Nuclear Weapons for All? The Risks of a New Scramble for the Bomb

And there are successes. Decades ago, a smattering of countries started but then abandoned weapons research efforts. They include such states as Switzerland, Sweden, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, and Argentina. Apartheid-era South Africa actually built bombs before dismantling them. Saddam Hussein's Iraq had run an ambitious nuclear weapons research effort before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. And, more recently, a foreign policy triumph during the administration of George W. Bush was the verified, negotiated elimination of Libya's nuclear weapons program. Much of its atomic equipment and materials was shipped from North Africa to U.S. facilities at Oak Ridge, Tenn.

The Bush administration has also been able to focus international attention on preventing proliferation at the United Nations and through efforts to interdict suspect shipments of nuclear gear through its Proliferation Security Initiative. At the same time, the bipartisan Nunn-Lugar program dating from the early 1990s has funded efforts to secure nuclear materials and facilities and employ weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union.

And yet more than 17 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world's nuclear weapons still total more than 25,000—some 95 percent of them in Russia and the United States. More than 40 countries hold a portion of the nearly 3,000 tons of fissile material. "This nuclear legacy is the result not only of the Cold War," write Ivo Daalder and Jan Lodal, two nuclear policy thinkers and former U.S. officials, in a recent Foreign Affairs article. They also blame U.S. administrations with "nuclear policies and thinking [that] have remained essentially unchanged."

What are changing, however, are the nuclear threats. The trend lines, for the most part, look bad, and the list of challenges starts with North Korea and Iran.

Despite plenty of tough U.S. rhetoric and hopes for regime change, North Korea during the Bush years has expanded its estimated nuclear stash from one or two bombs' worth of plutonium to perhaps eight. The secretive, hard-line communist government has broken into the world's de facto nuclear club, having conducted one underground test blast in 2006 and pulled out of the NPT. A six-nation negotiating process produced a deal for eventual denuclearization, and the North has stopped producing plutonium. But Pyongyang has refused to deal with questions about a possible, parallel uranium enrichment program and seems intent on dragging out the talks and reaping more economic and political gains. More than six years after the nuclear dispute erupted, there is no confidence that North Korea is even willing to shed its nuclear materials, in the end. The problem is landing squarely in Obama's lap.

Bush administration officials had hoped that the U.S.-led war on Saddam's Iraq would impress the likes of North Korea and Iran to quickly negotiate away their nuclear programs. If anything, the effect may have been closer to the opposite—stiffening their resolve to take the nuclear road in order to block any U.S. bid to force regime change.

Iran over recent years has been building up a uranium-enrichment operation that will soon be running 4,000 centrifuges, with tens of thousands more planned. A separate plutonium program is also underway. Iran remains defiant, undeterred by three United Nations Security Council sanctions resolutions. It has also limited its cooperation with the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, which is supposed to monitor the Iranian program. Bush for a while resisted joining European-led diplomacy with Iran, then relented, though with minimal direct contact with Iranian officials. Diplomatic efforts are now stalled, as Iran seems to be sitting tight, waiting for an expected initiative from Obama.