Negotiating proliferation with the “new” nuclear powers

Growing up in a post-Cold War America has its perks.

For one, we don’t have to “duck and cover.” America has been diplomatically resolving issues of nuclear proliferation since 1945. This adds up to “about two dozen successes; three failures (India, Pakistan, Israel) … and two cases-in-progress, North Korea and Iran,” according to Steve Coll’s article in the New Yorker.

But there’s still plenty to worry about.

Given their aggressive, vocal leader and unforgettable “told you so” moment with the National Intelligence Estimate — a document Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called a “declaration of surrender” — it has become clear that Iran is impossible to ignore. And just earlier this month, Ahmadinejad announced that Iran has begun tripling its number of uranium-enriching centrifuges at Iran’s plant at Natanz.

But Iran is hardly the only atomic-toting, diplomatically deadbeat country. Last September, Israel launched a strike on a site in neighboring Syria that was supposedly home to an incomplete nuclear reactor, which was allegedly built by North Koreans. As if grudgingly accepting the accusation and cutting its losses, Syria has quietly built over the site and refused to let anyone near it. Meanwhile, North Korea is as opaque and deceptive as ever.

So what is to be done? Given our speculative, democratic decathlon in Iraq, I think it’s safe to say that invasion is not the answer. A study by Johns Hopkins, which, admittedly, has been criticized for its methodology, cited an estimate of about 600,000 dead from the war’s start in March 2003 up through July 2006. That’s more than the population of Seattle.

Luckily, however, Coll makes a relieving case for diplomacy. It has worked to pressure nearly 20 countries into forswearing their nuclear weapons programs.

“While each diplomatic case is as individual as a fingerprint, the formula for achieving voluntary nuclear disarmament is well established: A country’s anxieties about security are negotiated into quietude; its aspirations to political legitimacy and economic integration are rewarded,” Coll writes.

But why isn’t it working? Iran has rejected a host of incentives to stop its nuclear program, North Korea has missed its deadline to deactivate despite already striking a deal, and now America is stuck in an awkward, diplomatic limbo with the two countries “in progress.”

So maybe the problem lies in our inability to submit a country’s anxiety about security “into quietude.” Unsurprisingly, this would be difficult to convince anyone. North Korea isn’t disarming for the same reasons America isn’t. And preemptively invading a country with make-believe evidence is hardly a persuasive argument for a country to defuse. Noam Chomsky makes the argument that our power of arbitrary aggression actually encourages countries to obtain WMDs in order to protect their sovereignty. So maybe we’re part of the problem and it’s about time we took a new approach to handling WMDs — one with a little less invasion.