Living Under the Cloud

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While the declared nuclear powers have wobbled in their commitment to get rid of their arsenals, the rise of a global black market in nuclear expertise and materials has made the Bomb more attainable for everyone else. Despite the bust in 2004 of A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who transferred nuclear technology and designs to clients like Libya, Iran and North Korea, intelligence officials around the world believe much of his network is still in business. (Today Khan lives under house arrest in Pakistan, but the U.S. has yet to receive Islamabad's permission to question him.) Meanwhile, Nunn maintains that the U.S. has underfunded the program that he and Senator Richard Lugar established in 1991 to help Russia secure its inventory of tactical nuclear weapons, which many fear has not been under close control since the demise of the Soviet Union. "These are weapons that could be transported by one person, put in the back of a truck and blow up a large part of a city," Nunn said recently. He continued, "We don't know how many weapons the Russians have or where they're located. We hope they do, but we're not confident of that."

The closer upstarts get to going nuclear, the more tempting it may be for established powers to restart the arms race. The Bush Administration is determined not just to modernize its aging arsenal but also to develop a new type of bomb, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator--known as the "bunker buster"--which would be used to blast targets buried deep underground. Both North Korea and Iran are believed to have buried clandestine nuclear facilities. But John Deutch, Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration, argues that by talking of a new type of bomb, the Administration is undercutting its own efforts to persuade others to stay out of the nuclear game. Nunn makes the point more colorfully. Other countries, he says, "have a hard time taking instructions from a chain smoker to quit smoking and to help us keep others from starting to smoke."

The temptation to light up is always there. Having a Bomb gives one bragging rights. Pakistan, for example, is intensely proud of its nuclear arsenal: displayed in every large city is a fiber-glass model of the Chagi Hills, where the 1998 tests took place. Every Pakistani remembers seeing TV films of the hills' shuddering at the jolt from underground, like a camel shaking off a layer of dust. Russia, which has pledged to update its nuclear arsenal, knows that its bombs are what maintain its pretensions to be a great power. Neither Britain nor France will give up its nuclear weapons, at least partly because if either did, it would leave the other as the sole nuclear state in Western Europe.

Could Hiroshima happen again? For 60 years the sense of power that goes with having a nuclear capability has been tempered by another emotion: naked fear of the horror that nuclear weapons can cause. From John Hersey's heartbreaking journalism for the New Yorker in 1946, through films, books and documentaries, the hell that was Hiroshima has helped persuade us to stay our hand.