PARIS. — One easily understands the fear that ex-Soviet nuclear expertise is going to find new sponsorship abroad, and that Soviet nuclear weapons will appear on the black market. However, nuclear proliferation is a problem with no solution. It's too late now to stop it.
By licit means or illicit, there are going to be more nations with nuclear weapons. Those of us who already live in well-armed states will have to make the best of it.
Obviously all that can be done should be done to destroy or secure Soviet weapons and provide harmless employment to the scientists and engineers of the new Commonwealth of Independent States. All that this can accomplish, however, is to delay the inevitable -- which of course is worth doing.
The debate on proliferation too often overlooks its real cause, which is fear.
The U.S.-Soviet arms race was driven by each side's fear of the other. Israel has built its nuclear force because it fears eventually finding itself alone, vulnerable to the attack of Arab nations vastly more populous. The Arab drive for nuclear status is motivated by fear of Israel.
This fear is not simply that the enemy might make a nuclear attack on you. The essential appeal of nuclear weapons -- deeply pernicious in its consequences -- is that they deter conventional attack. That was their primary attraction to the United States from the 1940s onward.
No one in Washington in the early years of the Cold War believed that the Soviet Union was capable of mounting a nuclear strike on the American mainland. U.S. nuclear weapons were deployed as a response to the threat of a Soviet land attack in Europe that would involve what was feared would be overwhelming numbers. To the very end of the Cold War, NATO kept open the threat of nuclear first-use to stop a Soviet conventional attack.
The threat works even if your nuclear force is a feeble one. You have introduced a crucial uncertainty into your enemy's calculations. A finite risk now exists that your nuclear counterblow will somehow get through to one of his cities.
Saddam Hussein has not wanted nuclear rockets for a first-strike on Israel -- which would, with the certainty of night following day, have resulted in a doomsday blow upon Iraq. He has wanted nuclear weapons to deter an Israeli (or Iranian, or for that matter, American) conventional attack upon Iraq in some new war. If he had had such weapons last year, would Operation Desert Storm have taken place -- or taken place in the way in which it did?
