In an effort to compare the US-India nuclear deal to other historically-bad ideas, I give you an account of a 1975 article from Fortune magazine that I found in Steve Weissman and Herbert Krosney’s 1981 book The Islamic Bomb.
According to Weissman and Krosney, the article argued that the United States was “sacrificing too much of our foreign policy on the altar of nonproliferation” and should have been “trading our superior nuclear technology for other things of value, economic and political.”
The article went on to complain that the US nuclear industry had lost out on some key sales of reactors and other nuclear items. The countries? South Korea, Taiwan, Libya, Brazil, and Iran.
I guess Fortune was right because we didn’t stop any of those countries’ nuclear weapons programs. And our foreign policy was ruined. Or something.