On this 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, it seems appropriate to consider what we’re doing to prevent nuclear bombs going off in cities in the future. We already know that the president isn’t particularly concerned about what&…

In case this is a serious question, the French would have happily forgone all prentense of sanctions against Iran long ago, nuclear weapons program or no, had the US not insisted on making nonproliferation a condition. Hence the US hard line with respect to Iran extracted a concession from France: a slightly harder line on France’s part.

The outcome most proliferators are seeking is security.

This is the oldest canard in the book: that aggressive totalitarian nations bent on external projection of power are only building up their military capabilities out of necessity, to shore up their own “security” against external threats. (Hopefully, I needn’t identify the obvious historical examples by name.)

It seems obvious to me that the single most effective step that the North Korean government could take to preserve its own security would be to negotiate a full peace treaty with the South. In the process, they could extract just about anything they wanted—aid, guarantees of non-belligerency, full recognition, and probably even partial demilitarization. Instead, they continue to proclaim loudly that the democratic government of South Korea is a US puppet regime, and that the Korean peninsula must be “unified” under the Pyongyang government’s rule. I’m fascinated to hear how this posture is in fact intended to buttress Kim Jong-Il’s “security”.

Similarly, I’d love to hear how the millions of dollars Iran is spending to bankroll and arm Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Islamic revolutionary organizations around the world are contributing to Iranian “security”. Likewise for its open threats to bring about Israel’s nuclear annihilation. Even if the Iranian leadership believed your preposterous claim that Israel represents an “existential threat” to the Iranian regime, the obvious solution would be to make peace with Israel. It’s not as if Israel is awash in regional friends, after all. Nor has Israel been reluctant to make deals with Iran in the past—in the Shah’s era, for example, the Israelis were more than happy to trade arms for oil. Given this history, I’m again fascinated to hear how Iranian belligerency towards Israel is necessary for the former’s “security”.

The outcome most proliferators are seeking is security. Absent hard guarantees of security (which, given the nature of such regimes as Pakistan, Iran and NK it would be unfeasible to grant anyway), and given continuous existential threats (Pakistan vs India, NK vs SK and the US, Iran vs Israel and the US) there is no incentive for such countries not to pursue proliferation and every incentive to do so.

What did they do, threaten to send the French ambassador to Gitmo?

Or is there some other way in which a hard line ostensibly directed at Iran can “wring concessions” from the French? (Sacnctions are “concessions”? Who knew.) Now that’s a novel idea. Threaten Tonga with annihilation and get the French to give up the CAP.

If Russia is substituting US aid for its own spending on nuclear security, the US should reconsider the program. If it is true that

…the Russians have not allowed the United States to help inventory and protect their tactical nuclear weapons…

I actually think that the NK and Iranian nuclear programs are more defensive than offensive in nature (they want to deter attacks by other states), but that does not mean that they will be any more likely to surrender such programs than if they had aggressive designs. The Bush administration might be right that regime change is the only means to achieve non-nuclear states in some cases.

1) We don’t want nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of terrorists.

2) After the Soviet Union dissolved, control of its nuclear weapons and materials was greatly impaired. This made it easier for terrorists to gain access to these weapons.

3) The materials for, and nuclear weapons themselves, are not easy to come by under other circumstances. Making them from scratch is a major industrial undertaking, not something terrorists are capable of.

4) Therefore, controlling nuclear weapons and fissionable material is one of the easiest problems in arms control and the clear choke point for keeping them out of terrorist hands.

It would seem, then, that this is one of the best targets for preventive funding. But, from the fall of the Soviet Union, the (largely Republican) faction in Congress that believes “We beat them in the Cold War, let them take care of themselves” has won out. You might think that they would see this as an opportunity to disarm an enemy for a pittance (a few tens of billions versus the several trillions it took to build the weapons), but their insistence on vengeance and retribution have overcome any self-interest in preventing terrorism.

Even if the Russians siphoned off an equal amount in graft, it would still be a bargain. Even if they put it into improving their weapons, many of which age into dangerous conditions and weren’t so safe to begin with.

No, their logic led them not to repeat a multi-decade Western pattern of capitulating abjectly to Iran and North Korea, in the vain, oft-crushed hope that somehow those regimes would depart from their long, rich historical records of rewarding such capitulation with even greater militancy and expedited nuclear development.

In fact, the Bush administration’s strategy with regard to Iranian and North Korean nukes has been quite sensible. In the case of North Korea, the focus of its efforts has been on getting all of North Korea’s neighbors to agree to put pressure on the regime in concert, to get it to dismantle, or at least curtail, its nuclear program. Unfortunately, China and South Korea have been uncooperative, and without their help, any attempt to wrest concessions from Pyongyang was bound to fail. Under the circumstances, then, it made no sense for the US to make any pointless deals that the North Koreans were sure to flout, just as they had flouted every previous one.

The American strategy regarding Iran, on the other hand, has been somewhat more successful, since it has gotten the Europeans to agree to consider the possibility of sanctions in the absence of serious concessions from Teheran. (Does anybody believe that anything softer than the Bush administration’s hard line would have wrung that concession out of, say, the French?) If the Europeans stay true to their word—-no guarantees there—-there might just be enough leverage available to prod the Iranians into some genuine, verifiable compromises.

Note that both of these strategic agendas included considerable multilateralism and diplomacy—but diplomacy with concrete goals and sticks as well as carrots. To TNR’s Scoblic, on the other hand, “diplomacy” obviously means unilateral concessions, in the romantic hope of receiving charitable treatment in return. (His touching concern for the sensitive feelings of the North Koreans—whom the Bush administration apparently “routinely went out of its way to insult”—and fury at the Americans’ stubborn intransigence in negotiations with Pyongyang are particularly laughable. Ditto for his hailing of the 1994 “agreed framework as “a superb example of coercive diplomacy”—which it was, except for the fact that the North Koreans happily took the loot offered them while clandestinely proceeding with the nuclear program they’d promised to abandon. If the 1994 deal was such a success, why are North Korean nuclear weapons such a huge problem today?)

Anyone with the slightest familiarity with US-North Korean or US-Iranian relations knows full well that the kind of conciliatory gestures Scoblic advocates would have accomplished absolutely nothing except the erosion of America’s bargaining positions elsewhere in the world. Scoblic’s fantasy of a conciliatory stance towards Iran and North Korea producing better results than the Bush administration’s hardline policies is just that—-a fantasy with a long and bitter history of utter and complete failure.

Look at all the US wars and interventions since 1950. Arguably most were avoidable and achieved little apart from keeping the electorate focussed on short term “threats”. It could well be argued that the loss in Vietnam was a mistake – it was a small country apparently unable to possibly defeat the US. That’s certainly what General Westmoreland thought, according to his recent obituary in the Guardian. So it was a case of the usual policy going belly up.

Looked at this way, Iraq is just a continuation of normal US policy. And the real threats (as opposed to the invented ones) will have to get a lot more serious before that policy changes. It is just too useful to deliver a series of “victories” to keep the electorate reassured that they have been given vengeance and are still powerful and able to deflect any future attacks.

Decades ago I heard this kind of behaviour described as: kicking the cat to teach the dog a lesson. I’ve often wondered where that expression originated. Anybody know?

At some point the US does have to ask the Russians to come to the party.