IN 1963 President John F. Kennedy famously speculated that by 1970 ten countries would be able to deploy nuclear weapons and by 1975, fifteen to twenty countries would have followed suit.1 In fact, the number of nuclear-weapons states peaked at ten when some of the successor states to the Soviet Union were born nuclear, then the number dropped to seven, and now it stands at nine with Pakistan and North Korea having joined what remains the world’s most exclusive club.
Why have nuclear weapons spread so slowly? The answer is found not in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but in the fact that most countries feel sufficiently secure without adding nuclear weapons to their conventional arsenals. If a country believes that its security depends on nuclear weapons, to prevent it from acquiring them becomes almost impossible. President George W. Bush among others announced that North Korea becoming a nuclear-weapons state would be “unacceptable.” Yet when North Korea developed a nuclear military capability, we quietly acquiesced. The alternative to acceptance would have been to attack North Korea’s nuclear facilities, and that would surely have been unacceptable.
Sagan emphasizes that verification and enforcement of an agreement to create a nuclear-free world would be required. If for a moment we imagine that Sagan’s hoped-for world without nuclear weapons could be realized, what would anyone do if a major state revealed that it had secretly rebuilt a considerable nuclear arsenal? Would someone then attack the reborn nuclear state using the only weapons it would have, that is, conventional ones? I think not.
