Krauthammer's Misplaced Proliferation Pessimism

Charles Krauthammer is one nervous guy:

The "international community" is prepared to do nothing of consequence to halt nuclear proliferation. No one wants to admit that. Nor does anyone want to contemplate the prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of one, two, many rogue states.

We must. The day is coming, and quickly. We must face reality and begin thinking how we live with the unthinkable.

Discussing just two states going nuclear - North Korea and Iran - Krauthammer boldly declares:

The era of nonproliferation is over. During the first half-century of the nuclear age, safety lay in restricting the weaponry to major powers and keeping it out of the hands of rogue states. This strategy was inevitably going to break down. The inevitable has arrived.

Gee, with all of that concern, it's a wonder this guy sleeps at night.

Of course, one of the larger concerns surrounding the prospect of North Korea's failure to disarm and the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran is that they could inspire balancing, follow-on nuclear programs elsewhere in their immediate regions. But it's not inevitable that this will happen. Nor is it inevitable, for that matter, that North Korea won't see its disarmament obligations through to the very end, or that Iran is racing toward nuclear weapons acquisition and there is nothing capable of preventing this outcome. Such fatalism is misguided, to say the least, and would lead to very poor policy if taken seriously.

Someone should remind the good doctor of this, as well as the situation in the early days of the nuclear age. There was a point when there were many, many more ambiguous nuclear programs than there are today, and many more states with nuclear weapons aspirations. Not all of this materialized to validate JFK's fears of a world of perhaps 20 nuclear weapon states. Instead, the result has been a world in 2008 where there are only eight states armed with nuclear weapons and one, in Pyongyang, that has weapons that are of little use.

The reason? Anti-nuclear political factions in many countries (in Sweden, of all countries, for instance) won the debate, steering their nation's course away from the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Other countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan, were pressured by external actors to halt weapons programs and to commit to verifiable non-nuclear status. A great many other simply felt that the costs of going nuclear vastly outweighed any would-be benefits (or never wanted the weapons to begin with), creating in the process a powerful international norm that persists today and is upheld by the broader nonproliferation regime and embodied in the policies of a multitude of countries. On what basis are we to believe, then, that these and many other constraints (both externally and self-imposed) won't be successful in limiting the further spread of nuclear weapons?

That is not to say there aren't potent concerns for the future of antiproliferation efforts; there are. But to translate this into such sweeping pessimism, going so far as to say "the era of nonproliferation is over," is intellectually lazy and politically dangerous, particularly if it means adopting purely defensive responses as opposed to vigorous preventive diplomacy designed to blunt such outcomes in the first place.