India Explodes A Nuke--And Our Illusions

The tremors from India's nuclear explosions had barely subsided before the finger-pointing in Washington began. Where was the CIA? Don't our spooks know anything?

Good questions, but a distraction from the main point: Why are the President and his State Department reduced to head-shaking stupefaction because a rising country of a billion people wants entry into the nuclear club? If India's blast is evidence of an American failure--a dubious proposition--it is a failure not of intelligence but of imagination.

For five years this Administration has been monomaniacally focused on producing, strengthening and expanding treaty after treaty to cure the ills of...