Invisible Ink? Ambassador Ali Salehi of Iran and IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei signed an Additional Protocol to Iran's NPT safeguards agreement in 2003. Dean Calma/IAEA

“The Number of Countries with Nuclear Weapons Is About to Grow Dramatically”

We've heard all that before. In 1964, five states possessed nuclear weapons. The previous year, President John F. Kennedy had predicted that number would expand to between 15 and 25 nuclear weapons states within a decade. Ten years later, the top U.S. arms controller, Fred Iklé, foresaw as many as 35 nuclear states in the world by 1990. But, even though nuclear technology did diffuse widely, the nuclear weapons club had only expanded by two new members by 1980. And during the 1980s, membership in the club did not grow at all.

At the end of the Cold War, experts again braced themselves for rampant proliferation. Even “optimistic” scenarios anticipated that key global players such as Germany would seek nuclear weaponry. The predictions again proved to be wrong. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, more states have actually given up their nuclear weapons arsenals than have created new ones. True, no one can be certain that those who come bearing dark predictions today won’t turn out to be correct after all. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. But if the proliferation prophets were managing your money, you’d have fired them by now.

“The Nonproliferation Regime Deters New Nuclear Weapons States”

Hardly. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) does good work, and the agency and its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, deserve their Nobel Peace Prize. But to say that a flood of new nuclear weapons states has been blocked by the international nonproliferation regime is like saying that Bill Gates is rich because he saved a bundle by switching to GEICO.

Has the nonproliferation regime been helpful? Yes. But it has not been a determinative factor in preventing proliferation. After all, the regime is flimsy. It suffers from ambiguous and erratically enforced rules, myriad technical loopholes, and chronic underfunding. The case of pre-1991 Iraq showed how easily a determined state can hide the true extent of its nuclear program from the IAEA. Monitoring and inspection procedures have tightened up a great deal since then, but even a closely watched Iran managed to develop an extensive secret nuclear program over an 18-year period, until the truth started leaking out in 2002.

In addition, the regime has been weakened by the ambiguous message it sends to states. The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) does not create a level playing field between states, as most international treaties try to do. Rather, it separates states into two categories—the nuclear weapons states versus the others—and most of the onus for compliance falls on the latter group. The nuclear weapons states have only halfheartedly pursued nuclear disarmament, as the NPT says they must, and they have increasingly refused to meet their other major treaty obligation of disseminating civilian nuclear technology. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has recently made it clear that it intends to treat NPT holdout India as a legal nuclear weapons state. So it’s difficult to say that the nonproliferation regime today offers nonnuclear weapons states much of a reward for staying that way—if, indeed, it ever did.

Then there’s the overriding fact that, even when the chips are down, most states have little desire to acquire nuclear weapons. The nonproliferation regime is billed as having been wildly successful because few states have gotten the bomb, but this logic ignores the fact that a vast majority of the world’s countries quite simply have no interest in doing what the NPT prohibits.

“States Want the Bomb Because It Is a Great Deterrent”

It’s not that simple. It’s true that most states who get the bomb want it mainly for the deterrent effect they think it provides. But many states, even among the handful that face high external levels of threat, don’t automatically accept that having the “absolute weapon” will make them safer. Consider the case of India. In 1964, two years after India had fought and lost a bloody border war with China, the Chinese went nuclear. At the time, India had the technical wherewithal to try to follow suit. It did not. Rather than playing with the fire of mutually assured destruction, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri focused on bolstering the country’s conventional military forces to secure India’s borders.

Shastri didn’t believe in the theory of nuclear deterrence. But even most of those leaders who do believe in deterrence theory are not rushing out to get a couple of nuclear missiles. Building a small nuclear arsenal to face a much larger one does little more than invite a preventive attack. It is only once a state develops a secure second-strike capability—the ability to absorb the enemy’s first blow and then respond in kind—that it can begin to feel safe. For instance, in the wake of China’s 1964 nuclear test, petrified Australian leaders also seriously contemplated exercising their nuclear option. What held them back was the belief that Australia couldn’t build that crucial second-strike capability.