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Is Nuclear Nonproliferation in the U.S. Interest?
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14137 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1988 |
2,280 Words |
| Author
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Jed C. Snyder
Jed C. Snyder is a senior research fellow at the Washington
office of the National Strategy Information Center, where he
is directing a project on "New Approaches to Transatlantic
Security." He served in the State Department during the first
Reagan administration, and from 1984 to 1987 was deputy
director of national security studies at the Hudson Institute.
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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
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