Apocalypse later.

• Author: Mueller, John
• Position: Apocalypse When? - Essay

I WISH, first, to thank my distinguished detractors for their considered comments and, second, to register a few points of clarification, disagreement and dismay. Dismay is the easiest. All three seem in various ways to want to detach quiet and methodical programs for securing Russian fissile material and improving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty--programs I am happy to support--from the more spectacular consequences of the non-proliferation obsession, particularly the Iraq War. But that war was principally packaged and sold as a quest to prevent or roll back Iraq's sup posed nuclear development. As Francis Fukuyama has crisply put it, a pre-war request to spend "several hundred billion dollars and several thousand American lives in order to bring democracy to ... Iraq" would "have been laughed out of court." Similarly, the sanctions against Iraq, popular on both sides of the political aisle, were substantially designed to keep the evil, if pathetic, Saddam Hussein from obtaining a nuclear capability. Not bad goals, but in carrying them out, each venture inflicted more deaths than did the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. Costs like that, I modestly suggest in my article, can reasonably be labeled "dire."

That's the kind of policy that logically (and actually) follows when nuclear non-proliferation is designated a "supreme priority" (Allison) or "our number one national-security priority" (Cirincione). It also follows that there should be wars against North Korea and Iran if diplomatic and other devices fail to rein in those countries' nuclear programs, wars that could easily engender the same calamitous human costs. Moreover, the intense hostility toward those particular regimes, due in considerable part to hysteria over what might conceivably happen should they obtain an atomic bomb, has had the perverse effect of enhancing the appeal of such weapons--for the sake of deterrence if nothing else.

To explain the remarkably slow pace at which nuclear proliferation has taken place, all three essays put a great deal of weight on the beneficial effects of the 1968 NPT. Indeed, Joseph Cirincione suggests that, without that document, there would have been a "nuclear wave", and the conclusion in the 1958 National Intelligence Estimate that a large number of countries might soon develop a nuclear capacity would have come true. (At the time, the same spooks were also estimating that the Soviet Union would have 500 intercontinental nuclear...