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Is Nuclear Nonproliferation in the U.S. Interest?
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14137 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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1 / 1988 |
2,280 Words |
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Jed C. Snyder
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It has been regarded as axiomatic that the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the acknowledged Club of Five would be detrimental to international security and therefore the United States must take a leading role in preventing that spread. Changes in the landscape of world politics, however, have blurred what once appeared to be clear-cut, easily definable, and achievable security policy goals. Increasingly, a rigorous stance against the proliferation of nuclear weapons has conflicted with more imperative American policy concerns. Nowhere is this conflict more obvious than in the U.S. approach to security on the Indian subcontinent, where an American ally, Pakistan, has been covertly pursuing a nuclear weapon while publicly assuring the White House that its nuclear program is peaceful.
Washington is wrestling with a classic policy dilemma: Should it attempt to stop Pakistan's bomb program by threatening to suspend a large military assistance package to the government in Islamabad, or should it accept the inevitable growth of the nuclear community and adopt a damage-limiting approach to the problem? The answer may have a profound effect on U.S. policy for several decades.
For much of the postwar period U.S. administrations have expressed commitments to retarding--if not preventing--the proliferation of nuclear weapons, particularly among Third World states. In fact, the consistency with which Washington has approached this problem has been noteworthy, considering the lack of bipartisanship that has characterized much of American foreign and defense policy for the last 15 years. Yet the record of American attempts in this regard has been poor, in large part because, despite grand rhetoric, there has never been sufficient alarm to create a serious debate among policymakers regarding "horizontal proliferation"--the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the current nuclear fraternity. The centerpiece of U.S. arms control strategy has been and continues to be an almost blind pursuit of "vertical proliferation" controls--attempts to reduce the size of superpower nuclear arsenals. While we have focused considerable political energy on managing the East-West nuclear rivalry, another arms race has continued almost unchecked--the covert spread of nuclear technology to the Third World.
The heart of Western efforts at curbing horizontal proliferation is the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and a regime of monitoring mechanisms supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The NPT categorized the international community of nations into two blocs--nuclear weapons states (the United States, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, Britain, and France) and nonnuclear nations. The NPT was designed to limit nuclear proliferation principally by restricting the transfer of technology and hardware to the nonnuclear nations. When the treaty was negotiated, conventional wisdom held that the greatest threat to any regime of international nuclear control was the overt pursuit of a bomb, which (in the minds of the NPT framers) would surely be signaled to all by the open testing of an explosive device. The 1964 nuclear test by China set the terms of reference for the debate that culminated in the drafting of the NPT.
A sanguine approach
The great faith placed in technology restraints was due in large part to the lack of perceived nuclear growth at the time. The fact that earlier apocalyptic predictions about
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