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We’d all be better off if Richard Betts wrote more often about proliferation. But he seems intent on pursuing high-quality, book-length projects on a wide range of topics, including surprise attack, war & peace, intelligence, and the Cold War.

My favorite Richard Betts article on proliferation appeared in Foreign Policy (Spring 1977) on paranoids, pygmies and pariahs, which he updated in a 1993 issue of Security Studies. Nations seek the Bomb, according to Richard, for two essential reasons: fear or ambition, or if you prefer, security or status.

Here’s a sampler:

Trying to coerce or buy off a power-happy state might well backfire; the desire for prestige is the desire not to be in a position of either victim or supplicant… Security-motivated candidates are the ones we should spend the most time worrying about. But here the problem is less what we can do than what we want to do.

There are no simple solutions that are feasible, no feasible solutions that are simple, and no solutions at all that are applicable across the board… There is no free lunch in nonproliferation policy; every effective measure has economic, political, or moral price tags.

Proliferation does not have a life of its own; it is a political problem as much as a technical one. Technological mystery, coinciding with international bipolarity, simply gave the United States a long period of grace in which it could afford to pay less attention to the political dimension.

With the disappearance of “technological mystery” and bipolarity, is there any wonder why new concerns about proliferation have arisen?

In a subsequent piece on proliferation (in Vic Utgoff, The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, 2000), Richard labels proliferation optimists like Kenneth Waltz as “utopian realists” who argue that,

… nuclear weapons can produce the permanent peace that liberals have always believed in and realists have always said is impossible… Any theory that predicts, say, 90 percent of outcomes on some important matter is an amazingly good theory. The Waltz argument may be in that category… [but] one exception to the rule may be too many… The United States should act as if the utopian realists are wrong, but hope that they are right.

As for U.S. nonproliferation policy, Richard argues that,

For most of the nuclear era the priority that the United States placed on nonproliferation was high in principle but low in practice. Washington was always willing to promote nonproliferation when it did not have to short-change some other objective, but seldom did it prove willing to sacrifice other interests for the cause.

Comment

Greetings from Pakistan where, when it comes to nuclear strategy, people say little but act expeditiously. In India, on the other hand, people write much and act slowly.

India now has a coterie of first-rate thinkers on nuclear issues besides K. Subrahmanyam, including Raja Mohan, Rear Adm. (ret.) Raja Menon, Rajesh Basrur, Gurmeet Kanwal, and Bharat Karnad (who had a class with Bernard Brodie but thinks more like Herman Kahn).

In my view, one of the best and most overlooked Indian strategic analysts is Vice Adm. (ret.) Verghese Koithara. His book, Crafting Peace in Kashmir, Through a Realist Lens (2004), has a chapter on “Nuclear Danger” that is well worth reading. Here’s a sampler:

“Till it acquired nuclear weapons, Pakistan had been protecting its highly vulnerable nuclear facilities in Kahuta and elsewhere through conventional deterrence, not defence. Its high card had been the vulnerability of a big concentration of Indian nuclear assets, close to the economically central city of Mumbai, to Pakistan F-16s coming over the sea.”

“The requirement to keep warheads and delivery systems (and perhaps even the fissile and non-fissile sections of the warhead) separate for reasons of security and survival could add to design and maintenance problems relating to safety. The relatively small number (six at best) of explosive tests carried out by each country, and that too in a time-constrained manner, raises worries about design safety, as well.”

“As far as continuous real-time monitoring of the opponent’s nuclear delivery systems is concerned, both sides are effectively blind.”

“Pakistan’s strategy is aimed at deterring a conventional threat from India, while India’s is aimed at deterring a nuclear one from Pakistan. Since a conventional confrontation is easier to develop and must almost invariably precede a nuclear one, Pakistan’s deterrence has to function much more actively than India’s.”

“As the conventional military balance continues to shift in India’s favor, Pakistan’s reliance on its nuclear capability will increase and so will its effort to lower the nuclear threshold. Thus Pakistan’s strategy is likely to emphasize not just ‘first use’ but ‘early first use’ in the coming years.”

“Pakistan’s effort would be to maximize nuclear uncertainty in times of crisis while India’s would be to minimize it… Pakistan would like to establish that nuclear risk-taking and its consequences in South Asia resemble Russian roulette with the outcome relying on chance, while India would want to prove that it would resemble a game of chess with the outcome determined by rational logic and relative superiority.”

Verghese writes that further Indian nuclear testing of thermonuclear weapons would depend on confidence levels from prior tests. Indian strategic analysts are divided on whether such testing is necessary. Raja Mohan is satisfied with boosted fission-type yields; Bharat Karnad is not.

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After succeeding spectacularly by landing astronauts on the lunar surface and welcoming them home, what do you do for an encore? This question has vexed Washington ever since 1969. Subsequent national choices in the form of the space shuttle and the international space station absorbed large sums and turned out to be confining – not exactly what Americans expect or deserve from their space ventures. Next comes the long wait, until China produces similar headlines to the ones on yellowing newspapers that I treasure in my attic.

Momentum is to geopolitics as possession is to the law. A rare commodity for the United States at present, in space as on terra firma. It’s hard to pursue bold new visions when cleaning up big messes from the previous ones.

I’m eagerly anticipating John Logsdon’s book on JFK’s space policies. Here, for old times’ sake, are a few key passages from President Kennedy’s famous man on the moon speech before Congress, May 25, 1961:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish… In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the Moon—if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there….

Let it be clear—and this is a judgment which the Members of the Congress must finally make—let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action—a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs… If we are to go only half way, of reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all.

One speech does not a space policy make. Kennedy’s encore (view it here), at Rice University on September 12, 1962, was perfectly pitched):

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it—we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people… But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? …

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win… “

Fast forward to NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr., as reported by Space News, January 11, 2010:

We cannot do big things very much any more.

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Moritz Bleibtreu and Martina Gedeck as Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in the 2009 film, The Baader Meinhof Complex.

Jeffrey’s posts and videos of the walkabout at the NATO nuclear weapon storage site in Belgium reminded me of a story with a much sharper edge that I retold in Better Safe than Sorry. ACW readers can file this one, along with last week’s account of the U.S. Navy’s encounter with the Foxtrot-class B-59 during the Cuban missile crisis, in the folder labeled “how-did-we-manage-(so-far)-to-avoid-an-epically-bad-headline?”

Politics were stretched to the breaking point in the late sixties and 1970s, when the culture wars took root in the United States, the Cultural Revolution crippled China, and disaffected middle class youth in West Germany gave terrorism a new face. They were called the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

In January 1977, gang members stormed a nuclear weapon storage facility in Giessen, West Germany. They planned to penetrate the base’s storage vaults by creating a diversion, blowing up a fuel tank outside the base perimeter. But they misread the fuel tank gauge, believing the tank to be almost full, when it was almost empty. Their shaped charge penetrated the tank above the fuel line, with no resulting special effects. Gang members then managed to penetrate the base perimeter, but after an exchange of gunfire, they were stopped short of the nuclear weapons storage area.

The base commander, then an Army Captain, told me this story. He later went on to become the Director of ACDA and helped jump start efforts to lock down dangerous weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union – Bill Burns.

Comment [6]

The Soviet Navy viewed nuclear-tipped torpedoes as aircraft carrier killers. A Soviet Foxtrot class diesel submarine, B-59, had this ace-in-the-hole when it was being depth-charged to the surface by the U.S. Navy during the Cuban missile crisis. Did Adm. George Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations (and the Navy’s version of Gen. Curtis LeMay) suspect that he was dealing with nuclear-armed submarines when his ships were aggressively enforcing the quarantine of Cuba? Wonks: Help me out here. There was much the U.S. intelligence community did not know during this crisis, including the presence of nuclear weapons in Cuba when the Kennedy administration was contemplating military options to take out missile sites. And no American official could possibly have known at that time that three officers on board the B-59 were conducting the most important vote in the history of the Nuclear Age, on whether to fire their nuclear-tipped torpedo or alternatively, so to speak, to go up with the ship.

We learned much later, after the Cold War was over, when Americans and Russians began to swap stories, that the Captain, Second Captain, and Deputy Political Officer on board the B-59 made a private compact over the possible use of their nuclear-tipped torpedo during the Cuban missile crisis. They were, of course, supposed to check back with Moscow before doing so, but it was hard for a diesel sub to call home while under attack. (For more on how the best laid plans for nuclear deterrence can go awry, Wonks-in-training can check out Scott Sagan’s The Limits of Safety.)

And so, on October 27, 1962, the same day that a U-2 was shot down over Cuba, the three officers voted. They promised each other that, in extremis, if they were unable to work through authorized channels, they would make their own decision about using their nuclear weapon. If all three voted in favor, they would do so. If the vote wasn’t unanimous, they would hold their fire. Two of the three officers voted to fire their torpedo. The third, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkipov, voted nay.

Arkipov should have been Time magazine’s Man of the Year, but Time’s editors, like the rest of us, were unaware of his remarkable contribution to Western civilization. Time voted for Pope John XXIII, instead. I’ve never seen a picture of Arkipov – maybe Jeffrey can find one for this post. He’s the unsung hero of the Cuban missile crisis.

Oral histories are only as reliable as the memories of story tellers. So if ACW readers have reason to believe these memories are deficient, please hold forth.

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A cunning rock ‘n roll showman, David Lee Roth, once opined that, “The key to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Vice President Richard M. Nixon defended himself when he was struggling to stay on the ticket with Ike by calling attention to his family’s pet dog and his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat.” Those were the days when it was an article of faith for Republicans to equate security with solvency — sometimes unwisely. To maintain a balanced budget, Ike short-changed conventional forces and relied heavily on nuclear weapons for national security.

Times change. I remember wandering around D.C. during President Reagan’s inauguration week. My fellow citizens decided they had had enough of the Carter administration’s austerity and tentativeness. I felt stunned, not just by the loss of a job, but by the party goers’ ostentatious display of wealth. Washington was awash in mink coats and stretch limos. No apologies needed. Now the mink coats rarely come out of the closet, but the stretch limos have gotten longer. Both parties now thrive on the ostentatious display of wealth from their supporters while the country seeks deeper in debt.

My sense is that the Reagan years were a cultural as well as political watershed. One big shift, of course, related to the traditional Republican equation of solvency and security. The progressive tax code was bent to allow tax cuts for high-end incomes. Not surprisingly, commensurate cuts in government spending did not accompany losses in revenue. The Clinton administration accepted the thankless job of re-balancing the budget through revenue increases. A budget surplus resulted, and Democrats were then hammered as the Party of Taxation.

An old professor of mine, Robert W. Tucker, wrote:

The principal Reagan legacy in foreign policy may well be just this: that the nation’s 40th president transformed what had been a disposition not to pay for the American position in the world into something close to a fixed resolve not to do so.

The cultural aspects of the Reagan shift harkened back to the 1920s. A newspaperman who covered the Harding administration, Samuel Popkins Adams, wrote in Incredible Era, The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding, that “the country wanted an anti.” Harding was elected because he was so unlike his austere, demanding predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. Harding arrived in Washington “with little more knowledge than the average man in the street of the issues on which the world’s future was to hang… He was an actor, cheerfully responsive to the direction of the playwrights.”

Reagan was, of course, a far more accomplished actor and politician than Harding. He surprised both his critics and supporters by reducing nuclear dangers in heroic and historic ways. Reagan flummoxed wonks by demonstrating that a grasp of detail mattered far less than having sound instincts. Garry Wills, in Reagan’s America, Innocents at Home, explained Reagan’s political success this way: “Because he acts himself, we know he is authentic.” Reagan was, in Wills’ view,

… the great American synecdoche… He is just as simple and just as mysterious, as our collective dreams and memories… He is the perfect carrier: the ancient messages travel through him without friction. No wonder he shows little wear and tear… Reagan does not argue for American values: he embodies them… We make the connections. It is our movie.

When politics becomes indistinct from stagecraft, masters of fiction can be our keenest observers. Here’s E.L. Doctorow on Reagan (in “The State of Mind of the Union,” The Nation, March 1986):

The new attitude [of the 1980s] borrows something of the accelerated sense of life in the 1920s, when precocity and a daring irrelevance caught up young people as the stock market had their fathers. But there is something unrecognizable here: it is not a spirit of selling out because it lacks that moral reference entirely; it is a kind of mutancy, I think, a structural flaw of the mind that suggests evolution in a social context.

The “evolution in a social context” of American politics continues apace. The George W. Bush administration fought two wars with tax cuts. It’s hard to be secure when you are insolvent. And now my fellow Americans have elected another “anti.” Think of this: Barack Obama could never have been elected President without George W. Bush.

Comment [12]

George Bunn (above, sailing and with son Matt) is one of the founding fathers of nuclear arms control. He was present at the creation of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and served for eight years as ACDA’s first General Counsel. George participated in the negotiation of the Limited Test Ban and Nonproliferation treaties. Fortunately, he took notes during his years of public service, which is evident in Arms Control by Committee, Managing Negotiations with the Russians (1992). George wrote this book to add to the negotiating history of key accords and to suggest lessons learned, using the case study method.

In his chapter on the test ban, George reveals that ACDA Director William Foster exceeded his negotiating instructions trying to bridge differences on the number of on-site inspections required for a comprehensive treaty. The Politburo finally budged from zero to three OSIs per year; the Kennedy administration wanted seven inspections, but was prepared to fall back to six. Before throwing in the towel, George relates that Foster held up five fingers to his Soviet counterpart, who scowled. A CTBT wasn’t in the cards in 1962-3 for this and other reasons.

There is still along way to go before the CTBT enters into force, but as George wrote in The Status of Norms Against Nuclear Testing (The Nonproliferation Review, 1999), “there are norms operating against nuclear testing even though the CTBT has not been ratified.” Norm building is a poorly analyzed, alchemical process in which political activism, risk-taking leadership, resolute negotiators, and “mere words” combine to eventually gain the status of customary and then international law. All of the key bulwarks of arms control — the tradition of non-battlefield use of nuclear weapons, the global nonproliferation regime, and constraints on nuclear testing – began as outlandish notions that have become norms. Norms can be broken, of course. So, too, can traffic laws. But we would be much less safe without them.

Without rules, there are no rule breakers. Norms, George wrote, “are international prescriptions for state conduct. They are principles, standards or rules.” Or as Abe and Antonia Chayes put it, “They are prescriptions for action in situations of choice, carrying a sense of obligation, a sense that ought to be followed.” The states of greatest proliferation concern are outliers, rejecting a widely shared sense of obligation. Norms clarify their outlier status, as well as the steps required for their rehabilitation.

Norm building was George Bunn’s life work. His handiwork now constrains political choices, and helps promote personal, national, and international security.

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Ronald Reagan remains a mystery. During his first term, he was vilified by the Left. During his second term, when he sided with the deal makers around him and when hard liners began to take their leave, Reagan was slammed from the Right. An accomplished biographer, Edmund Morris, was given extraordinary access to write an account of the man and his presidency. He was so unable to gain a fix on his subject that his botched result, Dutch, was partly fictionalized.

Historians will have a difficult time to settle their accounts of the Reagan presidency. His record of accomplishment on nuclear issues should speak for itself, but what role the President played in this drama is hard to pin down. The first chapter of this history, written primarily by U.S. journalists, wasn’t kind to Reagan, picturing him as woefully deficient on substance and easily manipulated by those around him. These accounts gave most of the credit for the breakthroughs reached during his presidency to Mikhail Gorbachev and to George Shultz and Paul Nitze. A second wave of accounts, relying more on declassified documents and Reagan’s diary, picture the President in command of the momentous developments that occurred on his watch. Perhaps a third wave of historical accounts will depict Reagan somewhere in between.

For those with short memories, here’s a sampler of some of the flak President Reagan took:

[Reagan is] a man singularly endowed with an ability to hold contradictory views without discomfort.

— Reagan’s ACDA Director Kenneth Adelman

Formidable will, based on a mediocre understanding of the facts. As often in politics, ignorance sustains.

— Jacques Attali

Ronald Reagan, who taught us to distrust summitry, to disbelieve in treaties, to reflect always on the duplicity of our communist enemy, is investing his historic reputation and our security in arms control treaties co-signed by communists. The Great Communicator who preached Peace through Strength today preaches peace through parchment.

— Pat Buchanan

[He] let his name and his office be traded about by subordinates in an endless civil war within the executive branch.”

— McGeorge Bundy

To me, the White House was as mysterious as a ghost ship; you heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck. But which of the crew had the helm?

— Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig

What’s going on right now is that the crazier analysts have risen to higher positions than is normally the case. They are able to carry their ideas further and higher because the people at the top are simply less well-informed than is normally the case.”

— Herbert York

What do you do when your president ignores all the relevant facts and wanders in circles?

— Reagan’s OMB Director David Stockman

[Reagan is] a President who confused nostrums with policies and dreams with strategy.

— Strobe Talbott

In relations with the Russians, the Reagan administration most resembles March: in like a lion, out like a lamb.

— Reagan’s ACDA Director Kenneth Adelman

Many other quotes could be added to this list. Feel free to add – especially one by President Reagan’s former speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, which I vaguely recall but can’t find in my shoe boxes.

Comment [26]

The 1971 war between India and Pakistan ended in a decisive victory for India and the vivisection of Pakistan. Pakistan’s nuclear weapon program began shortly thereafter, when President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto gathered the best and the brightest of his country’s nuclear establishment at Multan on January 24, 1972.

The 1971 war may also have given a boost to the Indian nuclear weapon program. This seems counterintuitive, given New Delhi’s huge victory, but here’s the argument: President Richard Nixon and national security adviser Henry Kissinger “tilted” toward Pakistan during this war. To dissuade Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi from overrunning West Pakistan after routing the Pakistan Army in the East, they ordered the deployment of the U.S.S. Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal. It is unlikely that Prime Minister Gandhi had such intentions. But by conveying a thinly veiled nuclear threat in the form of the Enterprise – the very same carrier that came to India’s aid during its disastrous war with China nine years earlier – Washington may have given impetus to a second nuclear weapon program.

Here’s what K. Subrahmanyam, India’s premier strategic analyst, concluded from the Nixon administration’s behavior during the 1971 war:

The experience in Vietnam, and the circumstances that led to the use of nuclear weapons on Japan when compared with the experiences of confrontation in the central European line and the Sino-Soviet border, suggest that mass destruction agents like nuclear weapons, ecocidal agents, etc., tend to be used only when there is no fear of retaliation and when there is no sense of mutual deterrence.

[K. Subrahmanyam, “India’s Nuclear Policy,” in Onkar Marwah and Ann Schulz, eds., Nuclear Proliferation and the Near-Nuclear Countries, (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1975), pp. 128-135.]

“Subbu” was more explicit in his “personal recollection” of the Indian nuclear program which appeared in Nuclear India, a volume edited by Jasjit Singh published shortly after the 1998 tests:

Now we know that there were no specific operational directions to the Enterprise mission. But at that stage, the Indian government could not but assume the worst and treat it as an act of nuclear intimidation…. This experience of nuclear intimidation must have influenced Mrs. Gandhi in giving the green signal to the Atomic Energy Department to go ahead with the nuclear test in 1972.

Subrahmanyam recounts having dinner at Delhi’s Ashoka Hotel in late August, 1971 with Vikram Sarabhai, the head of India’s Atomic Energy Commission. Sarabhai, unlike Subbu, was not eager to test a nuclear device, but he strongly hinted that night that Mrs. Gandhi would grant his dining companion’s wish.

The “one war, two bomb” thesis is highly debatable. Raj Chengappa’s insider account, Weapons of Peace, finds some credence to this story. But George Perkovich, who has written the most detailed account of India’s nuclear program, India’s Nuclear Bomb, The Impact on Global Proliferation, is unconvinced. Likewise, Vijai Nair, who wrote Nuclear India, isn’t buying this story. Itty Abraham’s book, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb, also finds other reasons for the timing of India’s “peaceful nuclear” test in 1974.

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Words matter, which helps explain the arms control community’s preoccupation with declaratory policies and treaties relating to nuclear weapons. But whatever phraseology emerges from the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review and however long it takes for the CTBT to enter into force, the stock prices of nuclear weapons have never been lower for major powers.

This is partly due to favorable circumstances: The P-5 have far less to fight about now than in previous decades. Another significant reason for devaluation is the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used on a battlefield since 1945. Every year that passes without the appearance of mushroom clouds increases the penalties for crossing this threshold. Weapons that haven’t been used for six decades have decreased military value, which also diminishes their political value.

Nuclear weapon testing has become a surrogate for battlefield use, in the sense that every underground test is a demonstration of utility, and a reason for a potential adversary’s discomfort. Underground tests are therefore another key indicator of the value of nuclear weapons. Here again, stock prices have decreased markedly, as is evident by the number of test detonations in recent decades:

Decade	No. of Tests
1960s	706
1970s	549
1980s	439
1990s	64*
2000s	2

*The 1990s figure includes 53 nuclear weapons test detonations conducted before the CTBT, plus a generous 11 declared by India and Pakistan in 1998 for a total of 64.

The permanent members of the UN Security Council haven’t tested since 1996 – an extraordinary stretch by historical standards. During the 1990s, only two states, India and Pakistan, tested nuclear weapons after the CTBT was negotiated. No country felt compelled to follow their regrettable example. And only one country – North Korea – has tested the Bomb since 1998. Pyongyang has received opprobrium, and little else, for doing so.

A fourth key indicator of devaluation for major powers is stockpile size. According to the best estimates compiled by Stan Norris and Hans Kristensen, the P-5 possessed the following number of nuclear warheads in these years:

Year	No. of P5 N. Weapons
1979	53,360
1989	62,525
1999	33,859
2006	26,854

Yes, 26,854 is a very large number – and this doesn’t include stockpiles held by Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. In the three most recent years that Stan and Hans have yet to tabulate, the arsenals of four of the P-5 have shrunk further. This trend line will continue, even with bumps in the road of U.S.-Russian relations. Bottom line: Four of the five major powers have never done more to uphold their end of the NPT’s bargain – but don’t expect sustained applause at the 2010 Review Conference.

Worrisome developments are also not hard to find, topped by Iran. Stockpiles are growing in China, Pakistan, India and perhaps Israel and North Korea. The IAEA’s Board of Governors has become polarized, with key non-nuclear weapon states undermining the NPT, rather than serving as its guardians. Other items could be added to this short list.

We are so in the moment – especially in this medium – that it’s easy dwell on the negative and to lose sight of facts and trends that are overwhelmingly positive. We all know that worst cases could be just around the corner. The worst of the worst is another battlefield use of a mushroom cloud. And I wouldn’t bet against additional underground nuclear tests. If renewed testing has cascade effects, the stock value of nuclear weapons will turn bullish.

Plus or minus, we’re in this for the long haul. In the meantime, every year that passes without a mushroom cloud or the testing of nuclear weapons is a good year – regardless of the language that emerges from the NPR or the infernal entry-into-force provision of the CTBT.

Comment [5]