Reflections on “Nuclear Alarmism: Proliferation and Terrorism”

John MuellerIn October 2014, Cato published the book,Dangerous World? Threat Perception and U.S. National Security, which Christopher Preble and I edited. I also contributed a chapter,“Nuclear Alarmism: Proliferation and Terrorism, ” and this is now being made available online as part of Cato’sProject on Threat Inflation.The chapter argues that the obsession with nuclear proliferation over the last three ‐​quarters of a centuryhas been unwarranted. The few countries that have acquired the weapons have used them simply to stoke their egos or to deter real or imagined threats, and that continues to be the case. Moreover, nuclear proliferation has proceeded at a remarkably slow pace and the nuclear club has remained a small one, confounding the somber prophesies of generations of alarmists: even the supposedlyoptimisticforecasts about nuclear dispersion haveproven to be too pessimistic. When North Korea first tested a nuclear weapon in 2006, alarm had been voiced that this would unleash a proliferation cascade, or, in thewords of Mohammed El ‐​Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, that it would signal“the beginning of the end of our civilization. ” These predictions have gone unfulfilled. There was little sign of the warned‐​about cascade in 2014, and that remains so today: thus far, no country in the region has altered its commitment to remain a nuclear ‐​weapons‐​free state.Sadly,...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs