Learning to love the bomb: is nuclear proliferation inherently dangerous?

• Author: Chapman, Steve
• Position: Culture & Reviews - 'The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed' - Book Review

The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed, by Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 220 pages, $18.50

WITH THE UNITED States in a wartime mode with respect to both Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Americans may have forgotten the scale of the danger that confronted them just a few years ago. The Soviet Union then fielded a huge army that had bested the Wehrmacht and was fully capable of gobbling up large chunks of Western Europe. It supported "liberation movements" around the world with arms and money. It operated a spy network that stole some of our most sensitive and tightly guarded security secrets. And, not least, it maintained an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons. During the superpower standoff, every American was half an hour from nuclear annihilation.

Anyone looking ahead from when this standoff began, would have glumly expected that sooner or later the two sides would come to savage blows. But the most striking fact about the Cold War was its peacefulness. Not only did all those nuclear weapons go unused, but American and Soviet soldiers never met on the field of battle. Historian John Lewis Gaddis argued that the period was misnamed: Instead of the Cold War, he said, it may well be remembered by history as the Long Peace. Writing in 1987, he noted that it compared favorably "with some of the longest periods of great power stability in all of modern history."

In a century marked by the greatest and most deadly wars ever seen, this era of tense truce came as a surprise, and might be seen as a miracle. But nothing supernatural was involved. Human nature didn't suddenly change. Nations didn't cease to regard each other with suspicion and distrust. But at least one important thing made the postwar world different: the invention of atomic weapons. As the military theorist Bernard Brodie wrote in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now its chief purpose must be to avert them."

Each side had a powerful interest in avoiding any conflict that could escalate out of control. Although no one expected it at the outset, a durable though uneasy form of peace took hold. Yet the same nations whose power and security have been underwritten by nuclear weapons have labored mightily to prevent anyone else from getting them.

When North Korea built a nuclear reactor capable of providing fuel for bombs, the United States and South...