Bombs

The new intelligence offers an implied but compelling case for sustained diplomatic engagement with Iran, because it reveals that country’s ambivalence about its nuclear ambitions. In any event, there is no other plausible way to pursue the urgent objective of Iran’s nuclear disarmament. As the Administration’s recent progress in negotiations with North Korea has shown, it is hard to predict when an opaque, radical government might be ready to bargain seriously about its nuclear hole card. The only way to find out is to stay at the table. (At this point, the risks of an unsuccessful diplomatic initiative scarcely seem worth worrying about: the world’s capacity to absorb American foreign-policy failures is apparently elastic.)

By now, more than sixty years into the atomic age, there is little mystery about why or how countries sometimes agree to give up work on nuclear weapons. Moral vision is not a decisive factor, the evidence suggests; the leaders who have repudiated bomb programs span the considerable range between Muammar Qaddafi and Nelson Mandela. Nor does the nature of a country’s political system seem to matter much. According to Richard Rhodes’s recent history “Arsenals of Folly,” the countries that, since the bombing of Nagasaki, have forsworn, under diplomatic pressure, either bomb arsenals or advanced-weapons experiments include, in addition to Libya and South Africa, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Australia, Norway, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, Greece, Romania, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Switzerland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

Nuclear bombs are expensive, dangerous, and not very useful in war, but they do bring prestige and scare off unruly neighbors. While each diplomatic case is as individual as a fingerprint, the formula for achieving voluntary nuclear disarmament is well established: a country’s anxieties about security are negotiated into quietude; its aspirations to political legitimacy and economic integration are rewarded; and, if the government in question is nonetheless recalcitrant, political and economic pressure are brought to bear. This method is not infallible, but the global scorecard since 1945 is not entirely discouraging: about two dozen successes; three failures (India, Pakistan, Israel); five problem arsenals born in the Cold War and complicated by Great Power competition (the United States, Russia, China, France, and Britain); and two cases-in-progress, North Korea and Iran. In only one instance, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, has preëmptive military action, rather than diplomacy, figured significantly in an attempt to stop nuclear proliferation; as a test case of this approach, beginning with Israel’s raid on an Iraqi reactor in 1981 and culminating with the present war, it has proved less than persuasive. In an earlier era, the Cuban missile crisis was similarly uninspiring.

The case of Iran’s bomb program—controlled by a messianic government led by a Holocaust denier and operating within missile range of Israel and Europe—presents a distinct problem in atomic history. Iran’s possession of the notionally peaceful nuclear fuel cycle it seeks might well provide an unreliable regime with an unacceptable reserve-bomb capacity. These tactical and negotiating problems are daunting, but their prominence in the current discourse is a diversion from a deeper fallacy in the Bush Administration’s approach to the nuclear danger. The Administration, trapped by its ahistorical skepticism about diplomacy, manages nuclear negotiations as merely an extension of regional-power contests. The challenge posed by atomic bombs, however, has always been global and moral. The engagements that will matter most, after Bush and Cheney have at last departed, will be not only with Iran and North Korea but with the neglected goal of worldwide nuclear-arsenal reductions, negotiated in full embrace of the ideal of abolition.

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