The Schell article was interesting, I thought. Proliferation is a very thorny issue. The right wants to stop it by freezing the nuclear status quo and forcefully eliminating the arsenals, or regimes, of proliferators it doesn't like. Liberals also want to freeze the status quo, but favor doing so through arms control treaties and the like. On either side of these two groups are two other groups, neither of which believes that the nuclear status quo (a few countries with arsenals, the rest without) is preservable. Some realists don't mind the idea of lots of countries proliferating, believing that deterrence will keep things under control as it did during the Cold War. Abolitionists (like Schell) think that the answer is for everybody to get rid of nukes, including us.
Personally, I agree with the realists and abolitionists intellectually that it is difficult and probably impossible to keep the nuclear status quo frozen forever. But I don't like either of their alternative futures. So I think this whole issue is really, really important, that we'll be grappling with it for a long, long time, and that we don't yet really have an appropriate conceptual or policy framework for handling it. There are two pieces relevant to this subject in the new issue of FA--an article on how to handle North Korea, and one criticizing the Bush administration's nuclear policies (from a mild Schell-type position). Schell himself did a nice critique of the liberal arms control position in FA a couple of years ago, for those who might be interested...
tb@boom.com |
