Of the three interwoven threats to America--terrorists, rogue states and the proliferation of WMD--the third has provoked the least public debate since 9/11. This is curious, since the invasion of Iraq was intended as an exercise in counter-proliferation and the administration has announced a major program to deal with other cases of the spread of WMD. But public debate has focused on the prudence of pre-emptive war and unilateralism, and on whether Iraq had stockpiled WMD in the first place, not on the ways the momentum can be and is being used to overcome further WMD threats in Libya and Pakistan and to strengthen the anti-proliferation regime more generally. The Bush Administration's ongoing program has received little serious attention outside of expert circles, despite eye-catching measures such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, which empowers the United States to board ships suspected of carrying WMD contraband.
Meanwhile Iran and North Korea demonstrate that the old non-proliferation regime is still in crisis. Yet at the same time, wider diplomatic conditions are better than at any point since the 1940s for a realistic policy of not only non- but even counter-proliferation--that is, the use of force to stop proliferation. Measures can be taken in the near future to reverse the impending crisis, and a short capsule history will explain why.
The history of non-proliferation diplomacy falls into three periods. The first was the period of U.S. nuclear monopoly that lasted from 1945 to 1949, during which robust plans for an anti-proliferation regime were proposed. In the late 1940s, the Baruch Plan proposed global management of uranium and UN enforcement actions that would have been exempt from a veto in the Security Council.
