This is a reasonable view. I sometimes, though, veer into heresy, and think that the opposite–more states with nukes–might not in the long run be better. Hear me out–I’m not 100% sold on this myself, but here’s my thinking:
1: Nukes are impossible to prevent. Any nation with enough interest and resources, and the resource needs get lower and lower each decade, can develop nuclear weapons capability. There’s no effective way to stop this. The know-how is out there, it’s usually an engineering problem that will, eventually, get solved.
2: No one has used a nuke since 1945, even when some rather iffy regimes have had them. There is a truly international sense that no matter what nastiness you can get away with, nuking someone isn’t acceptable. Pretty much everyone knows that if a sovereign nation is first to use a nuke, except in truly dire circumstances (enemy at the gates type stuff), they’re toast.
3: Efforts spent in futility trying to stop countries from developing nukes are better focused on making sure they control, secure, and manage the capability they do end up with. This is the approach we’ve taken with Pakistan and India, and so far, so good.
4: The prime driver for nuclear weapons is generally fear by strong peripheral nations that they will be attacked or invaded by the big powers. They feel, rightly, that having nukes makes this much less likely. This situation–that peripheral powers feel threatened by the US and others, whether rightly or wrongly–is not likely to change soon, so you can’t really remove the main reason why people want nukes.
- Sort of like people argue about firearms at home, if everyone has nukes, everyone walks a lot more softly.
Ok, the problems with this approach are also easy to see. The biggest is that what works for sovereign nations, which have a lot to lose, doesn’t necessarily apply to, say, ISIS or the Chechyns or any number of non-state actors. Proliferation by its very nature increases the chance that someone will screw up or deliberately transfer nukes to really crazy people with nothing to lose. Beyond that, there’s the same weakness in the “an armed society is a civil society” argument, that is, history seems to show that when everyone is armed everyone tends to shoot each other. So yeah, I’m not 100% behind this crazy plan.
But…number one above still stands in my book: if a country wants nukes, eventually, they’ll get them. After the Osirak strikes, pretty much everyone realized they needed to bury and harden their nuke sites, and there’s about zero chance that a conventional air strike today could eliminate, say, Iran’s nuclear capability such as it is. What’s more, nothing can eliminate the know-how, and there’s no hardware or infrastructure that can’t be rebuilt. Sure, I guess you could engage in a campaign of perpetual war to continuously bombard someone to stop them from developing nukes (or anything else, including their economy probably), but that hardly seems like a good plan either. And I still think any threats strong enough to convince a nation to stop building nukes, when not accompanied by any positive diplomatic action and benefits for said country, is simply going to drive development further underground and inculcate hatreds that will one day bite us in the ass.
tl;dr, I wish there was a solution to this dilemma, but I don’t see one. The genie is out of the bottle and the best we can do maybe is work to make sure everyone knows the consequences for either using these things or letting the real bad guys get a hold of them.
In a perfect world, I’d rather see none of these devices in anyone’s hands. But I’m not that worried about nukes in the hands of governments, even the weirdos in Pyongyang (though those guys do give me the willies, I admit). I do fear nukes in the hands of non-state actors, but the threat their is largely from the Russians or Paks I think, where the prospect of loose nukes is much more likely.
