With a war going on indefinitely in Ukraine involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers and prodigious daily missile and artillery fire, and China threatening Taiwan, it is easy to overlook the fact that the whole fragile concept of nuclear arms control and anti-proliferation is probably on the verge of complete collapse.

A few years ago, the only non-violent method of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear-tipped missiles was the extreme economic strangulation imposed by President Trump, which dried Iranian support for the Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Gaza), and Houthi (Yemen) terrorist operations, and drastically slowed nuclear research in Iran.

Now that the Biden administration has thrown in the towel and is vainly pursuing a resumption of the absurd nuclear arms deferral agreement that the Obama administration negotiated with Iran, by which Iran would be a fully armed nuclear power in another three years with the world’s blessing, Iran joins the company of North Korea in their condition of near nuclear readiness.

Both countries have the necessary missiles and easy access to fissile material and are close to being able to fit nuclear warheads on their missiles. This means that the only method of preventing those two completely irresponsible countries from becoming nuclear powers is a heavy conventional attack on their nuclear programs and launch sites.

This is assumedly with what President Trump threatened North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, which caused Mr. Kim to stop firing missiles through South Korean and Japanese airspace and to abate his provocative and bellicose nuclear threats. There is no realistic possibility that the current American  administration will seriously contemplate or believably threaten direct military interdiction of these nuclear programs as they sprint towards the finish line of full attack capability.

And it is not clear that they will not be fully armed by the time the next U.S. administration is installed in January 2025. And, of course, it is not clear how purposeful the next administration will be, anymore than it is easily predictable what state of deployment Iran and North Korea might then have achieved in their nuclear programs.

In all of these circumstances, the rest of the world has little choice but to assume that Iran and North Korea are about to become nuclear powers, joining the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan. The thought of the aggressive dictatorships of Iran and North Korea, which in all other aspects except nuclear weapons development and the techniques of totalitarianism, are poor and primitive countries, achieving such a military capability is distressing to any civilized person.

The fact that China and Russia, which are much closer to those countries than the major Western powers, have been so flagrantly cavalier in effectively encouraging them to become nuclear powers, is a cautionary tale about how far we are from the quasi-nirvana that much of the world thought had been achieved at the end of the Cold War when there would be no more threats of nuclear devastation.

In fairness to Iran and North Korea (not a cause that much enthuses any sane person), they are correct to object that the existing nuclear arms control regime is rank hypocrisy. The original nuclear powers, America and Britain, then the U.S.S.R., and a decade later France, could claim to be the victorious Allies against the German Third Reich whose nuclear programs arose during that just war.

China sought nuclear weapons to enhance its status as a great power; India to keep pace with China; Pakistan to keep pace with India, and no one who accepts the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state can blame that country for arming itself as it has. In the case of Israel the expression “never again” possesses a significance that is too obvious and legitimate to be labored here. 

Although Pakistan has not been a successful self-governing country, as a nuclear power it has been sensible, and the other nuclear powers have all been discreet and cautious, since the piping days of the 1950s when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev routinely threatened nuclear incineration of much of the West, and President Eisenhower famously responded to one of Khrushchev’s threats to eliminate West Berlin by conventional military means.

“If you attack us in Germany,” Ike retorted, “there will be nothing conventional about our response.” The current ceasefire in Korea, which has endured for 69 years, was agreed to after Eisenhower let it be known to the Chinese that if they did not become serious about negotiating an end to that conflict he would have recourse to nuclear weapons.

There is no question that nuclear weapons add an immense cubit to the geopolitical stature of the countries who possess them and Iran and North Korea are correct in asserting that the existing nuclear club (the U.S., U.K., Russia, France and China) is in many respects a pious fraud, in that it happily retains and updates its nuclear arsenals while admonishing the other 190 countries in the world not to destabilize the international political climate by trying to join the club themselves.

Iran and North Korea are, of course, notoriously unacceptable as nuclear powers because of their support of international terrorism and frequent belligerent threats against other countries. If, though,  such politically disreputable countries as they are going to arm themselves to the teeth with nuclear weapons, it would be prudent for responsible nuclear-capable countries, such as Canada, Japan, Germany, Turkey, Thailand, Brazil, Indonesia, Australia, Vietnam, Egypt and Poland, to do the same.

If the nastiest regimes in the world are going to become nuclear powers, it is asking a great deal of the rest of us to continue to outsource our national security entirely to the early members of the nuclear club and particularly to the United States.

Even during the Cold War, when the United States broke the Berlin blockade and assisted the Greek anti-communists and endlessly repeated that it would consider any attack upon a NATO country an act of war against the U.S. itself, one of the principal arguments in favor of the French and British nuclear deterrents was that the United States might not enter into an exchange of nuclear weapons with the U.S.S.R. to defend any country except itself, and that Western Europe needed its own nuclear deterrent.

The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 was interpreted by President De Gaulle as confirming that view, as the United States removed missiles from Italy and Turkey in exchange for the Soviet removal of missiles from Cuba, implying that the U.S. did not take threats against western Europe as seriously as threats against America.

We may be returning to a variant of the age of Mutual Assured Destruction, in which all of the 25 or 30 relatively populous and economically reasonably advanced countries of the world address their own defense with their own nuclear deterrents, and the other countries in the world are deemed to be, to use a Cold War expression, Finlandized: neutral areas whose integrity all the other countries promise to respect.

This could work, but we should remember that the security guarantees made to Ukraine in particular, when it demobilized the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the dissolved Soviet Union, have been ignored, by the Russians and by the West, a singularly unpromising episode whose tragic consequences we now see every day.

These problems can be managed but not without much more creative statesmanship than the world’s principal countries, including Canada, with Justin Trudeau’s waffling about “a post-national world,” are now showing.

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From the National Post