclear detonation in the early 1960s, the U.S. foreign policy elite went into a minor panic. (Quivering hands must have dropped countless cucumber sandwiches on Mr. Pratt's parquet.) All the usual approaches were considered -- but they seemed especially ridiculous when transplanted to Asia. Actual policy proposal: Help India build a nuclear weapon to counter China! Eventually, as in the case of most knotty problems, a commission was formed. Lyndon Johnson asked Roswell Gilpatric, a former deputy secretary of defense and shall we say "man about town," to look at the problem.
Unlike most commissions, this one produced something useful. (I'll give you a minute to recover.) The Gilpatric Report figured out what I take to be the central fact of the nuclear age: that nuclear weapons pose a shared danger to all countries -- this, only two decades into the nuclear age. Narrowly speaking, the commission observed, if both the United States and Soviet Union encouraged their friends to acquire nuclear weapons, pretty soon everyone would have them. That would be unwelcome. So, despite our deep ideological differences, the superpowers had an incentive to cooperate. The Gilpatric Report laid out a sensible set of nonproliferation measures that the United States might pursue with the Soviet Union, including treaties against proliferation, nuclear testing, and the production of fissile material. Fifty years later, we're still working on Roswell Gilpatric's list of recommendations.
I don't want to oversell how dramatic the shift in U.S. policy was after the Gilpatric Report. This isn't a Hollywood movie. Henry Kissinger didn't slap his forehead and say "Oh, vat an ass I've been," although that certainly would have been appropriate. The Nixon administration, for example, agreed to seek ratification of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) -- but only on the condition that we never, ever ask any of our friends to sign it, least of all the West Germans. Privately, the Nixon administration accepted Israel as a sub rosa member of the nuclear club and initiated a robust program of nuclear cooperation with France that might have seemed at odds with our newfound interest in nonproliferation, if it hadn't been kept secret for a couple of decades.
The NPT has plenty of flaws. It was, among other things, about 20 years too late -- but better late than never. By 1970, five states already had tested a nuclear weapon. The treaty recognized this reality, striking one of many bargains: no more nuclear weapons states, with those already in the club agreeing to good-faith efforts toward disarmament. The deal isn't fair -- life, you may have noticed, is like that -- but it was the only deal possible and better than none at all. People who talk about an NPT 2.0 are either fools or on staff at the Physics Research Center in Tehran. This is the best deal we're getting; we need to make it work.
Despite a cottage industry of claiming the NPT is doomed, the treaty has done rather well in several respects. Over time, nonproliferation became the norm for U.S. policy. We did eventually encourage and, when necessary, strong-arm our friends into signing the treaty, halting nuclear weapons programs in places like Australia, Sweden, South Korea, and Taiwan.
We've gotten to the point today where there does seem to be something untoward about building nuclear weapons, with proliferation at the moment largely occurring among states that are relatively isolated within the international community. Advocates of the NPT like to mention John F. Kennedy's remark that, without action, 15 or 20 or 25 states might acquire nuclear weapons by 1970. The number gets the headlines, but it's worth looking at the intelligence estimate his comment was based upon. The 15 or 20 or 25 states included all the states that could build nuclear weapons. Noticeably absent are many of today's problem children. Where the NPT succeeded was in limiting proliferation to the hard cases -- whether we call them pariahs, rogues, or states of concern. That is no mean feat. When military dictatorships in Argentina and Brazil ended, so did their nuclear weapons programs. When South Africa gave up apartheid, it also gave up the bomb.
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