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December 26, 2004

New York Times has a must-read article on Pakistan, proliferation and the doings of A. Q. Khan, the man who sold Libya--and maybe Iran and North Korea--the Bomb. Khan, wanted for questioning by both the U.S. and the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and no outside investigators have been allowed to speak with him. Among Khan's proliferation activities: Selling Libya centrifuges that could have been used to create fissile material--enough centrifuges that the Khadafy regime could have built ten nuclear bombs a year. As a "deal-sweetener," Khan threw in, gratis, a set of plans for the nuclear weapons.

I've written before that states are the nexus of nuclear proliferation. This is implicitly a major part of the Bush Doctrine, if that doctrine is still in force: Iraq, if it had been building nuclear weapons, might have given them to terrorists or--more likely--become a target for nuclear theft or subterfuge. But this new proliferation isn't like the old kind, where functioning governments would give nuclear secrets to each other (as happened when the French and Israelis collaborated, off and on, on their nuclear projects, or when the British gave the Americans their research on nuclear explosions early in the Second World War). Instead, this proliferation uses state organs, but is occasionally at odds with the aims of the host state, and is not subject to the same sort of scrutiny.

The analogy that best seems to describe this new proliferation is of a virus. Proliferators are not themselves states, but they invade state bureaucracies and laboratories and then spread the knowledge and materiel from one host to the next. And like a virus, the remedies that worked against one form of proliferation won't alwasy work against another: The Times piece seems to make clear that the Bush administration isn't just being stubborn when it says that the IAEA has major problems (although I think that the balance of opinion among experts is that the campaign to oust IAEA chief Baradei is vengeance, nothing more). On the other hand, the reporters also recount how the CIA twice prevented Danish authorities from arresting Khan.

If the proliferation virus becomes an epidemic, then we will be in a very difficult place. Deterrence requires a handful, or at best two, rational actors to work. It is arguable that such a situation never existed even during the Cold War; the Soviets, for instance, didn't believe in MAD, and neither did many Reagan Republicans. But it becomes less and less likely that MAD or a similar Mexican standoff can maintain itself as a stable equilibrium as more countries develop nuclear weapons--especially because those countries who will get nukes from this new wave of proliferation will be precisely those who lack the command-and-control sophistication that allowed the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and the other nuclear great powers to avoid most accidents. (Other factors come into play, too, like the geographical proximity of such potential nuclear powers as Taiwan and North Korea to their likely adversaries.)

In short, this is a real problem, not just a cause for outrage. (And against whom should the outrage be directed, anyway?) As we consider Social Security and the mores of "Merry Christmas," let's not forget that the nuclear genie is only partway back in the bottle, and a lot of hands are grasping for the lamp.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at December 26, 2004 11:03 PM

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