Living Under the Cloud

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Of course, making a nuclear bomb is difficult and expensive. The key ingredient for a bomb builder is the fissile material--either highly enriched uranium or plutonium--which is difficult to produce secretly. Nuclear-radiation leaks, even in minute quantities, can be detected. But making a nuclear bomb isn't impossible. Under the apartheid regime--at a time when it was subject to international trade sanctions--South Africa managed to build six of them. (Until the breakup of the Soviet Union, South Africa was the only nation to willingly and verifiably give up its entire nuclear arsenal.) Leaving aside North Korea's claims that it possesses the Bomb, there are already seven declared nuclear powers--the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, China, India and Pakistan--with Israel an undeclared member of the club. But there are plenty of other nations rich and clever enough to build a bomb if they really wanted to.

The world has taken some steps to curtail the spread of nukes. Under a treaty signed three years ago, the U.S. and Russia agreed to shrink their stockpiles; for the U.S., that has meant trimming the number of deployed warheads from the current 5,000 to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012. At the same time, the Bush Administration has decided, unilaterally, to cut the total nuclear arsenal from about 10,000 warheads to 6,000 over the same period. In the armed forces, nuclear expertise is no longer a path to the top. "No one's promoting their career anymore by pushing nuclear weapons," says Henry Sokolski, who served as a top Pentagon official on proliferation issues in George H.W. Bush's Administration. Since 2003 the Administration, with those of 10 other nations, has pursued the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which is trying to halt the spread of nuclear weapons through more robust interdiction. U.S. officials say the PSI has curbed Iran's and North Korea's nuclear efforts and helped persuade Libya to give up its quest for weapons of mass destruction.

But none of that has translated into a serious effort to abolish nuclear weapons entirely. In the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) signed in 1968, the nuclear powers--including the U.S.--promised to "pursue negotiations in good faith" leading to a treaty on "general and complete disarmament." None of the nuclear signatories to the NPT meant what they said, and in only one of them--Britain--has there ever been a politically significant mass movement in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament. (The young Tony Blair was once a supporter of it.)